Archaeologist.
Content Creator.
Tour Guide.
I'm Marshall Schurtz. Based in Philadelphia.
Exploring the world by understanding its past.
The Background
For ten years, I studied the ancient Near East at the University of Pennsylvania. I spent summers excavating Bronze and Iron Age sites in Iraq and Lebanon, and wrote a dissertation on Musasir — a mountain kingdom most people have never heard of.
I loved the research. I still do. But somewhere along the way, I realized I love archaeology more for what it can teach us today than for reconstructing the past on its own terms.
Origin
Born in Los Angeles. Undergrad in Boston (archaeology and economics). Grad school in Philadelphia.
Merakiva Travel
Merakiva is my archaeological tourism consultancy. I help travelers plan trips to places most travel agents have never heard of — and wouldn't know how to evaluate if they had. I've built a database of thousands of heritage sites at archaeolist.com, and I use it to design itineraries that go beyond the obvious stops.
Whether it's navigating permits for sites that aren't officially open to tourists or figuring out which local guides are actually worth hiring, I bring the same research rigor I developed in academia to the logistics of travel planning.
Always Sunny Tour
I created the Always Sunny Tour in 2023 because I wanted to sharpen my skills as a tour guide — and because nobody else had stepped up to show South Philly to fans of It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia. What started as an experiment became a legitimate business: two-plus years of tours with a perfect five-star rating, private bookings that sell out, and a website that ranks at the top of Google for anyone searching for Paddy's Pub.
I've researched deeper than anyone else has bothered to — tracking down filming locations, digging through sixteen seasons of episodes, and building a tour that rewards the die-hard fans without alienating the curious newcomers their partners drag along.
YouTube & Storytelling
I launched a YouTube channel to promote Merakiva Travel, but it's become something more: a place to tell the stories that actually excite me — whether that's critiquing a new metro line or exploring an ancient harbor most tourists walk right past.
My approach is to sneak archaeology in through the back door. I lead with what's visually compelling or culturally relevant today, then pull in the deeper history once viewers are hooked. It's brought me back to why I fell in love with archaeology in the first place — not the digging, but the storytelling.
Strategy & Operations
Throughout all of this, I've worked in marketing analytics — helping companies ranging from scrappy startups to enterprise organizations streamline their data infrastructure and make sense of what they're collecting.
Most recently, I've taken a lead role at Sweathead alongside Mark Pollard, running Operations and driving our Enterprise sales pipeline. It's given me a front-row seat to how strategy gets sold — and how most companies struggle to connect insight to action. That tension between knowing and doing shows up in everything I build.