Lives in Ruins (18 page)

Stuffed animal heads covered the walls of the trophy room and filled the deep window ledges. Lions, bobcats, gazelles—props for an old-fashioned movie about explorers. She pointed—“That is what we call the ‘canoodling sofa,'” she joked. But where was that whale phallus? We explored the whole room, and just when it looked like the strangest trophy of all had gone the way of the dodo, Connelly found it, tucked into a window well, mounted on wood, petrified, a termite's nest rising to a bony point, about four feet high. It was a magnificent specimen, the sort of thing you really want to see in a natural history museum but almost never do. Connelly stood beside it while I snapped her photo with my cell phone; then she photographed me, beaming by the towering whale member—souvenirs of our hunt.

Downstairs, by the fireplace framed with tusks, Connelly pulled out her laptop and files and the lesson she planned to give me in stratigraphy to help me visualize the way soil and rock get layered through time; she also pulled out a plastic ginger-ale bottle, sturdy and lightweight, which she'd filled with a fizzy, summery white wine. She had taken the subway uptown to the club, and worried that a wine bottle might break in the crush. Now she poured it into wineglasses from the Ralph Lauren bar. My expedition leader had thought of everything.

Convent-educated in Toledo, Ohio, Connelly grew up spending Saturdays with her beloved Irish-American father. He'd take her to the art museum in the morning for drawing lessons (there were riding lessons, too); then they'd visit his construction sites. He taught her how to use surveying tools, lay a foundation, talk to workmen, keep a project on task. Her dual education meant she felt comfortable anywhere, in museums or lumberyards. She spoke a basic workman's Greek, picked up while working on excavations at Nemea. She is not married and has no children, and that surprises
her; her mentor, Dorothy Burr Thompson, had both a great career and a family. Thompson was seventy-four when they met, “and how long do you think you have with someone when you meet them at that age? But she lived till she was a hundred and one. I had her wisdom and experience for twenty-seven years,” Connelly said wistfully. Someday she hoped to write about Thompson, after she finished her next book, about the Parthenon.

We were deep in conversation when the receptionist warned us that the club was closing in ten minutes. “In the old days,” Connelly confided, “some of the members used to slip the guy at the door a fifty- or hundred-dollar bill to keep it open. And he would!” Ah! A glimpse of the swashbuckling life! She had seen Thor Heyerdahl and Sir Edmund Hillary preside over these rooms. In the 1980s, she told me, she had traveled alone through Egypt, Syria, Jordan, Turkey, and Kuwait, staying in old legendary hotels “before they were refurbished,” communing with “the glamorous past.” As an archaeologist, Connelly did not simply appreciate that past; in a room with tusks framing the fireplace, she conjured it with flair.

T
HE COOL
, orderly sanctuary I had imagined for Joan Connelly when I first heard her speak was a product of my imagination. She lives in NYU faculty housing, and her apartment is hers only until retirement. “Then they'll ask me to leave,” Connelly said. “I know I ought to buy a place somewhere, but I haven't.” She also has an office on campus, with a huge window overlooking the Washington Square Arch, as well as a combination conference and storage room, a veritable fiefdom in New York City. Then there is her claim to the Explorers Club. But the real estate with the grip on her heart is in Cyprus; in particular, on the tiny island of Yeronisos, off the west coast of Cyprus. Its cliffs hold aloft a table of cracked Mediterranean earth the length of three football fields. Over the course of twenty-three years, Connelly has dug trench after trench there, assisted by teams of NYU students. Gradually, she has pieced together a compelling story of this spot that suggests that Yeronisos was once developed to honor Caesarion, Cleopatra's child by Julius Caesar—the heir Cleopatra hoped would unite the empires of Egypt and Rome, the East and the West.

