Meet February’s Employee Spotlight, Andrew Reinhard! Andrew is digging into his second year at Metcalf as a Principal Investigator. Andrew holds a PhD in digital archaeology and the archaeology of digital selves from the University of York in England. Andrew has been featured in the documentary Atari: Game Over, and his hobbies include creating punk songs about archaeology!
Andrew Reinhard here, entering my sophomore season with Metcalf. In my rookie season I learned first-hand why many of my colleagues have a distaste for corn in all seasons, especially after harvest. I learned that sorghum is the enemy. And beans. Beans are the enemy, too. I
was bummed in March about not finding any KRF, and by November I couldn’t go a day without picking up a point or a tool. I was reminded that half of archaeology is documentation and have learned to love (or at least accept) site forms and reports as a way of life. And I am completely smitten with North Dakota’s diverse landscapes, ecology, and history in snow and sun. I have the pictures to prove it.
So what was I doing before entering the CRM paradise that is North Dakota?
I found my way to archaeology—as I have with most things I love—by accident. As a kid, I wanted to be an astronaut (until glasses), an astrophysicist (until calculus), a geologist (until chemistry). While I settled into the Humanities, my dad took me on trips to go caving in Texas, Oklahoma, and Arkansas. We used to chip away at the limestone cliffs behind our house. And I was of a time pre-phone and pre-Internet when my parents would toss me out-of-doors with instructions to come home by dark. I would follow the nearby creek to its source or bike to the end of whatever trail I found, stopping for animals, plants, and interesting rocks. My parents kept feeding my books on Egyptology (thanks, National Geographic Society), the archaeology and history of the Americas (thanks, Brian Fagan), and Homer’s Odyssey fueling my adventuresome heart, and I made them take me to see Raiders of the Lost Ark five times in a row. I was 9. I started Scouting and became an Eagle Scout, camping and backpacking every month, and later became a whitewater canoe guide at the Maine National High Adventure Base, which, at age 18, was the best job I ever had until joining Metcalf.
I had a decision to make about college: archaeology or environmental science. I chose archaeology and gradually came around to pottery, architecture, theory, and method in the ancient Mediterranean world at the University of Evansville in Indiana, now a hub for CRM undergraduates. I did my field school at the Etruscan trading center of Poggio Civitate (Murlo) in Tuscany and found myself drawn to artifact identification, cataloguing, and photography. The digging was terrible. Give me sandy loam any day of the week.
At the University of Missouri-Columbia, I continued studying ancient Greek “plastic” pottery for
my MA and excavated at the Greek site of Isthmia while living in Ancient Corinth. I learned how to read a Munsell chart for identifying colors of pottery biscuits, slips, and glazes. I was also able to date the Roman Bath’s monochromatic mosaic to the first quarter of the second century AD through reviewing pottery lots recovered from underneath it. Also at Missouri, I had collections management jobs at the Museum of Art and Archaeology in Columbia and the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art in Kansas City (Go Chiefs!). I would also sneak over to the Anthropology Department to help other MA and PhD students with their projects, my first introduction to American archaeology, both historic and pre-.
The next 20+ years found me working archaeology-adjacent, supporting the work of my colleagues in the field, whether as a member of a startup museum/collections management software company (Willoughby Associates), an eLearning developer for a Latin and Greek textbook company (Bolchazy-Carducci), or as a publisher (American School of Classical Studies at Athens and the American Numismatic Society).
Throughout my office-working life, I also found myself at the intersection of digital material culture and archaeology. I’m as old as Pong (you do the math), and grew up playing video games. I joke that it took me 20 years to find a PhD topic, but I ended up going to the University of York in England to specialize in digital archaeology and, more specifically, the archaeology of our digital selves. I wrote my thesis, Archaeology of Digital Environments: Tools, Methods, and Approaches while also writing my first book, Archaeogaming: An Introduction to Archaeology in and of Video Games (Berghahn Books, 2018). I was able to create GIS maps of spaces that only exist inside a computer, could conduct 3D photogrammetry of 2D objects, and figured out a way to complete epigraphic research of software code sets in FORTRAN and other languages. I’ve published two other books since then, both with Berghahn Books in 2024: Practical Archaeogaming and Machine-Created Culture: Essays on the Archaeology of Digital Things and Places.
In 2014 I led the team of archaeologists who excavated the “Atari Burial Ground” and was in the documentary Atari: Game Over, which is now on YouTube. This was my first taste of public archaeology, and I enjoyed sharing our discoveries that day with the people who came to watch us dig. In other archaeological weirdness, I was/am part of the Punk Archaeology collective who explore and promote archaeologies of the underserved and overlooked. We published a book and I even wrote and recorded a 19-song album featuring punk songs about archaeology.
Speaking of music, that’s my hobby. You can visit my Cyphernaut page on Spotify to have a listen.
As digital as I am, I found myself missing the applied part of archaeology—fieldwork—and being outside as much as possible. I had first explored the North Dakota Badlands in 2013 as part of a flagged Explorers Club expedition to document the landscape, ecology, and archaeology during the Bakken Boom over a transect connecting the north and south units of Theodore Roosevelt National Park, now my favorite place on Earth. After being away from the place for 10 years, I had to get back to the field, to North Dakota, and Metcalf was right there waiting. It’s been an extraordinary year with amazing people, and I cannot wait to see what’s over the next corn field.
If you are interested in joining the Metcalf team, please visit our careers page for a list of current job openings.
