Lives in Ruins (5 page)

We regrouped and hiked back to the road, leaving the coral tool guarded by hovering wasps, and headed up to a trailhead, mostly overgrown, to climb the Quill. Gilmore took the lead and we filed behind him, up an ascent that had me gasping; everyone else was flashing brown muscles and chattering as they climbed. When we reached the area where his student had reported finding a tool, Gilmore told us to look for fruit trees. No matter when they lived, in colonial, pre-Columbian, or ancient times, people gravitated to fruit trees. We fanned out, balancing and picking our way like goats around giant termite nests and spiderwebs. We located a mango tree by the rotting smell of its windfalls and concentrated our search there.

We all felt the anticipation—ancient people walked here!—and the suspense was delicious, but my eagerness had a particular edge. After the second day digging at the plantation, Gilmore told me I could fill in our two test pits. I filled the holes carefully with dirt, but the nail markers at the corner looked messy, so I gathered
them up, too, as if tidying up after children. Later I heard two of the Dutch guys surveying the area shout to Gilmore that they couldn't find the markings for two test pits. “Was I not supposed to remove the nails?” I said. “Did I tell you to remove the nails?” Gilmore replied calmly. I tried to fix the depth of my error. “Not as bad as erasing sixty sites?” I said. “No, no,” Gilmore allowed. “You erased only two.” So on Explorers' Day, least trained and most repentant, I looked harder than anyone. And I found something under the mango tree, two things, in fact: broken shells. Unbroken, they would be nothing special, but broken might mean someone had crafted them into tools. Gilmore came over and examined one of the shells, an act of attention that was gratifying. He pointed it out to one of the Ph.D. students, who didn't bother to stop. “It's most likely hermit crabs,” he said. So much for my redemption.

Suddenly a commotion broke out above us on the hill. “Bees!” someone shouted, and another slapped at her ear. One of the Dutch archaeologists yelled, “Get out!” and suddenly all ten of us were in a downhill rush, crashing through the undergrowth. Thomas the law student was slapping at his head, so Gilmore stopped and pulled a bee out of his long hair. The Dutch crew stumbled past, yelling. I stuck close to Gilmore, who hesitated again partway down and pointed. “Lilies,” he said, reaching down for the leaves of two plants. “They don't grow wild here, but slaves planted them at grave sites,” and of all the markers we had seen today, this would seem the most promising—but he would have to note it on a map for later investigation. “Hurry, they're still on us!” came the cry from the volunteers farther up, so we stumbled down the last stretch of the slope. When we broke through to the road, Thomas had his head bowed and Hofman was pulling another bee out of his hair with a tissue. One Dutch student was nursing a sting at her waist, one shrugged off a sting on his arm.

Bees, you say? A band of fit and hearty archaeologists brought low by little flying insects? I know it seems silly, but consider the
words of the archaeologist who listed all of the terrible snakes and spiders and scorpions he encountered in the course of excavating in Central America, then waved his hand dismissively—snakes are stupid, spiders are kind of cute, and our fears about these creatures are irrational. Then what would be a rational fear? “What is deadly in the jungle is the mosquitoes,” he declared. What is most likely to kill us? “The bugs.”

And these bugs were not little honeybees. “Africanized bees,” Gilmore explained. “They appeared on the island about five years ago. They have sentry bees who patrol their territory. They'll bounce against your head, bump into your forehead, and then, if you don't get away, they'll come after you.” Ah, bugs that stalk people.

But the archaeologists didn't seem horrified, or upset. Everyone's cheeks were flushed. They seemed recharged, in a heightened state of—could this be pleasure? Why yes, they were having
fun
. Even Thomas, who had had two mad bees trying to drill through his skull, was shaking off the stings and grinning. This was much more fun than law school! This was the adventure we longed for, the Indiana Jones adventure, starring us and a swarm of—let's go ahead and say it—
killer
bees.

GRANT GILMORE WAS
sitting in his comfortable home on the north side of the island, on Zeelander Bay, beaming at his wife as she told me how she fell in love with archaeology as a teenager. Joanna, a decade younger than Grant, was soft-voiced, gentle, but steely at the core; she had analyzed bone damage in the skeletons of leprosy victims. She first came to Statia to work with Gilmore when she was a master's student and he a doctoral candidate at University College London; she returned as his girlfriend, then moved in as his wife. “Grant gave me a human skull for my birthday one year,” she told me, shyly. “Really? Which year?” I asked. And they discussed it, back and forth in the night breeze blowing off the bay, their children asleep in the back of the house.
“Twenty-one?” she guessed—“. . . no, later. Not Christmas, surely.” He said, “No, your mother would have freaked. Valentine's Day?” It was a puzzle—people who were trained to take any puzzle out there and pin it to a map and date it couldn't quite locate this oddly endearing event in their own past.

The rain from the tropical storm that had been threatening since I arrived finally came, a hot August downpour. It kept our little band of volunteers indoors for pottery lessons and a show-and-tell about eighteenth-century pipes, mirrors, and ink bottles, some of them marked
POLICE EVIDENCE
because they had been confiscated from a doctor trying to smuggle them out of the country.

Why do we study pottery? Because it endures; because, for thousands of years, most cultures have made it in one form or another; because it appears in breathtaking variety and tells us stories about the people who made and used it. I rubbed the pieces of creamware and pearlware from Europe and Asia and felt the rough salt glaze on a local piece of stoneware. Gilmore quickly figured out that Courtney, the newest volunteer, had taken pottery classes, and used her experience to explain the differences in how each was made. Then he told us about the beautiful hexagonal blue beads of Statia, the famous blue beads worth $150 or $200 apiece to collectors. I briefly entertained a detour into the archaeology of beads, following bead archaeologists, subscribing to the
Journal of the Society of Bead Researchers
, flying to the International Bead Conference in Borneo—it was not too late to go to Borneo. Whenever there was a storm, beads and other goods that had sunk when the British burned Statia's warehouses would wash ashore. “I bet you there are thirty or forty people combing the beach after this storm, looking for blue beads,” Gilmore said.

