Lives in Ruins Read online

  L. Adrien Hannus told me one day about the hole he has been digging for a decade at a prehistoric Native American village in South Dakota. He has found pottery fragments there, and sharpened stones, and ash from ancient campfires, but the best part, the really great part, this long-haired archaeologist said, was finding a mess of fire-cracked rock and chopped-up bone, evidence of bone grease production. This is why I was sitting in a diner in Rapid City, South Dakota, eating greasy eggs and learning all about bone grease.

  There is no denying the appeal of archaeologists, but they do seem to relish the squeamish side of their work. Hannus, who ordered his bacon burnt (if he doesn’t ask to have it “burnt, charred, incinerated, they bring it to me half raw”), was an expert in bone grease, the Crisco of the Neolithic, a stable fat hidden deep inside the big bones of animals that was an important part of ancient people’s diets.

  Unlike marrow, bone grease requires a ton of work to extract. Hannus laid it all out for me: you gather quite a few large bones, crack them, and then scrape off much of the periosteum, the membrane around the surface of the bone. You cannot simply scoop out the grease; you must boil the bones. Unfortunately, the pots that the Native Americans of the Plains made weren’t sturdy enough to hold boiling water. These people fired their pottery in campfires that reached only 1,000 or 1,200 degrees, and ceramics need to be fired at a couple thousand degrees if they’re to hold boiling water. Instead, these people dug a pit in the earth, lined it with treated hides, and filled it with water and cracked bones. Then they heated up a bunch of big rocks until they were superhot, somehow fished the hot rocks out of the campfire, then dropped them in the hole full of water. If all went well, the hot rocks sizzled and popped, the water boiled, and the precious bone grease bubbled to the surface, where it could be skimmed.

  For all the effort, Hannus said, only a small amount of fat is extracted. The process leaves lots of debris for archaeologists to study, from fire-cracked rock to characteristic hack marks on the bones. And all that debris, representing so much effort, shows just how important bone grease was to these people. Unlike Hannus’s crisp bacon fat, or the fat that marbles animal flesh, bone grease can last for years. Native Americans used to stockpile the stuff. It kept them from starving when the hunt or the harvest was bad. It lit their lamps and waterproofed their animal hides. They mixed bone grease with dried meat and berries to make pemmican, the energy bars of a thousand years ago, and with a pouch of pemmican, the Native Americans were good to travel far and wide. (If you can’t pack portable food, you spend most of your time hunting and foraging). Pottery fragments from Cahokia, seven hundred miles away, have turned up in Mitchell, South Dakota; bone grease made such widespread travel and trade possible.

  Hannus has harvested bone grease himself, in the manner of the Native Americans of the Plains, using bison bones and prehistoric tools. Then he made his own pemmican with dried meat, dried cranberries, and bone grease. How did it taste? He finished his bacon and grinned. “Disgusting,” he said.

  Archaeologists are not in it for the food. A field archaeologist described lunch on a dig: “We take bologna sandwiches and mustard and peanut butter and jelly and cheese, maybe a pickle, wad it up into a ball, slam it down, and get back to work as quickly as we can.”

  They are not in it for their health, either. “Let’s see,” another archaeologist said, ticking off his job-related setbacks. “I had a form of dysentery and turned into a scarecrow. I had malaria four times. But I’ve never been shot at. Hang on, let me think. . . . No.”

  From a distance, this kind of work might seem to fit the Indiana Jones fantasy, full of treasure and danger. Up close, the glamour can be hard to detect. Archaeologists are explorers and adventurers—Hollywood got that part right—but not exactly in the way you’d think.

  The site can look like an empty lot. The artifacts can be microscopic, the feature too subtle to see. The drama takes place in a muddy hole, with our heroes surrounding it, respectfully, on their knees.

