Mythology Abroad

by Jody Lynn Nye

“Say, Keith Doyle,” Holl called across the aisle. “There’s an interesting house coming up here on the side of the road. Take its portrait, will you?”

  O O O

  The hot summer sunshine slanted down across Keith’s shoulders and burned the tips of his ears while he worked on his patch of earth. The grass on the broad hilltop had been cleared in a section about twenty feet long by six feet wide. The exposed area was divided into sections three by three feet, by pegs to which string had been tied. When the group arrived, each student or worker was issued a pan, a loosely woven sieve, a trowel, and a pair of brushes. Under the supervision of Dr. Crutchley, the Professor of Ancient Studies from London University, they were expected to scrutinize the earth for artifacts, brushing away particles of earth from the marked patch to uncover each layer. The brushings were to be dropped into the sieve and broken up gently to see if there was anything hidden in them. If an artifact appeared, the site was measured and a note was made of where it lay. At least, that was what Keith understood them to want. He had been working for hours on his section, and had found nothing worth measuring or noting. He carefully brushed away the surface of the dirt with the larger, stiff brush, and scooped it into his pan, sifting through it for particles of metal or pottery. At times he would see a spot of another color and work feverishly to uncover it, but it would never turn out to be more than a pebble.

  “Not even a toenail clipping,” Keith grumbled to Matthew, whose pitch was across from his. “I never realized that scientists came up with their impressions of our ancestors based on such thin evidence. It’s like finding photographs, when you were expecting a movie. There’s so much in those exhibits in museums I supposed there would be more to see in a site. I think this part must have been the garden. Are they sure this was part of the site? The building boundaries are way over there.” He gestured with his trowel toward the tables where Crutchley’s assistants were sorting potsherds and animal bones. Behind them, inside a square pavilion tent, more of the professor’s team, nearly invisible in the shadows, moved back and forth with flat trays, filled with the results of other days’ successful searching.

  “Don’t give up,” Matthew said absently. “They wouldn’t still be here if they thought the site was milked dry.”

  “Well, this is where Professor Keith Doyle says that they didn’t have either the cooking or sleeping quarters,” he said emphatically, gesturing at his patch with the trowel. “Or anything else of importance, except maybe a footprint from the family pet dinosaur.”

  Matthew grinned without looking up at him, but then his expression changed. He began brushing furiously with the stiff brush at a spot in the earth before him, his cheeks pink. “Hoy, help a body here, eh?”

  “Do you have something?”

  “Here I thought it was one of the ever-present pebbles, but this one’s not shifting,” Matthew explained, his voice increasingly more excited. “It’s red-brown in color. Do you see it?”

  Keith dived over to help. “Yeah. Brush away from it. Clear the earth level. Hey, it’s round.”

  “What’s there?” Holl asked, from partway up the row of workspaces.

  “Don’t know yet, but it looks like Matt struck gold,” Keith said, his eyes shining. What disappointment he had been harboring evaporated in the excitement of an actual find. No matter that it was in someone else’s section, it was an archeological artifact, and he was watching it—no, helping it—be uncovered. He grinned widely as the edges began to emerge. “It’s a covered pot of some kind. And it’s intact.”

  The dig staff saw the crowd gathering at the end of the site and hurried over to see what was going on. Miss Sanders, Professor Crutchley’s assistant, a middle-aged woman with light ruddy-brown hair, leaned over Keith’s shoulder to watch as the pot emerged.

  “Carefully now. It could be very fragile. Stop using the brushes now, and use your fingers instead. Clear away the earth from its sides with your fingers. There might be small handles, and you could break them.”

  “Yes, ma’am,” both youths breathed, working more slowly.

  “Stop, Keith Doyle,” Holl’s voice came softly in Keith’s left ear. “I can feel cracks in the fabric. It’s only hardened clay. Stop now and move outward. You’ll have to pick it up from below.”

  Keith glanced up at Holl, and pulled away from the edges of the brown jar’s rim. “Matt, let’s move out and break up the dirt. It might widen out further down. We don’t want it to smash just as we’re getting something at last.” He dragged his fingertips along the ground until the pressure of Holl’s hand on his shoulder told him to stop. Matthew, shooting him a curious glance, followed suit, and started breaking up the soil.

