About the Palomar College
Archaeology Lab

    The Palomar College Archaeology Lab was created by Dr. Dennis O'Neil in 1978. The archaeology program itself was first created on paper in 1974 by the only anthropologist Palomar College had at the time, Abe Gruber. Then Dr. O'Neil was hired in 1975 to make the program a reality. He had to start from scratch, since the college had no archaeology facilities, equipment, supplies, or lab assistants. He acquired most of these over the next few years, and even built the first set of dry-screens himself. The college came up with around $10,000 for miscellaneous supplies such as shovels, microscopes, and other needed items. In 1978 he was able to establish BE-1 as the main classroom for archaeology classes and BE-2 became the Palomar College Archaeology Lab. He continued running the archaeology program until 1990 when he went on sabbatical.  Steven Crouthamel then took over. Dr. O'Neil continued to run the anthropology program.
    Dr. Phillip De Barros took over the program in 1996. Between then and 2000 he acquired a lot of new equipment for the lab, including:

• Four new computers

• A Light Table

• A Hewlett Packard 36" Designjet color printer

• A Laser Printer

• New topographic maps for San Diego and Imperial Counties

• 44 historic USGS maps

• 10 Tripod screens

• 2 field laptop computers

• 4 Trimble dataloggers

• Pathfinder Software

• An Infra-red total station for surveying

• ArcView and now ArcGIS software

• A Camcorder

• 2 digital scales (for weighing small and large items)

• A Digitizer

(The items listed above represents close to $50,000 worth of equipment)

    In 1997 he also acquired half of the old audiovisual storage area BE-4 to provide a place for some of the new equipment. The other part of BE-4 is now Professor Mobilia's office. Dr. De Barros also had an old conex box on campus repaired to make it rodent and rain-proof, obtained a new 40' container, and had fans installed in both containers to reduce interior temperatures and humidity. The containers are used to store boxes of artifacts from the program's past excavations.

Beginning in Fall of 2002, lab interns have been working on inventorying all of the collections we have at Palomar College to eventually satisfy the Cal NAGPRA law passed in 2001, which is still not operational, but soon should be.