PAL leader making mark in cultural preservation

FRIEND INDEED: Deborah Cox founded the nonprofit PAL – short for Public Archaeology Laboratory – in 1982 with four others. Currently its president, Cox is pictured above with Stephen Olausen, executive director at PAL. / PBN PHOTO/MICHAEL SALERNO
FRIEND INDEED: Deborah Cox founded the nonprofit PAL – short for Public Archaeology Laboratory – in 1982 with four others. Currently its president, Cox is pictured above with Stephen Olausen, executive director at PAL. / PBN PHOTO/MICHAEL SALERNO

The path for women interested in anthropology and archaeology 30 years ago was teaching – not a direction in which Deborah Cox necessarily wanted to go.
As a young student Cox, now 61, of Warwick, got a degree in 1974 in secondary education at Rhode Island College largely as a backup – and because it enabled her to study the two subjects she cared about most: history and anthropology.
Yet, by the time she was able to obtain her master’s degree from Brown University in anthropology in 1982, she was already on track to making her mark in the field.
Since 1977, she had been working as a staff archaeologist at Brown’s Public Archaeology Laboratory. So, when Brown decided to get out of the business of cultural-resource management in 1982, Cox and four others incorporated PAL, now located in Pawtucket, as a nonprofit. That launched what would become a continuing quest to broaden the organization’s reach.
President since then, she leads the largest organization of its type in New England.
“It was an easy decision to make,” Cox said of the path her career took. “I liked what I was doing. I saw the field as only expanding. There was a growing awareness about environmental impacts and impacts to cultural resources.”
Today, PAL has 68 employees and in 2013 earned revenue exceeding $6 million, Cox said.
“My proudest accomplishment is not necessarily the size of the business or our profitability,” she explained. “It is that PAL has been able to provide sustainable employment for 32 years to so many cultural-resource professionals. I am also proud of the amount of educational information we provide on a constant basis to the general public.”
She attributes PAL’s success to the commitment she imparts to employees to adhere to professional requirements, and success overall to being “in the right place at the right time.” Passed in 1966, the National Historic Preservation Act by the mid-1970s had implemented regulations that dictate that any time there’s federal funding or permitting for public or private projects, they need to take into account the effect that project would have on historic properties, buildings and archaeological sites.
“This was a new niche business in the late 1970s,” Cox said. “There were no companies that did this then. The agencies had to turn to the universities and say, ‘Help us out.’ ”
As an independent nonprofit, PAL’s first project involved the reconstruction of Route 146 for the Mass. Highway Department, which was receiving federal funding, she said. Since then, PAL has completed more than 3,000 projects for various state and federal agencies, towns, private developers and corporations, she said.
As three of the four founders eventually left PAL, Cox focused on implementing professional requirements for her staff. Supervisors and principal investigators have to have master’s degrees in archaeology, anthropology or a related field and be registered with the federal Register of Professional Archaeologists, she said.
Today, would-be archaeologists also can obtain a degree in cultural-resource management.
PAL also upholds the standards of the American Cultural Resource Association and is a member, she said.
“I was so driven at the beginning of the history of this company that failing was just not an option,” Cox said, “because we saw many small companies like ours fold after three or four years in the business. The only way I could ensure we were going to succeed was to drive others and myself in a manner that we were always the most informed, the fastest [in] response and the most professional.”
Besides maintaining a dedication to professionalism, Cox said she knew early on that there was more to running a business – nonprofit or otherwise – than supervising skilled people. “As much as I loved archaeology,” she said, “that was not what was going to keep the business going. What would keep the business going would be to develop a business sense and a management style.
I am very much a pacesetter. I’m very hands-on, although I’ve learned to moderate that in the past few years as we’ve gotten bigger.”
Paying attention to detail and to the rest of the staff and how they’re responding to client needs is paramount, she said. It includes timeliness, responsiveness and working within budgets realistically, she added.
Building the business was exciting, Cox said, particularly because the field encompassed “a very small group in New England [in which] everyone knew everyone else.” Yet, as a woman, working within the “old boy’s club” proved challenging at times.
“I ignored it,” Cox said. “In the community of archaeologists, there was an abundance of men, many more men than women, and many had a certain idea about what an archaeologist was. Men would say I was aggressive [but] I was just acting the same way they did.”
Cox likes to travel to the Caribbean to relax, though she’s never without her cellphone, or simply enjoy the water views in her Warwick neighborhood.
Self-taught, she keeps her skills in management current, with an eye to the needs of both employees and clients.
“The more varied skills you have, the more valuable you’ll be to any employer,” she said. “[In this field], you need to be a terrific archaeologist, but that’s not enough. You need to have a presence in terms of research. If you don’t, you won’t ever rise to the level of senior manager. And you need to have a business sense: how it works, budgets, client relationships.” •

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