  “Good, good,” the assistant encouraged them. “Now, lift …”

  A collective sigh of joy gusted from the crowd. Between their fingertips, Matthew and Keith held a glazed clay jar with a small round lid crusted in place by more dirt. Its shape was slightly reminiscent of an amphora, except that the foot was flat, and instead of the earlike handles, it had only pinched-looking tabs under the curled rim. At Miss Sanders’ instruction, they set it down in an empty pan on someone’s outspread handkerchief. The assistant dropped to her knees beside Keith and whisked at the jar with a soft brush until the lid came free and rattled in place.

  “Well done, you!” Miss Sanders exclaimed. “Someone get the camera.”

  Another assistant hurried up. The jar was photographed in the pan. A ruler was laid and chalk powder dribbled around the location in which it was found, and the assistant took another exposure. Dr. Crutchley beamed down on his workers as proudly as if he’d thrown the pot himself. He was a man in his late fifties, with perfect wings of white in his dark brown hair. Between those dramatic temples, wiry eyebrows stood out, just barely not touching above a beak-like nose.

  “A perfect example of corded ware, Miss Sanders. I never did expect this site to be another Jorvik, but it is encouraging to find fine specimens of this nature. Very gratifying. It’s an Irish style vessel, isn’t it, except that there are well-preserved traces of paste ornamentation, and the firing is much finer than you would expect. And a lid … not a seal or a stopper. Most unusual.”

  “There’s something broken off inside,” Keith said. “I felt it sloshing around when we picked it up.”

  The professor gently lifted the lid, and set it down on the cloth. With two fingers, he extracted from the jar a long string of globular, translucent golden beads. “Amber! An amber trading string.” The aged, blackened cord began to deteriorate as he lifted it, and he scooped his other hand underneath to catch the beads before they fell. “A small fortune in tally beads. Well, a good omen as a first find, I’d say.”

  “Someone’s cache, sir?” Miss Sanders inquired, picking up the pan containing the jar and lid.

  “Impossible to say until we’ve examined the entire site. It might have been interred with a shallow burial, not uncommon for wealth as grave goods.…” The two scientists drifted away to the table, offering speculations to one another, and exclaiming over the artifacts. The second assistant followed respectfully with the camera. Matthew and Keith watched them go with open mouths.

  “They’ve forgotten all about us,” Matthew said, a little indignantly. “We passed a miracle, and they’ve forgotten we exist!”

  “Oh, carry on, you lot!” Miss Sanders called over her shoulder.

  “There,” Keith grinned at him. “That’s better.”

  Enthusiasm rekindled, Keith doubled his efforts at searching, breaking up even the tiniest pieces of earth in his sieve and shaking them through. Miss Sanders had hinted of a shallow burial. There might be a skeleton here some place. Most likely, it would be cremated fragments in a funerary urn, which was relatively small and easy to overlook if you weren’t digging smack over it. The others were coming up with small artifacts, or fragments of larger items. With respectful hands, Holl was turning over a green, flaking piece of metal that could have been a bronze axe head. The two ladies and Ed
win were standing back so the assistant could sprinkle chalk along the outline of a long bundle that lay exposed across their three sections. Keith’s patch still showed no signs of yielding up anything interesting.

  He went on digging, undaunted by failure. Since his patch was adjacent to Matthew’s, it was possible that there was something hidden there, another clue to the solution of the puzzle of the Bronze Age settlement that had once been there. With a mighty heave, Keith tossed the earth from his sorting pan over his shoulder and bent down, trowel in hand, to start over filling it up.

  “What are you doing, lad?” a voice roared from behind him. “More care! More care!” Arrested, Keith tilted his head back until he was looking straight up into the face of Dr. Crutchley, face red above the collar of his white short-sleeved shirt over which he was wearing a sleeveless knitted waistcoat. Over which someone had inconsiderately sprinkled a truckload of dirt. Keith swallowed guiltily.

  He sprang to his feet and began to brush off the protesting professor. “Uh-oh, I’m so sorry, sir. I wasn’t watching where that was going.”