  BOOT CAMP

  FIELD SCHOOL

  Context is everything

  FIELD SCHOOL is a rite of passage. If you are studying archaeology, or even thinking about it, you need to apprentice yourself to an excavation specifically set up to help train field-workers. This usually takes place in a desert or jungle, a hot and often buggy place at the hottest and buggiest time of year. A century ago, field school meant signing on to a dig under the supervision of an archaeologist, who would teach you the fine art of excavating while hired locals did the hard labor. Now the locals work as translators, drivers, guides, or cooks, and the students do the heavy lifting, moving rocks and hauling dirt and slag—for instance, in a foul pit in Jordan that, back in the tenth century B.C., was a copper smelt. “I can’t prove it,” the lead archaeologist at that site told National Geographic, “but I think that the only people who are going to be working in this rather miserable environment are either slaves . . . or undergrads.” Students not only work without the prod of a whip, they pay for the privilege. Field schools got that school in their name by charging tuition, quite a lot of it, usually thousands of dollars. Where would archaeology be without these armies of toiling grads and undergrads? Are they the base of a pyramid scheme that keeps excavations going with their labor and fees?

  Field school is the short cut to a dig. You apply and get your typhoid and hepatitis vaccines, and stock up on antibiotics and Imodium and maybe malaria pills, and someone who has already beaten a path to “the field” tells you where to go and how to get there. You work hard under primitive conditions. You sit around at night with kids who play drinking games and tumble in and out of each other’s bunks. You sweat.

  From a tribute written in 1930 by a student who did time at the Chaco Canyon, New Mexico, field school:*

  I love your ruins, every one,

  That keep me out in the baking sun,

  And, too, my happy domicile

  Where the breezes play and the dunes do pile—

  I’ll miss you, yes, and the words you learn us,

  You sweltering, accursed canvas furnace . . .

  Nice water you have, but only for drink. . . .

  Wait. Nice water, but only for drink? Did that mean no showers? When I read this ditty, I had not yet been to field school, and was already sweating, scribbling notes at the museum exhibit “Chaco Uncovered: The Field Schools 1929 to the Present.” Obviously, the experience of field school involved suffering of one sort and another: grubby quarters—perhaps a “sweltering, accursed canvas furnace”—canned food, insects, sunburn, dirt, and skeletal remains. Fine, bring it on. I could handle heat and discomfort. I could live without wifi or cell phone, or even deodorant; but no showers? Chaco Canyon was 6,200 feet above sea level, in the high desert, an improbable place to build a massively complex city, though Pueblo Indians did just that about two thousand years ago. This meant the site was more than a mile closer to the sun than the regular desert. I imagined a high desert crew, unwashed over a span of days and weeks, digging shoulder to shoulder, armpit to armpit. Is that why bandannas always appear on the packing list for field school, to wear bandit-style, over the nose?

  I spent weeks searching websites like shovelbums.org and ar chaeological.org, poring over listings for field school opportunities. I considered a field school in some Roman ruins on an island off Spain, a short walk from the beach, and one in Peru, though students there bunked in a community center “with the only flush toilet in the village!” That exclamation mark worried me. What were the odds that while I was there this toilet would break from the stress of being the only toilet, and no one in the village would know how to fix it? I never imagined I was claustrophobic until I read about another field school in Peru: “Please keep in mind that excavations are made inside the tombs which have a very narrow entrance and limited space inside.” One school on a lovely Greek island in the Aegean offered students a whole cemetery, the largest ancient children’s cemetery in the world. The burials were in amphorae,
pots, so “As well as bones, you will get a chance to handle a large range of Classical Greek pottery.” The cost of this grave-digging and pot-stroking (not including the therapy to recover from it) topped $7,000.

  Something less intense, perhaps?

  I kept returning to a listing for St. Eustatius, an island I’d never heard of in the Caribbean, a part of the world that hurricanes regularly try to erase. What kind of archaeology was going on there? St. Eustatius, I read, had “the densest concentration of colonial period artifacts and sites for any location of comparable size anywhere in the world.” Shipwrecks, churches, taverns, old sugar plantations, and slave quarters—I might do fieldwork in any of these. The sponsor was not a university but an independent archaeology center, the St. Eustatius Center for Archaeological Research. SECAR seemed particularly suitable for volunteers like me, people who didn’t want or need college credit for their work, so it was a relative bargain, $500 a week to dig and bunk at the center. Also, unlike many field schools, SECAR ran from January to September, closing only for hurricane season and the holidays. You could pick your weeks. Perfect. I lived in the cold northeastern United States, so the thought of going to the Caribbean in January to dig in the warm earth delighted me.