The next day, a steamy one, we returned to the plantation, this time to learn how to operate the “total station,” a surveying tool that measured distances and helped archaeologists map their sites. Gilmore carried the high-tech tool and an equally important low-tech
one: a nineteenth-century edition of Diderot's
Pictorial Encyclopedia of Trades and Industry
, with its detailed drawings of how various industries, including sugar mills, worked. You can't identify artifacts if you don't know what they are—it's one of the challenges of historical archaeology, industrial archaeology, military archaeology, any type of archaeology: you have to know what you're looking for. Which meant, since we were digging in a sugar plantation, we had to know the components of a sugar mill, so we could recognize the pieces that went into refining sugar and turning it into rum. If we looked sharp, maybe we could find a conical sugar pot used to drain molasses from raw sugar.

After the lessons, Gilmore worked the sifting screen with a volunteer while I peppered him with questions and took notes.

“Oops, spider,” I heard Gilmore say, but I was scribbling and didn't see him pick it off the screen and toss it over his shoulder. A few minutes later, it reappeared—a gray tarantula the size of a baby's fist—on the front of his shirt. I felt fur sprouting around my heart. I had never seen Gilmore motionless before, but there he stood, frozen except for his eyes, which looked at me expectantly. It was one thing to obliterate two test pits, another to stand by and let my first archaeology teacher be attacked by a tarantula. I couldn't let him down twice. Also, I needed him; he was my source, my guide to poison trees, my ride to the airport. I used my pencil to get under the spider, and tried to lift it off his shirt, but the determined thing kept creeping up toward Gilmore's neck. When I finally got under the meat of its thorax and flipped it over Gilmore's shoulder, he said not “Thank you,” but, “I think you hurt its leg.”

“You're worried about its leg?” I was flabbergasted.

“Come on, it's harmless,” he said. Then he resumed picking through the dirt on the screen. We saw the blue glint at the same time and he lifted it up. “A blue bead?” I asked, breathless, as he held it close to his face. “Nah,” he said, “it's the egg case of a cockroach,” and flung it away.

NEAR THE END
of my time in field school, I peeled off from Gilmore and the SECAR volunteers and followed the Dutch archaeologists on a beach walk. The beach where we sometimes swam was small, perched between the old pilings of a pier and a stone outcropping. Statia has its charms, but when it came to Caribbean beaches, the island lost out. If you wanted to walk the shoreline north from town, you had to go past one of the diving centers, cut through a parking lot at the back of a hotel bar, ease past its trash cans and a portable toilet, and pick your way over the rocks. I followed Corinne Hofman and two of her students, Anne and Hayley, around the tourist spot and across a spit of sand toward the abandoned leprosarium. The waves lapped in over the rocks.

We could see where the water cut into the land; a cliff face about six feet high dropped off from the grassy outcropping to what was left of the beach. Anne pointed to a whitish surface poking out of the rough gray cliff. “That's part of a skull,” she said. This shocked me. “Human?” “Yeah,” she said, and she and Hayley moved in to get a closer look. Hofman was examining a nearby pile of rocks and shells. “This is a midden,” she said, “a garbage dump, about a thousand years old.” All these rich sources of archaeological knowledge, sitting out in the open, exposed to the elements; some would be washed away in the next storm. “Who owns this land?” I asked her. “It's government land,” Hofman said. “I don't know whether they would think it's worth excavating.”

I picked my way over the rocks and almost stepped on a shard of painted pottery, lying on a rock in the harbor in low tide, winking up at me. What do you know? I picked it up and turned it over in my fingers: a delicate piece of—was it stoneware?—about three inches long, painted with a band of blue under the lip, and a blue and reddish-brown scene, too worn to say for sure what was pictured. Was this a remnant from the warehouses that had been burnt by the British? I pocketed it and brought it back to Gilmore.
“That is a nice piece,” he said, turning it over and calling to Matt to come look. His verdict: Westerwald, most likely seventeenth-century. I felt a glow. He didn't scold me for picking it up, though archaeologists like their artifacts in place, the better to understand where they came from and how they fit in the historic landscape; this piece would have disappeared under the waves had I left it in context. Instead, Gilmore added it to the endless cubic feet of artifacts filed in the SECAR building, old shards plucked out of the earth or sea, carefully labeled, and tucked away—an archaeological record in which I now had a stake.

J
OHN SHEA
carried a sheathed Swiss Army knife on the back of his belt, and his teaching assistant lugged a big old Neolithic ax over his shoulder as they strode across the windswept campus of the State University of New York at Stony Brook. The campus, the terminal edge of a glacier from tens of thousands of years ago, is littered with rocky boulders, its winter bleakness relieved only by the young specimens of
Homo sapiens
milling about. In his lectures for the Archaeology of Human Origins class, Shea drew a picture for me and the other students of what various early humans would look like coming over the horizon. Our ancient ancestors,
Homo erectus
, were tall and thin, hunters able to run prey to the ground; they would have swarmed over their quarry like a pack of “wolves with knives.” Neandertals, on the other hand—and Shea trained me to spell those early humans Neander
tal
—were lumberers. They had a barrel-chested build, like football linebackers, or the Boston Bruins—“or me,” Shea said. That Neandertal profile, stocky and hirsute, is quintessential male archaeologist. It commanded the landscape: docile Stony Brook students, working their smart-phones or talking in small groups, yielded and gave way when
they saw two armed men looming like Neandertals. “I have been stopped by campus police,” admitted Shea.