PAL chief preserves culture, jobs

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.

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 earn 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.

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President since then, she leads the largest organization of its type in New England. 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.”

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.”

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.

“I was so driven at the beginning of the history of this company that failing was just not an option,” Cox said. “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.”

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, “what would keep the business going would be to develop a business sense and a management style.”

Building the business was exciting, Cox said, particularly because the field encompassed “a very small group in New England.” 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.” •

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