  “Don’t wait,” Grant Gilmore, the director of SECAR, advised via satellite phone from the field. “You never know what’s going to happen. And if you come next week, you can meet some archaeologists from the Netherlands.” So, on the last day of July, I threw a bandanna, bug spray, sunscreen, and a dozen energy bars in a backpack and flew to the furnace of the Caribbean—over the big islands, Cuba, Jamaica, Hispaniola, and Puerto Rico—and landed in St. Maarten. There I hopped a tiny plane southwest to St. Eustatius.

  A few hundred years ago, the Caribbean was the London or New York of the world, the hub, the place where the connecting lines on the global map intersected and grew dense. The lines were densest on St. Eustatius, called Statia by its residents: eight square miles of volcanic rubble and tropical vegetation. Under Dutch rule in colonial times, it had a free port, where a teeming multiethnic trading center sprang up with merchants from everywhere, including one of the largest populations of Jews and free blacks in the New World. Its port Oranjestad was the busiest in the Atlantic. From the 1750s to the 1780s, Statia’s influence had been global and the island was so wealthy it was nicknamed The Golden Rock. It sent arms to the American revolutionaries, and when the American man-of-war the Andrew Doria sailed into port, the guns in the Dutch fort above Oranjestad gave it a welcoming salute. The British were furious. They took the Dutch upstart by force in 1781, auctioned the contents of the island’s warehouses, and burned them down. St. Eustatius recovered and even thrived, but then the French swooped in and imposed taxes in 1795. That was the end of the modern world’s first experiment in free trade—and the end of Statia as the center of the Atlantic.

  I’d be searching for the remains and material culture from those early and dramatic days. I liked the idea of starting my archaeological education in a place I had never heard of, in a forgotten crossroads of the world.

  THE ARCHAEOLOGY CENTER turned out to be a funky mint-green house on a steep hill with a bleached cow skull presiding over the backyard.* SECAR: my grandmother’s attic, if my grandmother collected broken pottery and lepers’ bones. The door from the backyard opened onto a tiny kitchen at the end of a cavernous central room. Most of that room was stuffed with dusty display cases, trays of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century tobacco pipes (stems long gone), rusty cannon balls, plastic storage bins full of artifacts, and other detritus accumulated since the place opened in 2005. Off the main room were the dorms, men’s and women’s, with room for four volunteers each. I rigged my lower bunk with a spare mosquito net that a friendly Canadian named Kelly loaned me and fell asleep to the cacophony of the tropics: lizards scurrying over stucco, cows mooing and complaining, a mosquito whining through the net. A storm was moving toward the island, but not fast enough to move this air. There was no fan. The heat settled over me like a down blanket—but at least there was a shower.

  Our leader, Richard Grant Gilmore III, arrived at eight the next morning from his home across the island, and cheerfully began loading the Land Cruiser with high- and low-tech equipment: cameras and fancy surveying tools, shovels, buckets, trowels, plastic bags, nails, big mesh screens, metric rulers, and a few mangoes from a nearby tree. Gilmore was a coastal Florida native, part Filipino and Jamaican (“My mother is brown”). He was brawny and not yet forty; his close-cropped hair showed bits of silver. He herded the day’s volunteers and students into the back of the truck and we sat on benches installed along the windows: Matt, a big guy who came a couple months ago and never got around to leaving, Kelly, in her forties, on an adventure vacation (both in cutoffs and old T-shirts), and me, the oldest, in my nylon shirt with sunblock protection and my pants treated to thwart insects. We would be looking for fragments of pottery and glass, bits of trash from long-dead people, but it felt like an adventure, a reach into the unknown.

