Site Unseen

by Dana Cameron

  “Are you okay?” Meg asked.

  I shook my head, trying to clear it, and then tried to nod at the same time, lest I further worry Meg. “Yeah, just a little…we need to get a box or something rigid we can pad. I don’t want this to get any more damaged than it already is.”

  The student rummaged around frantically in her kit and handed me a small cardboard box.

  “Poke a couple of small holes in it, so the condensation can escape,” I added, and when she had done so and put a piece of paper towel in the bottom of the box—the best we could do for field conservation—I gingerly slid an envelope into the box for added protection. Coins from the early part of the seventeenth century or earlier are very rare, but it was valuable to me for far more than its numismatic worth. It confirmed that what we’d been finding was the early fort beyond a shadow of a doubt.

  “Shouldn’t we…?” Meg gestured with her head down the slope to where the rest of the students were working.

  “Yeah, we should. Just give me a sec, okay?” I stared at the coin a moment longer, as if burning it into memory, and then nodded. “You go ahead. It’s your posthole.”

  She shook her head. “You found it. You at least get their attention.”

  I gave one of my piercing pinkie whistles and as the heads turned around, Meg cupped her hands to her mouth and shouted the call that every dig member hopes they’ll get to make someday. “Hey, guys! Look what we’ve got!”

  And then, suddenly, later that morning, there was the “click.” I was sitting down to review my notes with the whole site spread out before me, as the river below continued its endless rush to the ocean, when it came. It’s not like Tennessee Williams or anything; I certainly hadn’t been drinking, though with the click, there always comes a mighty buzz. The click was how I described it when, suddenly, I understood my site entirely.

  Sure, every site, every season is full of discoveries, but for everything to snap into place so completely? One all-encompassing, road-to-Damascus insight? It’s the stuff dreams and careers are made on. And every minute longer we spent on this site proved conclusively that we were on the actual site of Fort Providence, the site that was going to rewrite history and make my career, not necessarily in that order.

  Even with all the work that was left to be done, the sorting, the analysis, the writing and researching, I felt more and more confident that I would no longer have to look over my shoulder to see who was gaining on me, waiting for me to slip and fail in my bid for tenure. I could unpack my bags, metaphorically speaking. I watched the cormorants flapping their wings on the water; I had absolutely no idea why they did it, but it sounded remarkably like applause. After years of work, struggle, scrabbling, and trying to kiss as little ass as possible, I would have arrived.

  But even that potential paled in comparison to what we were uncovering; it made me start to shake just to think about it. Archaeologists are romantics at heart; otherwise they’d be historians or crossword puzzle writers. Every one of us, no matter how stodgy a devotee to the scientific method one claims to be, wants desperately to touch the past. Not just acquire a deeper factual understanding, we want to feel what the people who lived hundreds of years ago felt, get inside their hearts and minds, and know what it was that made their world for them. And for archaeologists, the shortest path, the most satisfying of unsatisfying solutions short of a time machine, is to handle the artifacts, walk the ground, and breathe the air that filled the lungs of our predecessors on a site.

  I could hardly wait until Pauline got back—what this would mean to her! I got excited just thinking of telling her about it. Oscar had given me a passion and the tools to recover the past, but Pauline had given me an understanding of culture and the site itself. And now I could finally return the favor and reconstruct Jacobean culture transplanted in her front yard. After all these years, I could finally start to pay the two of them back for their gifts to me.

