Terra Australis Templar (A Peter Wilks Archaeological Mystery)

by Gregory House

  “What, ohh arrh sorry I mean... I didn’t mean to... Ahh, please accept my deepest apologies. Please understand I would never... I mean.” Peter gave up on his stammered attempt at apology as Lampie raised an inquiring eyebrow.

  “Peter y’ reckon we should deal with this guy before y’ try for a tumble?”

  What could he say to that? Wasn’t he claiming a little earlier to be a professional, and now he looked like an idiotic crotch cramped teenager, with all the social sophistication of an anorak! Well screw it, he’d stuffed up so he may as well make it a proper apology and get past the stupid stage. Having regained his feet, he turned to face Lampie. She was sitting on the ground, long legs out stretched looking at him in a strangely curious fashion. He bent at the waist and swept his right hand down towards the ground, giving her an approximation of a courtly bow that would have impressed Queen Elizabeth the first.

  “Miss Lampie, please forgive my clumsiness. I did not mean to lay hands, in such a careless manner, upon your person. You have my humblest apologies.”

  She sat there as if stunned while he maintained the deep bow of a courtier, not an easy task since his cods felt distinctly swollen. Lampie watched him for a long moment with a puzzled frown then burst out in a fit of the giggles and shook her head.

  “Peter bloody Wilks you’re a damned funny bloke for a Pom.”

  He straightened up with a wry grin and shrugged. What could you say? “How’s about we get stuck into this pair of graves and I’ll consider your apology accepted.”

  “Certainly Lampie, after you.”

  After that social faux pas, the work went quickly and Peter maintained his best decorum. Once the protective layer had been stripped back, he knelt down to examine the graves, while Lampie took up her accustomed position by the media array. Once more he took a series of deep breathes to relax and, as an old drama teacher used to say, ‘get into the theme of the situation’, easy to say but right now not so easy to do. Lampie’s long tanned legs were proving to be a continual distraction.

  Peter pulled the brim of his hat down and concentrated on the remains before him. What could he see? Well two graves for a start, both were only a few feet deep, and after a quick check with the compass that he kept in another of his useful waistcoat pockets, the orientation of the bodies was directly east-west with the head at the western end. Both bodies faced upwards and had been carefully laid out. Apart from being laid next to each other, they also had other similarities. Their respective right hands had been placed over the chest, while the left extended across the abdomen. That wasn’t all. Their ankles looked to have been placed close together. Whoever these two were, some care had been taken with their burial, not like the Visby bodies, dumped in a convenient ditch.

  Peter pushed his hat brim back and rubbed the sweat from his forehead. This had to be a Christian burial, no doubt about that. The body orientation was correct. Now what else could be discovered? Peter had always been keen on history – it was a life long passion. While other young lads were practicing cricket, he was in his father’s shed trying to figure out how to make reproductions of Roman or Saxon artefacts, especially weapons. To be able to do this with the sort of exactness he brought to any project, meant poring over early dig reports, visiting museums, talking to archaeologists and other specialists. Many a night he considered that his youthful enthusiasm was the reason he was where he was now, looking down at a set of bones, instead of working as a merchant banker like his school mates or in sales like his father. One of the most intriguing people he used to talk to was a very prim and proper grandma type named Miss Rodland at the British Museum. Actually she wasn’t that prim and proper. Offer to share a bottle of sweet sherry, and you’d be regaled with stories of the wild times of the fifties, the earlier indiscretions of present respected professors and the fascinating tales of dead bodies, all to the melodies of twenties jazz.

  It wasn’t that she was in any way bizarre or suffered from an excess of the celebrated ‘English eccentricity’ that afflicts so many noted academics. No, it was just that Miss Rodland was on intimate terms with just about every cadaver, skeleton or mummy in the entire museum. Her field was Osteoarchaeology, the study and interpretation of human remains, and in that area none could surpass her expertise. A glance at any bone was sufficient for her to reel off a life history of its former owner their sex, status, health, profession and probable cause of death. Peter enjoyed their chats and found the area fascinating, though not sufficiently to specialise in that arcane art. He preferred the open air of field research, not a life time stuck in a lab. He did, however, learn a few valuable lessons. Skeletal remains were not as easy to identify as was portrayed in the myriad criminal investigation shows on the tellie. You didn’t just rock up to a dead body and then say:

  ‘Well this is obviously the remains of a Caucasian male aged twenty and a half, and as you can instantly tell, he was a professional footballer by the development of the scapula and suffered fatal injuries in a fight due to the chipped teeth on the bottom left mandible’... and so on.

