He digs less to learn more about Vikings

John Steinberg's 'real badge as a scientist is technological creativity,' according to a peer. (Jonathan Wiggs/Globe Staff)

The joke is that, in John Steinberg's home, they know an awful lot about Vikings.

On one side you have his wife, Andrea Kremer, whose job requires her to be an expert on the Minnesota Vikings (and the other 31 National Football League teams) as a reporter for NBC Sports' football coverage.

And then there's Steinberg, a senior researcher at the University of Massachusetts at Boston, who is one of the world's foremost specialists on the real Vikings, the tough-guy (and girl) Scandinavian peoples who really knew how to blitz.

Steinberg, 41, has been exploring archeological sites in Iceland since 1999, and for the last two years has led the Skagafjord Archaeological Settlement Survey, which seeks to study the evolution of settlements in a northern fjord for clues as to how Iceland evolved from the era of Viking chiefdoms into a more organized central government.

The problem with surveying these 1,000-year-old settlements is that you can't see them. They were constructed with turf and driftwood - not exactly the most sustainable materials - and they've been buried under several feet of sediment.

But it is this challenge, and its solution, that excites Steinberg, and he gets very animated when he talks about this sort of thing.

"We were the first ones to apply technology to sites that were invisible," he said recently from his laboratory at UMass-Boston, which has a framed photo of Harrison Ford as Indiana Jones on the wall. "My claim to fame is that we invented a method of finding turf houses when there was no sign on the surface. And we can for the first time find all the sites and figure out how they changed over time."

Steinberg, who has boyish good looks in the John Edwards mold, initially planned to be an astronomer. But as a teenager, he got a job at a planetarium in Oakland, Calif., where one of the employees pointed out a button and told him not to push it. He did, of course, and it kicked off a procession of the equinox that moved the position of the stars back several thousand years.

"I found this fascinating," he said, "and I became obsessed with going back in time."

At the University of Chicago, he played strong safety for the football team and studied in an anthropology department that included Robert Braidwood, who is rumored to be the inspiration for Indiana Jones.

Tim Earle, an anthropology professor at Northwestern University, said there is a bit of Indiana Jones in Steinberg.

"He's a rough and ready kind of guy," Earle said. "He can make things happen in difficult situations," such as Iceland, which Earle described as a terrible place to attempt archeology.

"The standard techniques we use to find sites is impossible in Iceland because the sites are buried below a meter of soil," Earle said.

"But his real badge as a scientist is technological creativity, and he developed a whole new set of methods for identifying sites that had been buried or destroyed," he said.

Steinberg describes his Iceland approach as "dig less, know more," which involves directing a large team of PhD's and specialists - "It's a bit like cat wrangling," he says - who spend 50 days there each summer combing the landscape, taking soil samples, and using ground penetrating radar and other technology to look for signs of the Vikings' famous "long houses."

Steinberg said team members can learn as much about a settlement in a year as they used to learn in the seven years it takes to do a full site excavation.

By studying the Viking community, Steinberg is looking to uncover deeper riddles about the formation of human society.

"Most of human history is the story of colonization," he said. "Understanding how colonization works, especially in its most primitive form, is really important."

At the same time, he enjoys exploring the noninvasive approach to digging up the past.

"Archeology is a destructive science," he said. "Once you dig something up, you can never dig it up again. The ability to find things subsurface without digging is revolutionizing archeology, and we're at the forefront of that."

Fact sheet

Hometown: A San Francisco native, Steinberg lives in Marblehead.

Family: The couple's son, Will, came a month early while Kramer was covering the Super Bowl in Atlanta in 2000 for NBC Sports. Will was born the Wednesday before Super Bowl Sunday but Kramer still covered the game.

Education: BA in anthropology from the University of Chicago, 1988; master's degree in museum studies, Oxford University in England, 1989; PhD in anthropology from the University of California at Los Angeles, 1996.

Hobbies: While he enjoys skiing, cooking, and bicycling, he said his son's obsession with trains has overtaken his free time. "I spend most of my weekends riding trains around Boston with a 7-year-old."