Lives in Ruins (2 page)

The bog bodies, the ultimate artifacts, were riveting. “Some people will stand rooted for hours,” said Heather Gill-Frerking, the rare North American consultant who flies across the Atlantic when the peat machines unearth another body from the European wetlands. While still an undergraduate, she had seen a picture of the head of Tollund Man, whose remains had been found in a bog in Denmark. A 2,000-year-old man (or perhaps a bit older), Tollund Man, like other bog bodies, appeared in a state the reverse of most corpses: although his skeleton was dissolving, his body tissue remained, stained brown but otherwise in remarkable condition. You could see the stubble on his chin and his puckered forehead. His expression was peaceful, in spite of the braided leather rope around his neck. Something in those bogs acts as a preservative. What was it exactly? Nobody knows, Gill-Frerking was told. “Don't say ‘Nobody knows' to me,” she said, and designed an experiment for her thesis by burying dead piglets and pig trotters (feet) in a bog. She earned three degrees and a postgraduate certificate in forensic anthropology, wrote about mummies and bog bodies, and began an unusual archaeological career based mainly in Europe. She is currently the director of science and education for the traveling show “Mummies of the World” and a long-distance law school student at University College London, specializing in cultural heritage law.

Her Ph.D. thesis about the Iron Age bog bodies of Schleswig, Germany, resulted in the news that the body known as Windeby Girl (immortalized in a poem by Seamus Heaney) had in fact been a boy. Gill-Frerking told me this as if she was gossiping about a mutual friend—“You know Windeby Girl was a boy?” She was also eager to talk about a site in Florida where a pond with a peat bottom preserved numerous bodies—no tissue or organs, but skeletons and,
surprisingly, intact brains. “There are only three hundred sixty-nine bog bodies.
^*
That's a very small pool of evidence,” she pointed out. Some are in private hands. “You'd be amazed how many people want a mummy.” Collectors who traffic in work snatched by thieves from historic sites are the bane of archaeology, and security is a big concern with the traveling mummy show.

I assumed there would be a lot of excavations in bogs, but Gill-Frerking disabused me of this. You'd have to drain the bogs to do a proper excavation—too expensive and too difficult. “These bog bodies are found by accident by the peat machines, which do a lot of damage,” she said. “Bogs are wonderful places to bury bodies, or for accidents to happen. A sheep falls in, and a shepherd goes after it and falls in too—it's not officially quicksand, but it acts like it.”

Gill-Frerking said that the experiment that got her started in the mummy world, which she published as “This Little Piggy Went to Cumbria; This Little Piggy Went to Wales,” involved no intentional killing of piglets, though one sow did die accidentally. She herself can't bear violence or death; she makes her husband catch and release any spiders or flies she finds in their house in New Hampshire. They own a poodle named Ammut, Devourer of Souls, but she would rather talk about Fluffy, the sixteenth-century dog pulled from a German bog that she got to study and prepare for the mummy exhibit. The dog had a skeletal head, but lots of tissue and many organs and lovely brown hair—“the oldest surviving 3-D animal with soft tissue!” she claimed.

THOUGH ONE OF
my sources had told me, reassuringly, that, after a while, arrowheads and points just “jump out at you,” I had no confidence that any such thing would happen for me. The afternoon I spent hunting for effigy mounds in Wisconsin persuaded me
that I needed a guide. Effigy mounds are a great archaeological feature of the Midwest, piles of dirt shaped by early Indians to suggest animals and spirits. They are, according to the book I carried, world-class archaeological features, on par with monumental works like the Nazca Lines in Peru. Okay, but in the photos, those Nazca Lines—massive drawings of birds and geometric figures scraped into the surface of the desert—looked impressive, while the black-and-white pictures of the Wisconsin mounds, by contrast, did not. Still, I'm a child of the U.S.A., and this is my stuff.

In spite of a map, and a sign, and a viewing platform—a viewing platform meant a view, yes?—I could not see the feature in the landscape. Never mind the animal shape. Where was the mound? I was looking for something 359 feet high; alas, it turned out to be 359 feet
long
. I understood from the guidebook that the mounds had world significance, but I had missed the part where they were described as “characteristically low . . . following the natural contours of the land itself and blending seamlessly into the natural terrain.” For some of us, they are more or less invisible. The effigies resemble birds and snakes and panthers the way the Ursae, Major and Minor, resemble bears; in other words, it helps to know in advance what you're looking for. And what about the mounds that are not effigies, not in the shapes of animals? Those look like gentle round hills. Sometimes they contain burials, sometimes not. They are piles of dirt that humans shaped. They are mysteries.

The first archaeological excavation in the United States occurred around the time of the Revolutionary War, when Thomas Jefferson cut a trench through an Indian burial mound in Virginia and made a scientific report of the human bones and other artifacts he found there. I can only presume his mound had been easier to see.

Later I heard an archaeologist named Diana Greenlee enthuse about the Poverty Point mounds in Louisiana. She claimed that these mounds and ridges in Louisiana comprise a site significant enough to rank with our other UNESCO World Heritage sites,
right up there with the Grand Canyon, Independence Hall, and the Statue of Liberty. The Grand Canyon and . . . Poverty Point? Greenlee explained that thousands of years ago, people from certain lower Mississippi Valley cultures took time from their hunting and gathering to transport vast amounts of earth by hand, basket by basket, from distant spots, and made their own hills, concentric ridges, and a massive plaza. We don't know why. Poverty Point is particularly significant because (a) hunters and gatherers rarely built mounds, (b) they built this mound with great speed, and (c) the scale of this site is so enormous that, according to Greenlee, its 400 acres of mounds and other dirt constructions dwarf Stonehenge. The only created landscapes comparable in size to Poverty Point are Black Rock City at the Burning Man festival and an office complex in Florida, she declared, and by then, I felt humbled. And sure enough, when the next list of UNESCO World Heritage sites was announced this summer, Poverty Point topped the list.

Who knows this stuff? I want to shake the world and have all these experts fall out. Who can tell the difference between a human-made mound and an ordinary hill or hillock, a difference so subtle that someone with a map and a big sign can't detect it? What sort of people choose to read bones and dirt for a living? If the Late Woodland Indians who built the panther mound that I couldn't see and the more ancient Native Americans who built the massive and sadly named Poverty Point are intriguing, then the people who discover them and study them intrigue me even more. And how much do we miss without them?

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.

F
IELD 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.