  As Miss Rodland sneeringly dismissed, instant evaluations were only possible in Hollywood scripts, where they had three minutes airtime to breezily explain the work of weeks. According to her lifetime of experience, real osteoarchaeology didn’t pretend such fantasies. In the ground, it was not always easy to distinguish between a female and male skeleton, and why they were there, if you lacked the usual clues of grave goods. In one recent case in Britain, though, that hadn’t helped. A well published discovery of an Anglo-Saxon warrior grave with spear and shield was dramatically revised once the bones were back in the lab, leading to a number of embarrassed senior archaeologists having to explain why a thirty year old woman was buried with the high status gear of a male warrior.

  Peter had the same problem before him – two bodies placed next to each other and the only identifier was that the body on the southern side was three or four inches taller than the other. Superficial inspection told him that neither had suffered the same kind of fate as the three skulls in the box, but only detailed examination back at a lab could narrow down the possibilities such as age, gender and manner of death. He didn’t have a lab and Sid and Lampie were very clear that dating evidence was needed today, if not last week.

  “Lampie, do you have the sketches for these graves?”

  “Sure Peter.” Lampie picked up the large sketch pad by the camera tripod and flipped back several pages, before passing it to him. “I did six sketches from this page on, including a couple of detailed ones of the objects we found with the bodies.”

  Peter took the proffered pad and squatted by the nearest grave, flicking through the drawings. Each was clear and precise. Lampie had a fine eye for detail. He gave a nod of approval – yes, she’d also noted the differences in height. He moved on to the second set of drawings. According to these, the only pieces were a non descript belt buckle with tab in one grave, and a small simple cross of possibly bronze by the chin of the smaller skeleton. That was it – neither remnants of leather or iron nails from shoes nor any scraps of clothing, nothing else that could give the slightest hint of a date. Damn it all, these could be any Christian burial from the past thousand years or so!

  “Lampie, did anyone do a metal detector sweep?”

  “Yeah, that’s the first thing Sid had us do after we set up camp.”

  Peter nodded. Yes, that was standard practice and despite the bad press some scavengers got back home for stripping sites, the metal detecting hobby groups were a valuable aid to site investigation. “Where abouts?”

  Lampie swung her hand to the left and right indicating the small area around the chest and graves. Peter tried to maintain a studiously blank face. Now that was interesting. Common practice should have the whole hill checked. The fact that hadn’t happened raised a few more questions regarding Sid’s amazing feat of discovery.

  “I think we need to expand that. What kind of gear do we have?”

  “Apart from the me
tal detectors, we’ve also got a new Ground Penetrating Radar rig and a state of the art magnetometer, both hooked into a 3D program on the site laptop, as well as every thing plugged into a GPS coordinate system.”

  Peter blinked in surprise. Ground Penetrating Radar or GPR, as the common acronym went, was damned expensive equipment.

  Lampie grinned at his reaction. “Pete, we’re not hicks out here. Lavost Explorations is really keen on cutting edge info. We just had to get Trussie to bring up some replacement gear from Broome.”

  So that was what the heavy boxes were he’d lugged out of the Catalina. His estimation of Sid rose a smidgen. Peter shaded his face and squinted into the afternoon sky. A month in Australia and he was still unsure about the length of daylight hours. This part of the hemisphere lacked the hours of twilight he was used to. “Lampie, do you think we have time for those surveys before the sun goes down?”

  “Sure, a couple of hours easy.” All it took was a glance over her shoulder, and then Lampie’s face lit up in a wicked grin. “Got just the blokes to do it, Bluey and Rob. I reckon they’ve sloped off down to the camp. Where do you what it?”

