Lives in Ruins (31 page)

One evening, after a long day of presentations, I sat above Cusco in a restaurant where the tables doubled as aquariums in white old-fashioned bathtubs: you ate on a glass top as fish swam beneath your plate around algae and arrangements of shells. Around the rim of
the bathtub, a United Nations of archaeologists ordered pisco sours and, naturally, beer. Odd, stuffed angels were suspended from the ceiling, the chairs and benches cushioned with fake tiger-skin pillows, the light pink and murky, as if we were underwater, drowning in the eclectic. We ate alpaca steaks on top of the aquariums. Well, the vegetarians didn't eat alpaca, nor did Douglas Comer. The American copresident of ICAHM had started his trip with a hike up to the ruins of Saqsayhuamán, above Cusco, and one of the stray alpacas that roam the site fell in love with him; he couldn't eat alpaca since he'd been nuzzled.

I sat between Comer, an expert in space archaeology, and Yo Negishi, an expert in the ancient Jomon hunter-gatherers who lived 14,000 years ago in Japan. Comer ran a CRM firm in Baltimore, where he specialized in collecting and analyzing satellite and aerial data. He worked with NASA and encouraged archaeologists to make use of its library of recently declassified satellite photographs to study sites through time. Yo Negishi handled some of the oldest pottery in the world. He told me that ninety-nine percent of the excavations in his country were emergencies, conducted to clear land for development. The image of archaeologists might be dashing and romantic in the rest of the world, but in Japan, Negishi and his colleagues suffered scorn for their profession. He recalled working on one emergency dig, knee-deep in a muddy hole while the man whose construction was interrupted when the equipment turned up skeletal remains stood on the edge, mocking him. “‘You call this a job?'” Negishi imitated him, laughing.

JUST BEFORE LEAVING
Peru, I paid homage to the spirit of Ruth Shady Solís and made a pilgrimage to the oldest city in the Americas. I rode with a guide named Bratzo, an affable and chatty half-Peruvian/half-Balkan man who plucked me out of Lima and drove me up the coast. We passed through some of the massive slums of
Lima, where people lived atop cemeteries, he told me. We passed numerous houses bristling like porcupines with wires standing up from their roofs. “Our houses are never done,” he told me. “My own, which I built, has wires, because someday my son might want to build a floor above me to live. And look! Here are already the connections for him!” He played addictive
chicha
music on the car's CD player, Amazonian instruments and rhythms with a psychedelic influence and a dash of Carlos Santana, the perfect soundtrack for a jaunt up the Pan-American Highway, through steep foggy hills and coastal desert.

We turned east after several hours at a burnt cane field edged by palm trees. We saw naked men bathing in an irrigation ditch, one stretched out napping, workers on break, and horse-drawn carts piled high with produce. We drove and drove on a half-rutted road as mountains rose around us. We followed fields of marigold and corn and asparagus on either side through the fertile Supe Valley. We passed open trucks with men hanging off the back, and adobe houses, and, finally, a blue billboard that read: “Conozca: La Ciudad Sagrada de Caral, 23 km.” We waited for a herd of black and brown- and-white goats driven by a skirted woman in a flowered hat to pass; the goats traveled with a dog, a burro, and a spotted pony. In the middle of this farmland, another huge billboard announcing
La Zona Archeológica
had a squatters' lean-to propped against its base, guarded by two dogs.

And suddenly the landscape was desert, all beige and sere and dried riverbed; the green mountains and green fields had become a distant backdrop. The approach to Caral was as monochromatic as the moon, and the sun that had been shining on us all the way inland was hidden.
Overcast
didn't capture the atmosphere; this wasn't exactly fog—it was as if everything had become shrouded, humid, chilly. Six buff-colored pyramids loomed over a bleak plateau; bleached-out expanses of plazas lay between them, defined by
low walls of stone. The site had been fitted for tourists and students with informative signs, simple open thatched huts with low-tech displays, big parking spaces for buses, clean restrooms. Waiting for Dino, who would guide us through Caral, we read about the
shicra
, the loose-woven reed containers that held the rocks that formed the foundations of the pyramids. The site stretched out for 165 acres. On a distant pyramid, we saw people who looked to be the size of goats. Dino joined us and identified them as archaeologists who worked here for twenty-two days and then took an eight-day break. “This is like a prison for archaeologists,” he said with a smile. Until a late bus full of schoolchildren arrived, Bratzo and Dino and I and the busy, faraway archaeologists were the only signs of life at Caral.

