My sister, Cassandra, is an archeologist with the Parks Department in Montgomery County, Maryland. Lately, she has been supervising the excavation of a local farm where Josiah Henson had lived and worked as a slave during the first decades of the nineteenth century. In 1830, Henson and his family escaped to freedom in Canada. Henson went on to become a minister and to write an autobiography, “The Life of Josiah Henson,” that was a major influence on Harriet Beecher Stowe’s “Uncle Tom's Cabin.” My sister’s job, with its deep connections to history, literature, and culture, seems fascinating from afar. And yet, for all her talk of digs, artifacts, and conference papers, I had no real idea what she and her colleagues do all day.
Here comes Marilyn Johnson to help clear things up. Johnson has just published a book on archeology for the general reader, “Lives in Ruins: Archeologists and the Seductive Lure of Human Rubble.” It’s essentially a series of profiles of archeologists and their obsessions, and it successfully demystifies the profession and documents the unexpectedly wide variety of skills and activities that fall within its parameters. As I read, I kept asking what an actual archeologist would make of this portrait by an outsider. Was it accurate? Realistic? To that end, I asked my sister to round up a panel of her peers for a one-time-only archeology book club to discuss “Lives in Ruins.”
We gathered a week or so later, four of us in person, a fifth via Skype. Joining me and Cassandra were Carolyn White, an associate professor in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Nevada, Reno; Joe Joseph, the director of administration with New South Associates, a cultural-resource-management firm in Stone Mountain, Georgia; and Julie King, a professor of anthropology at St. Mary's College of Maryland. All are American historical archeologists whose specialties range from African-American culture to nineteenth-century ranching in Hawaii. Together, they represent close to a century of experience in the field.
We started by talking about the public perception, or misperception, of archeology. For all the glamour that surrounds the profession—Hiram Bingham “discovering” Machu Picchu in the mountains of Peru; Howard Carter unearthing Tutankhamun's tomb in the Valley of the Kings—the fact is that the work is often poorly paid, physically demanding, and prone to controversy. (Just last week there was a furor over the British Museum's loan of a sculpture from the Elgin Marbles to the Hermitage, in St. Petersburg.) “It's tough, physical work, all day, every day,” one of the archeologists in Johnson's book says. The panel commended the author for her portrait of the frustrating grind of the job and the often-long wait for a payoff. (Carter labored in Egypt for more than three decades before his big find.) A source quoted in “Lives in Ruins” estimated the unemployment rate in the field at about fifty per cent.
The book also illuminates what Johnson describes as “the toil behind an obscuring stereotype.” One of her subjects, Grant Gilmore, withdrew from a project he'd been leading for years on the Caribbean island of St. Eustatius when relations with the locals soured over the alleged sexual assault of two of his volunteers. Gilmore was unemployed for two years and applied to hundreds of openings before finding his next job. (The book's double-entendre title comes from a T-shirt worn by Gilmore that reads, “MY LIFE IS IN RUINS.”) Another subject in the book, Kathy Abbas, scrubbed floors in the mansions of Newport, Rhode Island, in order to fund her decades-long search for the Revolutionary War fleet that lies at the bottom of Newport Harbor. In a letter to Johnson, Abbas referred to herself as one “of the working poor.” “I had more disposable income when I was a graduate student!” The archeologists I spoke with confirmed that these stories were representative. One member of the panel—Julie King—said that she would add “Lives in Ruins” to her students' reading list simply for its blunt portrayal of the difficulty of the job search.
When an archeologist finally does find a job, much of the work, as Johnson notes, “involves graves and garbage.” It's not for the squeamish. Even some members of the panel said that they had a hard time reading the chapter on forensic archeology in which Johnson and others search the New Jersey Pine Barrens for a dead waitress. (For the purposes of the exercise, the waitress was played by the carcass of a four-hundred-pound pig that was interred a year earlier.) Kimberlee Sue Moran, the forensic archeologist profiled in that chapter, has forty-five dead rats buried in her back yard so that she can study their decomposition. I, for one, didn't need to know that Moran sometimes finds “a whole bed of writhing maggots” when she removes a layer of dirt over a grave.
Moran's rat collection is one example of how something unconventional in mainstream life becomes conventional among archeology's practitioners. The arduousness of the career and the elusiveness of its rewards result in some other common characteristics, which Johnson enumerates: determination, passion, and innovative thinking. “It's a full time job,” White told me, “as in twenty-four hours a day.” The majority of archeology in this country is performed not by tenured professors, but by cultural-resource-management (C.R.M.) firms hired by developers and land-owners to certify that a planned skyscraper or highway won't destroy the remains of an ancient village or a sacred burial ground. The slow labor of archeology is often, as Johnson notes, at odds with “a world that demands speedy returns.” Joe Joseph singled out the chapter on Bill Sandy, a C.R.M. archeologist who discovered what is believed to be the largest Revolutionary War cemetery in the country, in Fishkill, New York, in 2007. “Cemeteries are easily our most difficult projects and our most controversial projects,” said Joseph. Sandy's discovery of skeletal remains halted the construction of a planned strip mall. A second C.R.M. company not only confirmed Sandy's findings, but also discovered hundreds more graves, which led to a prolonged stalemate over the future of the site. With no federal funds available to purchase the land for preservation, Sandy and his colleagues have resorted to a variety of fund-raising efforts.
Another surprising employer of archeologists is the military. Several members of the panel praised the chapter on Laurie Rush, a civilian archeologist who works for the Army, at Fort Drum, in New York, which is the home of the Tenth Mountain Division. Rush not only supervises archeological digs within the hundred and sixty-nine square miles of the fort's boundaries, but also plays an important role in educating American troops about cultural heritage sites that they may encounter on their tours of duty.* In response to the damage caused by American soldiers to an ancient Babylonian temple in Iraq, in 2004, Rush developed sets of playing cards that would teach American troops the basic archeology of Iraq and Afghanistan. They are cleverly designed. Each suit represents a different aspect of culture. The cards also contain practical information, such as “the ancient water system tunnels in Afghanistan look like ant hills on aerial imagery.” Laid out together, the backs of the cards form a larger picture of an archeological icon. As my sister noted, everything in archeology is controversial and Rush's work is no exception. Rush has been criticized by some of her peers for working with the military, but Johnson makes a strong case for the value of her accomplishments at Fort Drum.
The panel credited Johnson's ability to balance a big picture of the profession with details about the minutiae of the work. The most egregious flaw they found in Johnson's book was not in the text, but on the cover. Turning her copy over, King pointed to the trowel on the back. “This is a riveted trowel, which we would never use. It should be a welded trowel, because the riveted trowel would break, and break quickly.” The chapter on Rush, as well as several others, gave me a clearer idea of the work that archeologists do. But the book also changed my understanding of what lies at the root of the profession. I had always assumed that archeology was driven by the objects that came out of the earth: the pottery and the trinkets and the temples. But at its core, archeology is not about artifacts; it is about the people who used them. A chapter on the paleoanthropologist John Shea, whose work focusses on the tools used by ancient humans, was especially moving. Johnson calls Shea “a one-man anti-defamation league for our genus and species.” He believes in the genius of primitive peoples. According to Shea, the stone points that he found while hunting the history of Homo sapiens in Ethiopia were so well made that their creators could not have been truly primitive. “These were people just like me.”
*Correction: A previous version of this post misstated the size of Fort Drum.
