Lives in Ruins (12 page)

All but one, I noticed, had been sold. Never fear, there were more where these came from. The dealer, who told me he had a deep personal collection, brought out six or seven more for me to drool over. Are their faces really pigs? He thought they might be bears. Here's a fine one, he said, nudging me toward a large chunk of dark carved jade that had a price of ten or eleven thousand dollars. But for me—only $8,500. I asked him if a purchase included papers. Ah yes, he said, each piece had been authenticated by three experts. Naively, it hadn't occurred to me that they might be fakes. No, no, I said. How do I know they're legal? How can I be sure they haven't been looted? “Ah,” he said. “These are, how do you say it,
stray finds
. The farmers pick them up in their fields. I declare every one and pay duties and taxes on them, but . . .” Then he shrugged.

He invited me to take cell-phone photos of my pig dragon, and gave me an official photo with its dimensions and description, and then he made me a gift of the handsome gallery catalog, a seventy-five-dollar item. I usually identify myself as a writer, but somehow, though I signed my real name into the guest book, I never found the right time to share this fact. I was a cultural prospector, and not a fellow collector, like the suited gentleman and smartly dressed women who browsed knowingly by my side. The dealer and I parted ways as fellow lovers of an ancient art form. Perhaps he is still waiting for me to return with my credit card.

The gallery's catalog was not as coy as he was. “Most of the jades of the Hongshan Culture were unearthed from medium and small scale tombs,” I read on the first page, then I studied helpful photos of what a grave looked like
in situ
, in the ground, and how an unearthed grave of the period looked with its skeleton decked out in jade. The text even told us to expect “three to nine artifacts per tomb.” While they last.

When an object is looted, as any archaeologist would tell you, it loses its archaeological meaning. “For years art historians thought the Hongshan jades were from the Shang dynasty, because they
didn't have any context,” the heroine of Nelson's novels declared pointedly. Three thousand years separated the Hongshan from the Shang dynasty. Pig dragons, once looted, are still beautiful, even in the hands of a dealer, but they can't be dated, they can't illuminate a place, and they can't tell a people's story. Looted objects lose the power to speak.

L
IKE MANY
professionals dedicated to the careful study and preservation of our cultural remains, archaeologists find that work that pays a living wage is scarce. A snapshot of the profession shows salaries and wages lower, on average, than those of artists. One source estimated fifty percent unemployment in the field. In 2014,
Forbes
identified “Anthropology and Archeology” as the #1 worst college major, “based on high initial unemployment rates and low initial earnings.” At the SAA conference in Memphis in 2012, a gathering of more than three thousand archaeologists, I stepped into the room designated “Employment Service Center.” Only five full-time jobs were posted. Archaeologists could find temporary fieldwork through cultural resource management (CRM) firms, which handled compliance issues for developers, but permanent positions were harder to secure. I mentioned those five lone jobs to John Shea, and told him how much I admired the stubbornness and humor of his fellow professionals in light of their brutal economic prospects. “What does this tell you?” he said, almost grimly. “It tells you how much we love this work.” Not romantic love, bathed in hopeful illusions—something fiercer, that costs dearly.

At the same conference, one of my archaeological guides took my elbow and urged me past the rooms of Mayans and Africanists,
past the exotic “Ethnoarchaeology of Fire Features in Fiji.” “I think you'll be interested in this,” she said, leading me into and through the labyrinth of the conference center to some forgotten rooms far from the action. There, the Committee on Museums, Collections, and Curation had packed a room with the beleaguered. The next year, the federal sequestration and government shutdown would introduce the rest of Americans to the cutbacks in government support, but these professionals were old hands at austerity. They had been in crisis for a generation.

In the room, archivists, curators, preservationists, and archaeologists, all keepers of collections of artifacts, discussed their challenges as the stewards of rooms full of excavated material that had not yet been inventoried. The
stuff
of archaeology, the material, was burying them.

“We are
not
encouraging our master's and Ph.D. students to stop digging—
and we must
. Look, we don't have room to put everything you're digging up!”

“This collection is going to be out in the trash dump! We can't be asked to fund this storage! We just had the third worst year in a row!”

“Do we really need to dig more 1880s farmhouse sites?”

“Tell them to slow down the digging!” one called, and the voices chimed back: “We've tried!”

There was no funding for volunteers to help catalog the collections that piled up. The professionals felt “lucky even to be paid,” one said. Everywhere there were collections orphaned because the cultural resource management firms that excavated them had gone out of business. The federal Save America's Treasures program was one of the largest and most successful grant programs “for the protection of our nation's endangered and irreplaceable cultural heritage,” I learned, but it was not funded at all for that year, so the National Park Service, which administered it, was no longer accepting applications. The federal Advisory Council on Historic Preservation
would not even talk about collections. Every six years, the National Historic Preservation Act of 1966, which was created to fund this work, was renewed at smaller and smaller margins.

In this room, the archaeologist who directed the curation and management of archaeological collections for the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers said, mournfully, as if he were a farmer during the Great Depression and the last crop had just blown away: “National historic preservation is a first-generation job. I began when that legislation came through, as so many of us did, and we are the first and perhaps the last people to be employed our whole lives in this field. We've had too many warnings that this is not popular legislation, though, and too many people are blissfully unaware of the consequences. We are keeping our history alive, but if that legislation goes down and we are all gone, there will not be a ripple on the water for the loss of this discipline.”
^*

Two rays of hope: the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) continues to breathe life into the storerooms of artifacts with an average of eighteen grants awarded each year, giving archivists and museum guardians some tools and support. And archaeologist Giovanna Vitelli reported that she had just been funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation to direct the “University Engagement Programme” for the Ashmolean Museum at Oxford, charged with dreaming up new ways for teachers to engage with its collection. “I have a ton of money and a bunch of postdocs,” she said, inviting everyone to network. “I'm in a sandbox with a bunch of toys.”