  “Take it more slowly in future,” Dr. Crutchley ordered, batting irritatedly at the front of his waistcoat, which sent clouds of gray dust floating into the air. “I came over to compliment you lads on the skill you showed at bringing out that pottery piece, but it may have been a fluke! You could be missing something working at a pace like that, or worse yet, destroying it in your haste. More care is needed. Or perhaps it would be better if you stopped what you were doing and helped to catalog our finds instead?” He pointed the stem of his pipe toward the table. Keith followed his thrust and shook his head vigorously.

  “Oh, no. I’d rather help out finding things, sir. Normally I’m good at digging things up.”

  Crutchley flicked particles of dust off one arm with a decisive finger. “Yes, though more like a surgeon exposing tissues, boy, and less like a dog burying a bone.”

  “Yes, sir. Sorry, sir.”

  “I admire your initiative, but keep the energy for endurance, not speed. Carry on.” The professor walked away, reaching into his back pocket for a tobacco pouch and plunging the bowl of his pipe into it.

  “Ooh, that was a rough ticking off,” Edwin said under his breath.

  “Hah,” said Keith, going back to digging, but much more slowly. His face was invisible to the others, but his ears were red. “That was nothing. I’ve been chewed out by experts.”

  As the sun began to throw longer shadows over the dig, the team called a halt to the work. Some contrast was useful, as it threw the edges of hidden objects into relief, but if the angle was too great, pebbles began to look like potsherds. Gratefully, Keith and the others creaked to their feet and exercised stiff legs and backs. Miss Sanders and the male assistant made tea inside the square tent, and distributed it to the workers in stained, chunky pottery mugs.

  “From the look of these,” Mrs. Green quipped, “ceramics skills haven’t changed much in forty centuries.”

  “Man hasn’t changed significantly over the ages,” Dr. Crutchley replied, settling down in a canvas director’s chair with a sigh. “In my opinion, only his tools have advanced in sophistication. Well, that was a good day’s work. I thank you all, especially our newcomers. Now we like to sit down and have a chat over what we’ve done today. What you Americans would call the ‘recap.’” Keith grinned at Holl, and the others chuckled.

  “Before you came,” Miss Sanders began, “my lot were turning over the rubbish tip. Once we had an idea of the perimeter of the settlement, we started nosing about downwind. There it was, just about twenty paces behind one of the structures. Fairly extensive.”

  “You can’t still smell any of it, can you?” Mrs. Turner asked in alarm, wrinkling her nose.

  “Not at all,” the archaeologist answered impishly. “Kitchen refuse becomes quite sanitized after four thousand years. We’ve come up with the bones of many herd animals, and an enormous quantity of remains of fish and shellfish. We take that to mean that the settlement was prosperous, since they weren’t dependent upon a strict diet of fish. Herd animals would be more rare in a poor environment.”

  “Doesn’t the amber necklace prove that they were wealthy?” Matthew asked. He took a proprietary pride in his find, and no one seemed to object.

  “Amber,” Dr. Crutchley began in a lecturing air, “was both an irreducible tally and in itself valuable. Our ancestors weren’t utter barbarians. They were attracted by the beauty of the substance. Now, without any other evidence to support it, what do you think the pot was doing out there at the bottom of the settlement?”

  Encouraged by the professor, the students offered their own conclusions. The professional archaeologists took their theories seriously, discussing the pros and cons of each suggestion. Keith found the give and take stimulating, and volunteered his own theory.

  “Maybe that amber string was somebody’s ace in the hole. You know, cookie jar money, and he wanted to keep his advantage hidden.”

  The others laughed. Dr. Crutchley let the corners of his mouth curl up. “Very interesting, Keith,” he said. He seemed to harbor no ill will for Keith having showered him with dirt, and even confessed that not only had it happened to him before, but he’d done it to others himself.

  “Am I right?” asked Keith eagerly.