  This was the key question. Evidence was still lacking for anything, apart from Sid’s lucky guess. If his Aussie mate wasn’t going to be thorough, then he certainly was. “The whole hill, every inch. We cannot afford to dig a single hole without knowing what is here.” He didn’t add that he wasn’t prepared to rely on anymore of Sid’s fortuitous discoveries.

  Lampie gave a very wicked chuckle and shook her head. “Jeez, that’s bloody perfect. It’ll keep those two outa mischief for hours!”

  Peter put up a tentative hand as she was heading off. “Oh Lampie, while they’re doing the survey, would you be able to assist me with bagging the skeletons?”

  “Yeah, sure, no worries Peter. Love too!” Lampie gave him a wave and almost sprinted down the hill.

  Peter gave an unknowingly deep sigh, as he watched her lithe figure and blonde ponytail effortlessly lope down the shallow slope. His subconscious tagged the smile and ready agreement as a good sign. It looked like the previous indiscretion had been forgiven. That pleasant warmth faded as Lampie disappeared from view. Peter turned back to the graves and another darker shade emerged. He was possessed by a singular determination that history was not going to repeat. Sid wasn’t going to stuff it up again.

  Field Illustration 4

  Chapter 13 Shades of Interpretation

  Peter took another sip of Uncle Bill’s miraculous coffee from that amazingly efficient and robust little espresso machine of his. He still couldn’t get over how fortunate he was, a fresh cappuccino and another Kimberleys dawn more glorious than any Imax presentation. All he needed was bikinis to make this a day in paradise. Despite that omission, it was still difficult to review the GPR and magnetometer results. This morning the Kimberleys’ Luftwaffe had started their morning operations with a skull splitting opening. His tent had obviously been selected for the ‘dawn patrol’ and rather than cower in his sleeping bag, he’d sought out the aerial foe, though flung rocks didn’t seem to compare with decent ack-ack guns. In despair he’d stumbled over to the fire where an understanding Uncle Bill had thrust a coffee into his trembling hands.

  That wasn’t the only difficulty to contend with. Peter found his thoughts constantly drifting back to another source of local scenery, the site surveyor Lampie. Yesterday afternoon’s bone bagging had progressed quite well, and as he was coming to expect, Lampie handled that aspect of the dig with her usual competence. He didn’t stuff up or make any inane jokes or even overly ogle. In fact he played the perfect gentleman and professional no matter what other more fractious parts of his anatomy urged. The exercise was made even more pleasant as Lampie add a running commentary on the Abbot and Costello like progress of Bluey and Rob with the surveying. At the end, it took all his self control not to burst out laughing, as Rob once more tripped over the GPR cable to Lampie’s perfectly timed drum roll.

  He gave a loud sigh and tried once more to focus on the reports. It was bloody difficult. Last night by the campfire had been another distraction. They’d all sat around quaffing some of Matso’s Chilli beer, one of the ales that Wally had raved about. Wow that had been a taste experience! He’d have thought the chilli would drown the wheat beer flavour. Not so! By the end of the first bottle, his lips had tingled pleasantly and his tongue savoured that delightful spicy tang. What’s more, he had been looking forward to the second and was trying to figure how to explain the taste to the lads back home at the Bull and Castle. That wasn’t the only distraction. Lampie, of course, had joined ‘the boys’, well that is every one except Sid. He’d listened in as they’d swapped wild tales of the Kimberly coast and the weird antics of tourists. It was quite diverting and for a little while he didn’t feel homesick or lost.

  Today wasn’t so good. He slurped some more coffee and once more looked at the print outs. He had two to correlate, one from the magnetometers and the other from the GPR. In recent years, both sets of electronic wizardry had become essential items in the archaeologist’s tool box, the first pretty well did as the named stated it measured and marked magnetic variance. Every little crystal and fragment in the soil substrata had its own unique magnetic signature, this was caused by many different natural and artificial actions. Decaying organic matter or disturbed soil level gave one type of signal while iron, burnt timber, fired rocks or bricks could leave a more positive reading. This all depended, of course, on the underlying geological strata. For instance, this read out would be absolutely useless at Koolan Island where the high iron content would distort any recording. The other main problem was in an area that had frequent changes in occupation or activity like residential sites. Layers of modern bricks or building rubble could give too many false positives or ‘noise’ for the readings to be relied upon.