  My euphoria was conducive to interpretation. I imagined that the English garrison must have had days like this four hundred years ago, when the hideous winter was a bad memory, the food was abundant, and the “savages” didn’t seem quite so alien. It must been on days like this that the months of voyage, the sickness, fear, and violent death seemed justified; the adventure was worth it all. An entire continent to explore—imagine what even this small, clean stretch of coastline would have looked like to some poor soldier raised in the smoky squalor of late sixteenth-century London. A line from The Tempest came to me: “The isle is full of noises, sounds, and sweet airs, that give delight and hurt not…”

  Imagine…

  A cluster of small buildings, made in the English half-timbered style but of New World materials. Smoke rose from the chimneys even on a hot summer day, for food must be cooked and tools mended and lead poured into molds to replace diminishing supplies of shot. A hard-baked and stony garden yielding a growing store of vegetables, just beyond the ditch and the rampart. The gates are open today, for there is no threat by the land, and seems to be none on the sea from France or Spain—the guard keeps only a distracted watch. Men drill in military exercises, others hunt, others begin to lay plans for exploring farther up the river, which may lead to the Great Southern Sea and China…

  And what about the native people? It could have been on such a day that it might have seemed possible, for however short a time, that they could live in peace with these pale, curious, ungainly strangers lately come upon their shore. A chance to understand some of their bizarre behavior that seemed so contrary to a reasonable way of life…

  Imagine…

  A small group of men trying to trade good pelts for a cold iron ax head, beads, and other curiosities. Sometimes the exchanges succeed with these queer foreigners, sometimes not. A European pot falls into a cooking fire, leaving a little piece of North Devon behind in a New English trash heap of ashes, stone flakes, and bone…

  I took out my notebook and started to write.

  The siren call of the site completely seduced me, and the words came forth faster than my pen could work across the page. That capricious rascal, my muse, had come back from her extended vacation and was making up for lost time. I hardly noticed the dry, prickly grass poking into my backside, or the line of ants marching purposefully across my left boot. Even the cormorants’ clapping no longer intruded into my thoughts. Yesterday it seemed impossible to make sense all of the stratigraphic sequences that shaped the site; today they obediently slipped into logical order and gave up their secrets. The ghosts of people long dead were inclined to share their knowledge with me, at last. Passages from the eighteenth-century deeds, inventories, maps that I’d studied all winter suddenly sprang to mind, to explain that scatter of stones, or this artifact distribution. I thought of other research from the South, from the Caribbean, from Ireland and England in relation to my own, and for the first time I felt as though I could begin to understand the personalities involved, the cultural dynamics of the place, the introduction of the Old World to the New in the early seventeenth century.

  The calm with which I worked was mystic, and it wasn’t until I felt someone, Rob, nudge my foot with his that I came back to the present, but I was so grounded, so in tune with everything, that his insistent tapping was merely one more sensation to appreciate. I finished my sentence, scanned the rest of my notes to make sure it was all still there, and smiled at him beatifically.

  “Sorry, Em, but you didn’t seem to hear when I called. Neal’s got everyone packed up, and we’re ready to roll.” He offered me a hand up, and I dusted myself off, after a spine-crunching stretch.

  “Why? We going out for lunch?” My stomach suddenly indicated its long neglect, but otherwise, I felt the way I did after a fabulous run; high and focused, perfectly calm and alert to everything. Odd; Rob usually took until the end of the day to get those ridiculous, baggy shorts of his that filthy. He must really be wallowing today, probably another phase of his chimp mating display for Dian.

  “No, Emma. Lunch was
over four hours ago. It’s time to go home now.” He spoke slowly, as though plain American English might be beyond my ken. “Neal didn’t want to bother you, as you seemed a little tuned out and didn’t come when we hollered for you.” Like Brian, Rob wasn’t the sort to appreciate what might cause one to miss a meal, outside of some catastrophe, and gave me a look that spoke of worry for my sanity.

  I rolled my head around my shoulders and another volley of bone cracks followed. “I thought it had clouded up a bit,” I said, realizing the sun had moved clear across the sky. “Preoccupied, yeah. Got a lot of work done though.” I bestowed another hundred-watt blast of my patented St. Emma valedictory smile on him, and got another bewildered look for my trouble.

  Perhaps I was showing a few too many teeth—ah, but he couldn’t have known that I had been strolling on Mount Parnassus. Poor mortal, I thought charitably as I followed him up to the trucks, perhaps someday he’ll know what it’s like to be the first person to set foot on Mars, or hear the National Anthem played for his victory at the Olympics. Or see a seventeenth-century English soldier standing alone on the beach, filled with homesickness and hopefulness.