In her conference room at NYU, Connelly has assembled a shrine to Yeronisos that includes a wall of twenty-three artful photos, one from each year of the ongoing dig, featuring members of her
various expedition teams posed around a piano perched incongruously on a bluff, the photogenic island of Yeronisos shimmering in the background: attractive students in dressy clothes, sometimes with a famous archaeologist or even a
famous
famous person—a sunburnt, grinning Bill Murray, for instance—or someone wealthy who thought archaeology sounded fun and was willing to donate $10,000 to the program for a week in the field.

I joined the dig team for a more modest donation, and set about trying to cram what should have been months of physical conditioning into a couple of weeks. Connelly was adamant about visitors to Yeronisos being able to swim. She envisioned someone sinking in the waters off the island and taking her beloved program with it. I remembered her mentioning the cliffs her team had to climb that were twenty-one meters high (nearly seventy feet!); how would I hoist myself up something like that? Along with swimming lessons, I signed up for a climbing class. The second time I fell off the practice wall, the instructor offered me my money back. The swim lesson went better; I made it across the pool.

The day before I left for Cyprus, Connelly e-mailed: she was determined to decorate the hills and patio for her annual dig party with sand candles but had been unable to find paper lunch bags on the island. Could I bring as many as possible? I managed to stuff a hundred bags into my carry-on, and during my layover in London, I even hauled them through the British Museum. Before they held flickering candles on the hills of Cyprus, those brown paper bags basked in the presence of the Elgin Marbles.

YERONISOS GLEAMED OFF
the coast of the little town of Agios Georgios. It looked as if it were only a few hundred yards from shore, easy swimming, if swimming came easily. This turned out to be deceptive. Each daybreak, we met at the town harbor and climbed into the
Nemesis
, a boat run by Valentinos, a handsome local fisherman. We huddled on the deck floor, smashed up against
each other in our bright life preservers: Joan Connelly and her two archaeology partners, Richard Anderson and Paul Croft; one grad student, ten undergrads, one local hired hand (Yanni); and one interloper (me)—a flock of strange orange birds herded into the Mediterranean. The waves might be gentle, so only those with delicate stomachs felt queasy, or the waves might be brutal—but I tried not to think about that ahead of time.

My first day, the waves were not gentle. It took half an hour to cross that seemingly short distance and loop around to the island's south side, and I could feel myself turning green. Connelly's graduate assistant, Talia, coached me, “Keep your eye on a fixed spot, and breathe in and out with the swells.” Then we waited patiently, the fishing boat bobbing in the water, to disembark in shifts into a small dinghy, which Valentinos pulled, via rope, to the landing. The whole operation consumed another hour and was fraught. Valentinos steadied the dinghy and delivered orders, a cigarette tucked in the corner of his mouth, and the chain of Croft, Anderson, and Yanni steadied us as we staggered out of the wobbly dinghy across tires and planks—a jerry-rigged dock—to a cluster of boulders—the shore.

After we were safely on land, the more experienced crew formed another chain, and Valentinos passed up the backpacks, the equipment, the bags with breakfast, and the jugs of water (there was no fresh water source on the island). We threw our life jackets in a pile at the foot of a sheared cliff and began to climb, single file, up crumbling and ancient steps—steps!—to the top of the island, an elevated plain of rock and ruin, circled by gulls and surrounded by the sea. We emerged at the top of the cliff near two huts with stone foundations and wooden frames, their walls open to the view. These
khalifi
s, set up above pilgrims' huts from the sixth century, made our base camp shady and picturesque. We arranged ourselves on the stone benches in the larger
khalifi
and got our trench orders, our digging assignments, while the seagulls wheeled overhead, shrieking.
Across the channel, Agios Georgios's little Byzantine gem of a church twinkled in the early morning sun.

