By Matt Spector

The Daily Northwestern

The story sounds like the foreword to a Dan Brown novel or the introduction to an Indiana Jones film: An archaeologist searches valiantly for a lost Bronze Age artifact. It’s a small piece of a vast puzzle that, if solved, could bring to light a civilization obscured from history.

But the premise is far from fiction.

On the morning of Sept. 20, archaeologist David Peterson misplaced a carved stone artifact in the vicinity of the Sports Pavilion and Aquatics Center parking lot. Peterson, who is conducting research at the University of Chicago, was working with colleagues at Northwestern’s Department of Materials Science and Engineering in Cook Hall before he lost the relic.

The artifact is a carved rectangular stone marked with horizontal dashes and circular designs; it is less than four inches long and about half an inch thick. The artifact was recovered from the Eurasian steppes and is an important piece of Peterson’s research. The archaeologist has posted signs near SPAC and surrounding buildings but without success.

Although the relic has no monetary value, it has great research value to archaeologists studying ancient Eurasian metalworking, Peterson said.

His research deals with the metal production of Bronze Age cultures in the Caucasus region in the south of the former Soviet Union.

“It’s really crucial to examine evidence like the artifact that we’re dealing with here because these are our records. That’s our library of people’s lives in the past,” he said.

According to Adam Smith, assistant professor of archaeology at the University of Chicago, archaeologists are not normally concerned with individual research objects, but some finds are more significant than others.

“The loss of an object that speaks with a louder voice than others is a particularly great loss,” Smith said. “An object such as that is worth bemoaning and worth doing everything possible to try to recover it.”

Peterson’s research is particularly important because he is using new technology to study artifacts more precisely than before, Smith said.

“He’s developed a familiarity with forms of really complex instrumental analysis,” Smith said. “(Peterson is) using scanning-electron microscopes to peer more deeply into objects.”

Peterson and his colleagues have theorized that the lost object was a mold used for casting metal, and that its carvings were of symbolic importance to the people who created it.

“Archaeological objects aren’t just things; they’re a part of us, they’re part of history, they’re part of cultures,” Smith said. “They’re not things to be thrown away or taken as trinkets. They’re something far more valuable than that.”

Reach Matt Spector at [email protected].