  “You’re kidding me, right?” Brian’s voice was incredulous on the phone later that night. I had been telling him about the day’s discoveries, saving the best for last. “My God, Emma, that’s fabulous! Oh man, that’s so excellent!”

  “I think it will really be an excellent cover for the monograph,” I said. “I’m thinking of a couple of overlays, a contemporary painting of a fort, a topographic map of the site, and then the coin, bang, right in the middle.”

  It was nice to be the bearer of good news, for a change. I’d already been through several emotional peaks since we’d found the coin and was tired enough to act a little jaded about it. National interest was assured, international was probable, and just having the beginnings of the project show such results—for the three postholes had become five, and not indicating one building but two—was grant bait of the first water. Grants begetting grants. Hello, National Geographic Society. Hello, National Endowment for the Humanities.

  “But wait. Isn’t a 1590 sixpence too early?” Brian’s voice filled with worry. “Don’t you need it to be closer to 1605 and King James or something for it to work for you, date-wise?”

  “No, it’s fine as long as it’s the same exact date or earlier,” I reassured him. “The same way that you can use a quarter that was minted when Nixon was president, but you couldn’t have a quarter from ten years from now, because they wouldn’t exist yet. In fact, you’re more likely to have an older coin, because the newer ones wouldn’t have had as much time to get into circulation, right?”

  “I get it. What does Pauline think? She must be excited, huh?”

  “She doesn’t know yet, she’s still in Boston, till next Wednesday, I think. But I’ll have a hell of a surprise for her then.”

  “Speaking of the weekend, I know this is exciting and everything, but are you going to be able to come home this weekend?” Brian sounded wistful. “I mean, I don’t want to drag you away from your work, or anything…”

  “I’ll be there, hon. Since we’ve got that line of postholes now, I do want to try and get as much out of it as we can—we’ve only got about a week left, and everyone knows that any archaeological crew worth its salt always finds the best and least explicable stuff right before you’re supposed to close down. The weather’s supposed to be bad tomorrow, so if it rains I’ll be home that much earlier.” I twined the phone cord around my hand. “Don’t make any plans for this weekend, ’kay?”

  I heard Brian pause. “Naturally, had I known your plans for sure, I wouldn’t have dreamed of it,” he said slowly. “But I did sort of tell Kam to come over for dinner tomorrow night. That’s okay, isn’t it?”

  It was my turn to be sheepish. “Well, yeah, especially since I just remembered I told Marty to come over for a visit then. It’s her only free night in Boston this weekend.”

  “Tell her to stick around for food, then.”

  “You know,” I mused. “I’d always wondered if they mightn’t get along rather nicely together. They seemed to get pretty chummy at dinner that time.”

  “Emma, don’t!” Brian pleaded. “Kamil Shah’s my oldest friend, and what’s more, he’s my boss—”

  “Pish, something in title only,” I said.

  “Yeah, well, I don’t want you messing around with two perfectly good friends and trying to make them into something else,” he insisted. “It will just get complicated and screw everyone up if it doesn’t work out. And these things never do.”

  I wasn’t about to be put off; my idea was great. “But what if it works? Don’t you want Kam to be happy like us?”

  “Kam is happy with a gym with large mirrors and women in spandex. Kam is happy with his uncomplicated serial dating. I like Kam happy the way he is.”

  “Never mind, then.” I just wouldn’t say anything more about it to Brian. “It was just a thought.”

  “Good.” Brian sounded relieved. “So I’ll see you tomorrow night, maybe earlier?”

  “You got it. And we should make a point of celebrating.”

  “Right. I’ll get the wine with the real cork this time.”

  “And don’t get the pizza from that place down the street—they have soggy crust.”

  “Anything for you, my queen. See you then, love.”

  “I’ll see you, sweetie.”

  “I’m so proud of you.”