I can't imagine what it was like for Ruth Shady Solís here before she realized what she had found, when the walls were buried and the pyramids looked like dunes. She excavated the humble and exotic remains, the
shicra
bags, the drug inhalers carved from bone, the piles of sardine and anchovy bones twenty miles from the ocean, the cache of flutes made from the bones of cranes. It took fifteen years to appreciate that these finds were not just traces of an ancient population but evidence of an organized society with an extensive trading network. And such a sophisticated physical infrastructure—altars, for instance, with underground flues for ventilation, the kind of thing you might find in European ruins, but not until thousands of years later. And just over the lip of the plateau, irrigated farms had grown an abundance of beans and pumpkin and cotton in four different natural colors year round. Some of those beans and cotton crops had made their way to the coastal site of Aspero, where they were exchanged for sardines and anchovies, caught in cotton nets. That's where Shady worked now, with Michael Moseley, the American archaeologist who had defended her against Haas and Creamer's “academic imperialism”; in a recent speech, Moseley charged they had “jumped claim, quite literally.” Shady, Haas, and Creamer were all engaged in “spectacular and revolutionary” archaeology. He blamed their feud on the
character flaw that plagues so many archaeologists: “They have huge egos.”
^*

I was standing by the largest pyramid as Dino talked on about the thousands of his ancestors who must have lived here—perhaps we were walking on the remains of their houses, he suggested. Bratzo asked intelligent questions; he had been hooked on archaeology since he hiked along the coast with a friend and came upon a mummy in one of the caves.

Ruth Shady Solís had been obsessed with the precolonial story of her people. That obsession led her to discover what is, so far, the oldest city in the Americas; with it she has restored a piece of the ancestral past to her people. Recognizing Caral's importance was evidence of her skill as an archaeologist. But here's the thing about archaeologists: Caral or no Caral, she probably would have done what she did anyway. Whether or not what she found was the oldest or first, she would have given up vacations, slept in her car, awakened each morning and kept working, with nobody encouraging her and no guarantee she'd find anything. I suspect she would have pursued her stubborn vision no matter what she unearthed.

I thought of all the archaeologists I had met, what their drive and stubborn insistence on their own visions had meant. I thought of Adrien Hannus, the long-haired Sioux Falls archaeologist who sat eating burnt bacon in a diner at the beginning of my story, describing how the Native Americans of the plains used to extract bone grease from animal bones. A Vietnam veteran, Hannus had ended his military service in bad shape, with a case of amoebic dysentery that had left him sixty-five pounds lighter, and a powerful aversion to the “grotesqueness and violence and gore” he'd witnessed. After discharge, he abandoned the study of law and turned to anthropology, the study of human beings.

What was archaeology to him? It was the opposite of killing things. It was trying to will life back into stuff that had been forgotten and buried for thousands or millions of years. It was not about shards and pieces of bone or treasure; it was about kneeling down in the elements, paying very close attention, and trying to locate a spark of the human life that had once touched that spot there.

THERE WAS NO
one in sight as Bratzo and I left Caral. We rolled slowly away over the rocky riverbed in this remote moonscape, and then . . . what's this? A man in a yellow jacket and cap on a mototaxi—a three-wheeled motorbike—with a yellow cooler strapped in front of him, coming from the other direction. Bratzo rolled down his window and they had a little chat in the middle of the dry riverbed. He handed over a few
soles
, and the man handed us back some ice cream bars, and we pressed on through thousands of years to return to the present.

MY THANKS TO
the archaeologists and experts who opened their doors to me and whose stories make up this book. Grant Gilmore, Laurie Rush, Bill Sandy, and John Shea led me to others as well, and Sandy took me along on numerous digs. I am also indebted to Robert Ashworth, Jim Burr Sr., Joey Cabaccini, Zoe Contes, Terri Jentz, Leedom Lefferts, Ricah Marquez, Duane Quates, Cristina Scalet, Meg Schulz, Willa Skinner, Mike Sprowles, Ruud Stelten, Penny Steyer, and Joe Wallace; to Leila Amineddoleh and Thomas R. Kline at the Lawyers' Committee for Cultural Heritage Preservation; and to my digging partners, especially Jillian Banks, Alex Denning, Kelly Riemersma, and Talia Varonos-Pavlopoulos and the whole NYU crew.

