Michael Parrington, N.J. archaeologist

Michael Parrington, 70, of Burlington City, a former commercial archaeologist who unearthed rare artifacts on construction sites from Britain to the Jersey Shore and from Philadelphia and Manhattan, died Saturday, Oct. 18, at home of progressive supranuclear palsy.

Born in Lancashire, England, Mr. Parrington moved to the Philadelphia area in 1976 and took a job at an excavation site at Valley Forge where he met and worked alongside fellow archaeologist Helen (Linny) Schenck, who became his second wife.

Mr. Parrington was a prominent archaeologist in the Philadelphia region, and in 1992, he cowrote The Buried Past: An Archaeological History of Philadelphia. He was a founder and supporter of various local archaeological societies and an ardent reader and book collector.

His other interests ranged from the Phillies to the Beatles to folk music and taking long walks, his wife said.

"Michael was always a humble person who never showed off his expertise, but he had been trained in Europe and had an impressive background when he came to the U.S.," she said.

In 1992, he worked on a significant dig at a place known as the old Negro Burial Ground in lower Manhattan, where a government office building was under construction. Twenty-six feet below the city streets, hundreds of well-preserved skeletal remains of colonial-era African slaves and Caucasian paupers were discovered buried three deep in close graves.

At the time, Mr. Parrington contended that, as so little history had been recorded about slaves, the find was historically significant because "there's a lot these remains can tell us."

Eight years before that dig, Mr. Parrington supervised the excavation of a pre-Civil War graveyard of freed blacks at the First African Baptist Church in Philadelphia that was discovered during the construction of the Center City commuter tunnel.

Mr. Parrington later noted he had found more evidence of African cultural traditions among the free blacks buried in Philadelphia than he had under what was probably a more suppressed environment for Africans in New York.

He was called to a construction site on a portion of the Blue Route in 1987 to study a crumbling 250-year-old farmhouse and barn facades in Marple Township when he worked for John Milner Associates in Philadelphia.

"Everything we find is garbage. Our job is interpreting the garbage," Mr. Parrington said of the process of the dig and the careful cataloging of artifacts.

The next year, a dig at a hotel construction site near Independence National Historical Park yielded some 10,000 pieces, including wine bottles, ceramics, and bones, representing the colonial era to the 19th century.

"We don't have [from other sites] this kind of range of material . . . and we have found it here in abundance," Mr. Parrington said.

Working with Schenck's firm in 1996, Mr. Parrington dug at the base of the 170-foot-high Absecon Lighthouse in Atlantic City to uncover the remains of the stone-and-redbrick foundation of the lighthouse keeper's cottage. The circa-1857 cottage was eventually rebuilt on its original foundation and is used in the operation of a gift shop at the historic site, now open to the public.

In addition to his wife, Mr. Parrington is survived by three daughters, Alice, Megan Hollingsworth, and Ellen Grandin; three grandchildren; two brothers; and two sisters. He was previously married to Karen Lawrence.

A memorial service was held Sunday, Oct. 26, at the Burlington Friends Meetinghouse, 340 High St., Burlington.

Donations may be made to one of the archaeological societies Mr. Parrington supported: the Philadelphia Archaeological Forum, c/o Steve Tull, treasurer, 437 High St., Burlington, N.J. 08016; the Archaeological Society of New Jersey, c/o Michael Gall, treasurer, 199 S. Main St., Medford, N.J. 08055; or the Oliver Evans Chapter of the Society for Industrial Archeology, c/o of Larry DeYoung, treasurer, 54 N. Waterloo Rd., Devon, Pa. 19333.

Funeral arrangements are by the Page Funeral Home in Burlington.