Archaeologist takes stories to Web.

Byline: Greg Bolt The Register-Guard

After decades of digging in the dirt for traces of history, archaeologist Richard Pettigrew has turned his attention to dust.

Specifically, the dust collecting on the thousands of reports of past archaeological projects. He already knew that the heart of archaeology is stories - tales about those who came before us, where and how they lived, the things they made, the way they adapted to the rhythms of the earth - and now he's dusting off those stories and getting them out to people other than his fellow diggers and researchers.

Pettigrew is the founder of the Eugene-based Archaeological Legacy Institute and The Archaeology Channel, a Web-based resource that offers free streaming video and audio programs on an array of topics that range from the native people of Western Oregon to the Neolithic settlements of Turkey.

More than an online museum, it is a place where anyone can watch and hear the many stories archaeology has to tell in a format that's both accessible and entertaining.

"Archaeology is really a useful and valid way to explore our past," Pettigrew said recently in the above-garage office that is ALI's headquarters. "So after doing archaeology for 30 years and seeing most of our research ending up on a dusty shelf, I reached a level of frustration with that."

Founded in 1999, The Archaeology Channel grew slowly at first but over the past two years has started to balloon.

It now gets about 500,000 page views a month, is among the top 10 Google search results for "archaeology" and is perhaps the world's most popular archaeology Web site, Pettigrew said.

All that attention and hard work recently won Pettigrew the 2006 award for excellence in public education from the Society for American Archaeology.

The site offers a smorgasbord of documentary videos, audio news programs and educational resources.

While it has proven popular with everyone from kindergarten teachers and home-schoolers to university lecturers, Pettigrew said the site's popularity has spread well beyond the classroom.

Educators account for about a third of The Archaeology Channel's audience, with another third coming from Baby Boomers cruising the Web for interesting sites.

Pettigrew said the remaining third is younger, tech-savvy Web surfers who often find the site's videos on the Microsoft streaming portal windowsmedia.com.

"When our content is featured there, suddenly it becomes cool," he said.

But archaeology always has been cool to Pettigrew, who got his doctorate from the University of Oregon and worked for its Museum of Natural and Cultural History for 10 years among his other jobs in the field. He's worked all over the Northwest and other parts of the country trying to piece together the stories of ancient peoples and lifeways through the objects they left behind.

Those stories, Pettigrew said, are important not only because of what they tell us about the past but also for what they tell us about the present.

"I think it's really valuable to all of us to know how we fit into this place in time and in all time," he said. "Fundamentally, we all have the same needs and desires and we're all very closely related. There's more variation among chimpanzees in Africa than there is in the human population worldwide, and the more we explore, the more we come to a better understanding of ourselves."

The Archaeology Channel gets that story out to a mass audience in a way that's different from entertainment-oriented science programming.

Rather than going commercial, TAC is built on the same business model as public radio and public broadcasting and seeks funding through individual memberships, sponsor underwriting and grants.

Three years ago, Pettigrew started an archaeology film festival to bring the stories of humanity's past to even more people.

Held each spring in Eugene, it offers a spotlight for some of the best documentary filmmaking in the field, as well as additional exposure for TAC.

The festival's reputation has grown, and next year the featured speaker will be Louise Leakey, a third-generation paleontologist.

She is the granddaughter of the famed paleontologists Louis and Mary Leakey and daughter of Richard and Maeve Leakey.

This year, a mini-festival featuring the eight best films from the 2006 show will visit several cities in Oregon, starting with Eugene showings at the Downtown Initiative for the Visual Arts on Aug. 25-26, and Sept. 2 and Sept. 15.

The non-commercial model has meant long hours and short pay for Pettigrew and his small staff - he uses the words "bootstrap" and "shoestring" frequently - but he said TAC and the institute are on the verge of bigger things.

He won't mention names yet but said partnerships with a couple of major corporations are in the works.

And skipping over cable television and going straight to the Web puts him at the vanguard of what could be the Next Big Thing in program delivery.

"I feel we are at a threshold moment in our development, and with some real hard work now ... we can move this organization to another level," he said. "I think we'll become a household word."