  And then we were off, no seat belts, bouncing through the steep and colorful streets of Oranjestad, the only town on the island, perched on a bluff above the ocean. The landscape was dominated by the peak of an inactive and overgrown volcano that rose behind us; but giant white oil tanks built on a nearby hillside, roving bands of cows and goats, and half-finished houses gave it a patchwork texture. Though the island is tiny and hilly, the oil company had brought some jobs here; we passed a bright-yellow Hummer on the narrow street. I had been looking for a place with an exotic background to learn the basics of fieldwork, but you can’t separate the work from the place where it happens. Place is not the background of archaeology—it’s the point. As any archaeologist will tell you, context is everything. Digging in Statia meant getting to know Statia, now and before.

  The island’s history stands somewhat apart from the history of the rest of the Caribbean. People enslaved on plantations on Jamaica and Barbados and Puerto Rico lived a nightmare under the control of their masters; but, as Gilmore told us, the excavations of St. Eustatius’s slave quarters are telling a different story. The island wasn’t large enough or wet enough to support big farms; its sugar plantations were small operations, more like country estates for the squires who lived in Oranjestad. Statia had used its free port to become one of the world capitals of trade, playing host to a thriving black market. The other islands secretly shipped tons of sugar here, where it was repackaged to be sent untaxed into the world, or refined or turned into rum in factories like the one in ruins near where we would dig. So many ships came in and out that in the mid-1750s, the merchants of Statia couldn’t build warehouses fast enough for all those goods. Gilmore and his diggers had found everything from Chinese porcelain to German seltzer bottles. “They were so friggin’ rich, they even imported mineral water,” he marveled.

  Slaves on other Caribbean islands lived under the watchful eye of their masters; here in Statia, by contrast, the cabins of the enslaved had been found way off near the sugaring operations. They had also been put to work in the rapidly expanding black market. In addition to Afro-Caribbean pottery, Gilmore and others had found porcelain pieces, ivory combs, and hand-blown glass in the slaves’ quarters. This wasn’t the usual bounty at slave sites.

  Gilmore said the relative autonomy of Statia’s enslaved could be detected in the written record, too—not the history books, but the primary documents, which he had read in the Royal Dutch Archives in The Hague. “Why else would they have to make laws against slaves galloping on horseback through town firing muskets, or against slave children setting off firecrackers under carriages?” he asked. The place was too small to harbor runaways, but people enslaved on Statia had the means to earn money to buy their freedom. Those who did so tended to stay on the island, as merchants and landowners, and even as slaveowners themselves. At least one of those free black slaveowners was a woman.

  IN ADDITION TO learning something of the history of the island, we were also
getting to see what life was like for an archaeologist who supervised multiple sites and coordinated the work of a shifting population of experts and volunteers. Down the hill toward the harbor, in the heart of charming Oranjestad, Gilmore stopped first at the St. Eustatius Historical Foundation Museum, housed in a pretty seventeenth-century building. Behind it, a replica of a colonial blacksmith’s shop was being rebuilt under the direction of Grant’s wife, Joanna Gilmore, a slender, blond archaeologist from the U.K. Grant gave her Matt as an assistant for the day, a gift of muscle and enthusiasm. Matt grinned, picked up a sledgehammer, and immediately began wielding it, chain-gang style, to break down the old, fake-looking kiln.

  Gilmore and Kelly and I sped off in the truck along the coast another mile or so, past a graveyard of ornate monuments decorated with photos of the departed and masses of flowers, populated by black-and-white goats and donkeys roaming freely. We stopped by a low-slung modular building where the Dutch archaeological team was housed. The hills behind their dorm were dotted with those big, round, white storage units holding a total of 13 million barrels of oil. The Texas oil conglomerate NuStar Energy wanted to double its capacity by building more tanks, so the Dutch archaeologists and SECAR had been doing contract work for weeks, digging and sampling two wide trenches through the vivid green hills to see if such an expansion would disturb any potential archaeological sites. So far, and much to their surprise, the archaeologists had found nothing.

  Gilmore leaned out the Land Cruiser’s window to chat with Corinne Hofman, professor of archaeology at Leiden University and one of the Dutch team’s leaders. After a dozen rapid-fire exchanges in two languages, she volunteered her son, Yann, a biology student, and his roommate, Thomas, a law student, two tanned university dudes in surfing shorts and mirrored sunglasses, to be our dig partners for the day.