  As for the GPR, it supplied another useful set of data, using the same type of technology that originally frustrated Goering’s Luftwaffe during the Battle of Britain in 1940, though this time an electromagnetic pulse or radar signal, rather than being bounced off incoming Heinkel bombers, was directed into the ground and its return echo provided the relatively accurate location of underground anomalies such as changes in soils structure from digging, buried masonry or the scars from usage pattern of the site. Back home in Britain, he’d seen it used to map out Roman villas, lost for millennia, and to discover ancient Bronze Age burial mounds that had been ploughed back into the surrounding fields since the Middle Ages. As he said, damned useful tools, if only he could make sense of these.

  “G’day Peter. Did y’ sleep well?”

  Peter almost spilled his coffee as he swivelled around. “Arrhh yes. Yes I did, Lampie. Thank you.”

  The still attractive site surveyor settled down on the log next to him and took a sip from her own mug. She looked so magnificent in the morning light. The Kimberley dawn shifted the blonde of her hair into a tumbling cascade of Irish gold, with that hint of red lustre. Peter suddenly felt very rumpled and dirty. He had no doubt he was beginning to issue a rank miasma. It had been a couple of days since he’d had the chance for a shower.

  “Any luck with the scans, Peter?”

  He shuffled the sheets and coughed then asked his own question. “Where’s Sid? I haven’t seen him since yesterday.”

  Lampie waved a hand towards the inlet. “He’s still plugged into the sat system in Bast. I think he crashed out about four or five in the morning. Anyway, he was slumped on the couch beside the table so I tossed a blanket over him.”

  Peter gave his cappuccino a deeper consideration. Sid being ‘unavailable’ made this a whole lot easier. He preferred talking to Lampie. Her answers lacked the calculation and spin that always seemed to accompany Sid’s replies.

  “Yesterday you gave me some background on the Dutch. That was really interesting and very useful.”

  “Thanks Peter.”

  He noticed that Lampie hid a smile behind her coffee mug. Well
, it was a good enough start. He took a deep breath and launched into his next question. “I feel really on the back foot on this excavation. I am still not sure why I am here. I don’t have any real knowledge of your early explorers. My specialty is medieval history up to the Tudors. So I find it very difficult to relate the evidence to who or what you are looking for.”

  After her praise of him yesterday, it was damned bruising to his ego to admit he was pretty well lost when it came to colonial affairs. Lampie, however, appeared to be still listening to him so why not take the plunge.

  “Lampie, could you please tell me about the Portuguese and how they relate to this part of Australia?” Oh God, that sounded really bad. Either he came across as a complete and utter idiot or, maybe worse, like some stuffy professor setting an essay question. Perhaps he should have just kept his mouth shut and drunk his coffee!

  Lampie’s reception was not quite what he expected however. She quirked an eyebrow and gave him a very strange glower. “You’re not winding me up are y’ Peter? Sid didn’t arrange this as a bit of ‘go’ did he?”

  Peter blinked in very real surprise. Sid, what the hell did Sid have to do with anything? “Ahh no Lampie. I haven’t spoken to Sid since yesterday before he rushed off. Why?

  Lampie dropped her frowning concentration to some minute speck in her coffee cup and didn’t answer for some time. Peter was getting worried and quickly ratcheted through an instant and growing list of how he may have offended her.

  He was about to engage auto apology mode when she eased out a reluctant query. “Y’ sure this has got nothing to do with Sid?”

  “Absolutely. I swear it on my honour as a Pommie Real Ale drinker!” Peter held up one hand in the sign of the scout’s oath, while the other made a crossing motion over his heart.

  That response at least brought a more genuine smile to her face and Lampie appeared to relax enough to give an answer. “Y’ see Peter, when I was at uni down south, I kinda specialised in an area that caused me a few hassles with the lecturers and they weren’t very happy. They called it ‘controversial’.” Lampie didn’t look happy and made the symbol of the double quotation marks with her fingers at the mention of controversial.