Thanks to those who talked to me about their work and who made incalculable contributions to this book, including Andy Bobyarchick, Bill Caraher, Jennifer Everhart, Joel Grossman, Rachel Hallotte, Kris Hirst, Sandra Hollimon, Fumiko Ikawa-Smith, Dave Johnson, Jessica Johnson, Judy Kelley-Moberg, Rungsima Kullapat, Edward J. Lenik, Brian Lione, Taylor Middleton, Andrew Reinhard, Friedrich T. Schipper, Christopher J. Stackowicz, Margaret Staudter, and Louise Pothier and Sophie Limoge of Pointe-à-Callière, Montreal's stunning museum of archaeology.

I took advantage of many programs that are available to anyone interested in archaeology, particularly through the AIA and
its local societies, the New York State Archaeological Association and its local chapters, Brown University's Joukowsky Institute for Archaeology and the Ancient World, and NYU's Center for Ancient Studies, and Coursera, and am grateful for all. The Society for American Archaeology (SAA), the Paleoanthropology Society, and Stony Brook University were particularly welcoming.

I could not have done the research for this book without the help of Purchase College, its Writers Center, and its library. Thanks especially to Louise Yelin and Suzanne Kessler, and to Darcy Gervasio, and Marie Sciangula. Margaret Fox, Carolyn Reznick, and Meryl Sprinzen led me to sources, and Sherry DeBoer led me to several. Jim Nicholson gave me great advice when I began this project. Thanks to E. Jean Carroll, Pete Dexter, and Nick Trautwein for crucial support, and to Bob Brutting, Betsy Carter, Lee Eisenberg, Eric Himmel, Christine Lehner, Jay Lovinger, Bruce McCall, Becky Okrent, Dan Okrent, Caroline Miller, David Smith, Roy Solomon, and Yvonne vanCort. Carol Caldwell went above and beyond to help me at an important point, as did Chris Dodge.

My friends and readers are an extraordinary crew. Catherine Anderson, Marcelle Clements, Mary Ellen Hannibal, Abby Rosmarin, Kristen Munnelly, and Barbara Rowley gave me useful and much-appreciated comments. Martha Alcott read and fact-checked on deadline. Kate Buford, Ben Cheever, Gay Daly, and Mark Golodetz listened to and/or read several versions of these chapters, and Susan Squire read it no fewer than three times. Esmeralda Santiago and Larkin Warren offered steady feedback and endless patience and support. My friend Ruth Liebmann traveled with me to Peru, and I stole all her great observations. Mary Murphy and Bob Minzesheimer have been there for me throughout, as have Jackson Fleder, Carolyn Fleder, and Nick Fleder, and my extended and forgiving family.

I want to thank my publishers, Jonathan Burnham and Michael Morrison, for their faith and support, and Jane Beirn, Ed Cohen,
Barry Harbaugh, Annie Mazes, Sydney Pierce, and Virginia Stanley for their hard work and steady hands on this book. How many writers these days can count on the same team across a decade? I have had the benefit of David Hirshey's humor and savvy through every stage of three books. Milan Bozic has designed three wonderful covers. Chris Calhoun has guided me wisely throughout. And Rob Fleder, who shares my life, has given me three fantastic titles, priceless editorial advice, and courage.

That is very many excellent people—and others unmentioned besides—but none could talk me out of some of my decisions or save me from all errors. I take full responsibility for those.

“Archaeology's Dirty Little Secrets,” online course, Sue Alcock, Brown University, 2014: www.coursera.org/course/secrets.

Birmingham, Robert A.,
Spirits of Earth: The Effigy Mound Landscape of Madison and the Four Lakes
(Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2010).

Gill-Frerking, Heather, and W. Rosendahl, “Use of Computed Tomography and Three-Dimensional Virtual Reconstruction for the Examination of a 16th Century Mummified Dog from a North German Peat Bog,”
International Journal of Osteoarchaeology
, vol. 23, issue 6, November/December 2013.

Glob, P. V.,
The Bog People: Iron Age Man Preserved
(Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1969).

Karr, Landon, with L. Adrien Hannus and Alan K. Outram, “Bone Grease and Bone Marrow Exploitation on the Plains of South Dakota: A New Perspective on Bone Fracture Evidence from the Mitchell Prehistoric Indian Village,” A Bush Foundation Research Project, November 3, 2005.

“Kingship and Sacrifice: Iron Age Bog Bodies and Boundaries,” Heritage Guide no. 35, Archaeology Ireland.