The Kelsey Museum of Archaeology received a $750,000 gift from University of Michigan alum and donor Steven B. Klinsky and his family to hone new methods and technologies for revealing what lies beneath long-occupied, deep, and densely built modern cities. This funding builds on Klinsky’s 2024 gift of $1.15 million, which established the Klinsky Expeditions—a series of five archaeological field projects led by faculty from the College of LSA—along with associated educational programming and curricula for K–12 students across the state.
Klinsky is the founder and CEO of New Mountain Capital and a 1976 graduate of LSA. He’s also a demonstrated supporter of archaeology and history; his continued partnership with the Kelsey Museum advances research that pushes the boundaries of how archaeologists locate and interpret the past.
This latest gift will focus on a longstanding challenge in archaeology: how to apply geophysical and subsurface techniques in active, living cities. Traditionally, geophysical surveys have been conducted in rural areas—or former urban sites—where there is less disturbance. In modern cities, researchers contend with interference from power lines, transit systems, underground utilities, and layers of rebuilding over centuries.
The project supported by Klinsky’s gift aims to develop new and advanced techniques to overcome these barriers by refining methodologies for subsurface testing in complex urban environments and by leveraging new technologies and improved data filtering to detect meaningful evidence amid the “noise” of contemporary urban centers. New discoveries in this field could also help the work of city planners.
“Great treasures lie under cities like London, Rome, and Mexico City. This gift allows the University of Michigan (and the field of archaeology as a whole) to develop techniques to explore deeper results and reveal hidden treasures,” said Nic Terrenato, former director of the Kelsey Museum, who was instrumental in soliciting this funding. “This ‘moonshot’ will help us address the challenges of working in living, breathing cities and open up an underexplored area of archaeological investigation—one that holds the potential to locate sites that have long been buried or even lost to time.”
A key feature of the initiative is its collaborative reach across the university: the gift will also benefit researchers from the U-M Museum of Anthropological Archaeology (UMMAA) and the Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences, renewing the strong partnerships touched off by Klinsky’s original gift and supporting the shared research priorities of faculty in these units.