  “Probably not, son,” said the archaeologist, grinding ash out of the pipe bowl and tamping fresh tobacco into it with his thumb. Keith’s face fell. Dr. Crutchley went on. “But you make me think that you’re heading in the right direction. I am reminded of a book in my library—I must send for it from London—that mentions a similar artifact. You may not have the right answers, but you function nicely as a catalyst for others by making them think. Do remember, there’s no theory so silly that it hasn’t been proposed in quite serious scientific papers by my learned colleagues.” He lit the pipe and drew on it, watching the others humorously through the thicket of his eyebrows. “We are coming to the conclusion that this was a trading village. By its placement, and by the types of artifacts we are finding here, our theory continues to be borne out. What I would like to find, though it is nearly impossible with the dearth of evidence, was what early man thought about.” He looked around at his circle of listeners. “What inspired him? What brought him here? Whom or what did he blame when it rained? Luckily, the Celts and Saxons were inclined to tell stories to us, their extreme descendants, through the decoration and ornamentation of household goods, what they ate, what things they held dear and,” with a wave toward Keith, “what they kept hidden. Yes, I will have to send for that book.”

  “I’ve made a note of it, Professor,” Miss Sanders said, flourishing her pen.

  From the crest of the hill where they sat, the students could see the shining ribbon of the river leading down to the sea. The hills around them were similar to that one: scattered scrub along the sides and clearings of wind-brushed grass atop the flat bluffs. Most of the land was marked off as restricted sites, cordoned off at road level by twisted wire fences and red printed signs warning away trespassers. Theirs was the only one of the peaks which was unmarked and unfenced.

  “This is not a terribly important site, but it is a nice one,” Crutchley continued. “Good, defensible location, but still reachable. As the population grew upriver, the shipping trade routes dealt with cities so much further inland. Wool and iron rejuvenated this area in the Middle Ages, so this site became obsolete. Lucky for us, since we can now investigate a stopped moment in time.”

  The teacups were gathered up and washed in a tub behind the tent. Keith and the others picked their way down the hillside to wait for the Educatours coach. Everyone else was chattering excitedly about the day’s work. He sat next to Holl in the tall grass, playing with a straw between his fingers, gazing at nothing, and thinking about Dr. Crutchley’s lecture. To understand a site, you had to make up a story using what was there; artifacts, layout, weather patterns, and hope that nothing you excavated later made the story inval
id. The work was backbreaking, but it was fun. He was fond of making up theories. If he was a better catalyst than a scientist, then he’d better come up with some good suggestions. To stimulate the others’ minds, of course.

  “Doesn’t really tell you who they belong to, does it?” Keith asked. Holl followed his eyes, and read the Restricted signs swinging on the barbed wire across the road.

  “Perhaps the owners want privacy,” Holl reasoned, peering up between the thick bushes and waist-high grass on one obscured hillside. “What could they possibly be building out here among all these private sites?”

  “What?” Keith asked, not really paying attention. “Who?”

  “Don’t you remember the reason they’re hurrying with this excavation? ‘Right in front of the bulldozer’ was the way Miss Anderson put it. Someone’s building something among all these unfriendly neighbors.”

  Keith walked backward and squinted under the flat of his hand toward the crest of the hill across the road. “I don’t know. No buildings. Not even a tent. No one lives there, anyway. Maybe it’s a nature preserve of some kind. There’s a path leading up the hill. I’m going to have a look.” He started for the fence.

  “A preserve, preserved one hill at a time? What has that to do with bulldozers? In any case, you shouldn’t touch, Keith Doyle,” Holl warned him. “I don’t know what they’ll do to you if you’re caught meddling over here. Think of me stranded here by myself in a strange place before you decide to get yourself tossed in jail.”

  Keith grinned. “I guess you’re right. Hello, Mom?” he pantomimed a telephone receiver, “Can you send me five hundred pounds bail?”

  “You’ll have to bailout later. Get up. The coach is coming.”

  ***

  CHAPTER SIX

  The dig was the exclusive topic of conversation in the coach all the way back to Glasgow. Miss Anderson circulated up and down the aisle among the tour group, chatting and asking questions. She gave Matthew hearty congratulations on his find, and discussed funerary customs with him. After a hasty dinner which no one really tasted, Keith and Holl joined the other young men for a celebratory pub crawl around Glasgow. Miss Anderson, the two schoolteachers and Narit stayed behind to talk quietly among themselves.