  “Me too. I love you. Bye.”

  True to the forecaster’s predictions, rain was just heavy enough on Friday morning to drive us out of the field and back to our makeshift lab at the dorm. When one says the word lab, one thinks of white-coated technicians rigorously observing the results of experiments conducted in gleaming glassware and complex-looking, state-of-the-art computerized equipment. While the pharmaceutical lab where Brian worked as a chemist might closely resemble that ideal—gleaming pipettes, bottles of chemicals, and all—an archaeological field lab almost never did. We used dishpans and sieves and toothbrushes bought from the supermarket to wash the artifacts, and then we dried them on ordinary window screens, newspaper, or even beer flats. The highest technology we had in our field lab, if we were lucky, was somebody’s portable CD player. And what we were doing was hardly demanding, even if it did require patience and care; we were washing trash discarded several centuries ago. Pretty funny, when you stopped to think about it.

  Normally labwork is something to be delayed as long as possible, because washing every one of those thousands of little pieces of ceramic and glass is the most tedious task on earth. There is never any good way to work; either the plastic washtubs are too high on the table, and you have to stand, or too low, and you have to hunch over. Fingertips inevitably become cramped from holding the artifacts tightly, scrubbed raw from brushing them, and wrinkled from being submerged in water for hours on end. Labeling the artifacts with their context coordinates is even worse, with the fumes from the marking pens and the clear varnish used to protect the labels making the students dizzy, even with the windows open.

  Even I helped out this time; usually I just excused myself from the odious chore, pulling rank and using the excuse of seniority. But now we had the opportunity to get a closer look at the artifacts associated with the early settlement, and so the drudgery was mitigated for everyone.

  I squinted at the piece of pottery that I held between my water-pruned thumb and index finger. Water dripped off the ceramic potsherd that looked better for washing, but was really not much more than mud that had been hard-fired into shape. No wonder we had so many of the ugly, rough, brown potsherds; whoever had been in charge of outfitting the settlement at Fort Providence certainly hadn’t put the money into sturdy ceramic storage vessels. With walls this thin and unrefined, they must have broken if someone looked at them sideways.

  I sighed and put the sherd with its fellows. After my revelatory experiences of the day before, I chafed at
being locked up away from the site. So far in the artifact assemblage there wasn’t anything that stuck out, gave a blinding new insight into life at Fort Providence. That would come with closer examination. Later.

  “Mine’s smaller than yours!”

  That unlikely challenge caught my ear and I looked up. Rob was holding up a minute piece of eighteenth-century glass for Alan’s inspection.

  “You can’t even read the provenience!” Alan shot back. “That doesn’t count!”

  “You can so,” Rob insisted. He handed the sherd to Neal.

  “ME 343–1–2F3” Neal read out loud. He looked at Rob. “That right?”

  Rob looked smug. “That’s it all right.”

  “Of course you’d take his side,” Alan told Neal.

  The crew, as one, sighed. Alan’s passive-aggressive behavior around Neal had been increasingly less passive, more painful to listen to, and harder to ignore.

  “It’s just a stupid game,” Meg said. “No one really cares who can write the smallest, just so it’s legible.”

  “Calm down, Al,” Dian said, not looking up from her own work.

  “This sucks,” Alan announced. He threw his marking pen down and stalked out of the room.

  “For God’s sake,” Rob muttered. Everyone else looked at me.

  I sighed but spoke decisively. “Finish the bag you’re working on and then let’s knock it off for now, before I get sued for exposing you all to carcinogens. We’ll let the freshmen do the rest of the later stuff in September. When you’re done cleaning up, we’ll break for the weekend.” It was clear to me that we’d hit the boiling point during the dig, the time at which tempers that had been kept in check at the beginning were fraying and people were starting to get on each other’s nerves. “G’wan, get out of here.”

  With a collective stretch and a groan of relief, they straightened up and started carefully moving the artifact screens out of the way to dry. Neal looked at me and I nodded, sighing. “Back in a minute.”