She was the only one who did not seem to be wailing and rending her garments.

I followed several of the Cassandras of archaeological collections to the next panel—on the access and preservation of archaeological
information—and watched them confront the elegant and affable John Yellen, who heads the National Science Foundation's powerful grant program that sends many archaeologists into the field. NSF archaeology grants are made only to scientists with plans for long-term preservation of their data, such that it could be accessed by other researchers. But “after they have the money,” Yellen allowed, “there's not a lot we can do.” How long should an archaeologist have exclusive access to the data?—this was a burning question. There is a limbo between excavation and publication that some archaeologists never got out of—a limbo where intellectual work stalled and the artifacts and information gathered were out of reach, invisible to other researchers.

Yellen said that the National Science Foundation, too, “is being pushed by Congress to save money. Our travel budget is down fifteen percent. We have panelists come to advise us and review applications, and we do not have money to buy them refreshments. At the same time the number of proposals is increasing enormously.”

Was it any wonder the noise in the hotel lobby that night was deafening? In the roar of the late evening's libations, the archaeologists shouted across tables, sat perched on the lip of the fountain outside, laughed at the gods. The field archaeologists, the lucky ones, would soon be heading to Turkey or the caves along the coast of South Africa or the Peruvian desert or Washington State or Dmanisi, Georgia (nice
Homo erectus
skulls!), or they'd be spreading out across the countryside, ahead of the bulldozers, chasing history. The graduate students roamed in packs, lean and hungry. The assistant professors counted their crumpled bills and compared travel grants. The keepers of the collections muttered into their beer.

IN THE SUMMER
of 2011, Grant Gilmore had warned me not to wait to come to St. Eustatius, and I soon learned why. The shiny job he'd enjoyed for so long, directing the independent archaeology center on Statia, had tarnished somewhat by the time I met him.

His unusual temperament, the combination of fierce energy and equanimity, had worked well for doing the demanding work of archaeology in the tropics, on an island where nothing happened quickly. Gilmore helped found SECAR with the locals in 1997, and though it was not funded until 2004, its creation had been nothing less than, as even he said, “astounding.” Gilmore's old teacher, Norman Barka, who first began charting the island's role in the global economy of colonial times, had told him, “If Statia gets an archaeological center, I will eat my hat.” As the years passed, local support waxed and waned, and the recent election of fundamentalists to key political offices did not augur well for the center. Then, the month before I arrived, two female volunteers were assaulted, a first for SECAR. The young women fought off the drunken locals and reported the attack, but the police declined to follow up. Gilmore demanded a meeting with the chief and objected strongly to the casual dismissal of the case. Soon after that, the old car the volunteers drove was impounded, and Gilmore himself was stopped several times; he began to feel unwelcome.

I remember bouncing in the Land Cruiser over the charming cobblestones in Oranjestad, and Gilmore snorting. “Completely inauthentic. This road was in terrible shape. The original stones are underneath. I told them they should just uncover the junk on top of it. But that wasn't in the plan.” He stopped at the waterfront one morning to loan out Matt, the perpetual volunteer, this time to act as SECAR's eyes, keeping vigil over a dredging operation to expand the harbor, to make sure the dredgers didn't destroy the remains of the old warehouses that had sunk when the wharfs were burned. When I asked what Matt was doing, Gilmore said, “He's watching them destroy our archaeological heritage.” Barka, his mentor, had lasted twenty years in the islands, long enough to become “a jaded pessimist—that point that I would get to,” Gilmore said wryly. And as their children approached school age, he and Joanna took stock and decided that they needed a fresh context.

So my first, revelatory visit to Statia happened as his own time there was coming to an end.

Neither Grant nor Jo had another job, but their plan was to head to the U.K., the U.S., or the Netherlands, trusting they would find work before their savings ran out. This was a terrible time to find archaeology jobs, but Joanna had a master's degree, experience working with museums, a calm disposition, and an indefatigable will, while Grant was strong, personable, and confident, a font of knowledge and resourcefulness, with a Ph.D. and seven years' experience running his own archaeology center. Both had studied at University College London, which, according to the
Guardian
, edged out venerable Cambridge University as the top-ranked archaeology school in the U.K. Gilmore would leave with “a lifetime of stories” and plans to write at least three books rooted in Statia, including an encyclopedia of Caribbean archaeology.

I STAYED IN
touch with Grant and Joanna via Skype, where Grant's profile pictured him grinning in a T-shirt with the legend,
MY LIFE IS IN RUINS
.
^*
I met up with them in June, seven months after their departure from Statia. They had taken up temporary residence at Jo's mother's house a few hours north of London in Lichfield, the beautiful old city in England's West Midlands, but as the seasons changed, as Grant turned forty, as their almost-five-year-old daughter started school, and their two-year-old son preschool, one job interview after another failed to yield a paying position. Gilmore was a finalist for a number of these jobs, but that didn't change the tally: 190 applications, zero jobs. Jo had stopped keeping track; she'd applied for perhaps thirty. “We psych ourselves up, and it's a tremendous lift to do well in the interview. Then there's a period of hope. Then . . .” She shrugged. “We start all over again.”