For the first two years of this island project, 1990 and 1991, Connelly directed an ecological assessment of the island that tracked its flora and fauna and prescribed ways to minimize the destructive impact of the excavation. “Our ecologist suggested only earth tones [for equipment] up here, so we wouldn't disturb the birds,” Connelly said. “Our buckets, you notice, are earth- and sea-colored, not red and orange.” She recalled going to Machu Picchu and looking out over the breathtaking specter of mountains and ruins. “And then it started to rain, and out came these plastic ponchos in millions of colors—yuk!” The ecologist made numerous other bird-friendly recommendations that Connelly incorporated into her vision of the place. “We have an early and short season so we don't interfere with their nesting. And the
khalifi
s are not covered in ugly corrugated metal, but thatched with sticks and brush.”

For Connelly, who was part of the Art History Department before she joined the Classics faculty, directing an excavation also meant art-directing it. Her field books are hand-bound “by a little old man in Limassol,” and filled in by hand, complete with illustrations of found artifacts. “Some digs give everyone an iPad, but we have no power source on the island. We use trench books that go back and forth in waterproof bags. Narrative on left, trench number, date, supervisors' initials, weather, initials of everyone working on it, space for photos, trench drawings, objects written in red”—the classical approach to a classical dig.
^*
Even the clothes Connelly worked in were earth-colored, for stepping lightly on the earth: beige linen shirt, snug green cords, canvas boots. (None of us wore red or orange, in deference to the birds.) There was an aesthetic element to everything. One day, Yanni reinforced a concrete wall near the staircase by slapping on more concrete. It was functional,
but that wasn't good enough for Connelly; the next day, he recemented the wall, artfully.

YERONISOS, MEANING
“
HOLY
island,” was first occupied 5,800 years ago, then abandoned. What interested Connelly this particular season was its brief occupation in Hellenistic times, when for several intense decades during the first century
B
.
C
., vast wealth poured into the island. An elaborate cistern was built to collect water, and numerous buildings were erected on huge ashlar blocks of native limestone. A circular floor was built in the open air and filled with tons of marine silt laboriously brought up from the seabed—a dance floor dedicated to Apollo, they conjectured. Connelly and her crew had found quantities of small amulets, and many small cups, miniature bowls, strainers, and writing tablets. Slowly, they began to speculate that Yeronisos was the site of an ancient boys' school, equipped, it seemed, by someone with vast wealth, ambition, and is a gift for symbolic spectacle.

“Good archaeology fills in the blanks of history. It tells the losers' story. It teases out the history that falls between cracks,” Connelly said. She thought this site told a story of Cleopatra VII and her son Ptolemy XV, called Caesarion, two of the great losers of history. The island was visible off the coast to travelers sailing between Alexandria and Rhodes, a convenient stop on the trade route from Egypt to Constantinople, and very near Paphos, the traditional birthplace of Venus, whom Caesar claimed as his ancestor. It was an ideal place to build a temple to Apollo and make a claim for the child of a Roman emperor and an Egyptian queen. Connelly and her team had found bronze coins minted during the joint reign of Cleopatra and Caesarion. They'd also found Egyptian artifacts; in addition, the buildings on Yeronisos were constructed to Egyptian measure. The dates fit. “And who besides Cleopatra had those kind of resources?” she asked rhetorically.

In 30
B
.
C
., after the battle of Actium—“the turning point for
the rest of history,” Connelly declared—and the death of Cleopatra and Marc Antony, the money stopped flowing to Yeronisos. An earthquake in 15
B
.
C
. left the island something of a ruin. Then, in the fourth century, a series of massive earthquakes took down the sides of the cliffs. Later, a major Christian complex was built on the island, then it once again fell into ruin. In 1980, it was targeted to be the site of a casino, but an archaeological officer in the Department of Antiquities and later Cyprus's director of antiquities, Sophocles Hadjisavvas, turned over enough ground to see that something ancient had once stood there; he and Cyprus put a stop to that development. Connelly, who had dug in nearby Paphos with Hadjisavvas, learned about Yeronisos from him. There she found the piece of real estate on which to make her archaeological stand. Each year she has to demonstrate tangible progress to the Cyprus Department of Antiquities to renew the license to work there.