Finders Keepers

by Craig Childs

  Wright lives in Phoenix, and by his early fifties he had worked the gamut, from an Indian tribe to a global consulting company to a tiny firm operating out of a suburban duplex. He says that, depending on the employer, salvage work often gets reduced to three simple goals: do your fieldwork quickly, hack out a bare minimum of reporting, and move on to the next project. Rarely is there the incremental progress and contemplative tedium of university digs. Companies may be breathing down your neck. At one point Wright found himself arguing with one of his managers, trying to convince him that a site was significant enough to warrant preservation. The manager told Wright to keep his opinions to himself, and the site was soon taken out by bulldozers. Along with pothunters, dealers, and academic archaeologists, these are the next layer of people who are busy removing the past from the ground.

  “There is no pressure to do poor work per se,” Wright says, “but plenty of pressure to avoid lingering over things that don’t contribute directly to the cash flow.”

  Still, I have never met a salvage archaeologist not enthralled by what is in the ground. For them, it is about the food. They want to know what is down there. The past ten years of accelerated development in Phoenix has added more to the archaeological record than the entire previous century. In the back room of a consulting company, Wright once showed me a broad-hipped jar freshly unearthed from an empty lot in his city. It was still crusted with dirt and root scars. The cremated remains of a pre-Columbian individual were packed inside, and he was preparing the jar for repatriation to a local tribe, as is done with all prehistoric human remains found in Phoenix.

  “No brushing the dirt off to see if there are paintings, no removal of the contents,” Wright explained. “We will catalogue this, study it for a bit, then give it to the tribe.”

  The jar had come from just two feet under the surface where a new apartment complex was going in. Before his excavation, transients had been sleeping on the lot amid broken bottles, and he marveled at how so few would ever guess what lay beneath them. Holding the jar as if it were a skull, fingers lacing its underside, Wright handed it to me very carefully. He did not give me its weight until his fingers met mine. It was at that moment that I realized the simple utility involved in bringing up the past, and how understated and heartfelt it can be, a tender recovery.

  I once spoke to a developer who was in the process of bulldozing a pre-Columbian settlement for a housing project at the edge of Phoenix. He was not a bad man. He hired a respectable firm, made sure that graves were emptied and skeletons and funerary offerings shipped back to local Indian tribes before going ahead with the project. I found his office attractively decorated with ancient ceramics from previous digs, mostly pieces from the early Hohokam culture. He obviously had an appreciation for history. I asked how it felt to permanently remove a large archaeological site from the face of the earth, and he responded, “Tell me a place you can dig in the valley without hitting something Hohokam.”

  He had me there. You would have to build this city on stilts if you wanted archaeology to endure in situ. Remains tend to lie two inches to a few feet under the surface all across Phoenix: burials, kitchen hearths, and Mesoamerican-style ball courts.

  On a hot late-spring afternoon I stopped to watch an urban parking lot being destroyed near the heart of Phoenix to make way for a new light-rail station. When the project had run into human remains, the URS Corporation, one of the largest engineering design firms in the world, had been called in with its troops of salvage archaeologists. A surprising number of prehistoric burials started coming up, which halted the project at astronomical costs to developers. This site was significant enough that the station was pushed back month after month as more discoveries kept popping up.

  The crew chief walked me through a field of tanned shoulders and T-shirts, day labor scratching out potsherds and slivers of bone. Wearing jeans, clipboard in hand, tape measure on his belt, the crew chief told me they had so far found the graves of 182 individuals (plus three intentionally buried dogs). Everything dated to around the fifteenth century, a time when Hohokam society was falling apart. Burdened by overpopulation, the land overfarmed and salinated, the Hohokam had been hit with a deadly knockout punch of drought followed by floods that sent them over the edge. Most of the burials found here were women and children, a sign that things had gone terribly awry.

  The crew chief introduced me to one of his diggers, a woman named Pam Cox, who took a break to talk. Perched on the tailgate of her truck, she lit a cigarette and pointed to where a bulldozer was now working, telling me they had found the burial of a young mother there, alongside the remains of a fetus, a clutch of bones small as a rabbit’s. She said it looked like a miscarriage.

  “That’s probably how she died, in childbirth,” Cox said, her eyes hidden behind sunglasses. “They buried her with her unborn child.”

  She took a drag on her cigarette and looked at me until I understood how much precious study she had given to this particular grave before a massive steel blade ground through it.

  Cox was a mother in her thirties, and she took this work very seriously. I appreciated her forthright attitude. She gestured across the dig, mentioning a little girl that they found buried by herself, shell bracelets shingled up her left arm and all around her caches of pots, pendants, carved fetishes, and a pretty necklace made of 185 polished shell beads. It was one of the richest burials at the site. They called her “the princess,” not because of any known social hierarchy, but a name for a girl who had probably been adored. Nicknames are frowned on in a profession that prefers numbers, but as Cox knew, this girl had never been a number. Why should she be one now?

  “Over there was a teenager,” Cox said, pointing out past a dirt pile. “Extreme case of scoliosis. Her spine looked like this.” She traced a big question mark in the air. Cox pulled a folder and opened it in her lap, showing me a diagram she had drawn of the burial. She’d rendered the skeleton in detail, ribs bent inward, each one biologically distorted in its own way. In life, the young woman’s chest must have looked crushed as she hobbled through this village, her back crooked under a woven shawl. Cox said the deformities were so great she could not have put much work into the community and certainly could not have survived on her own. She had to have been cared for.

  “It wasn’t a poor burial either,” Cox remarked. “People came out for her. She had six complete vessels and a duck effigy.”

  “She must have been very loved,” I said. I felt as if I were consoling someone at a funeral.

  Cox nodded.

  The way she spoke, so simply, got to the heart of the matter: nobody owns these remains. They belong to the people who died, who deserve at least human respect as they are being cleared away for a new civilization. We do not possess them. We merely participate with them.

  In his essay on whether we can actually harm the dead, Geoffrey Scarre of the Department of Philosophy at the University of Durham, England, wrote, “Whilst a bone may be no more animate than a stone, it is the relic of a man or woman who once thought and felt, was happy and sad, loved and feared as we do. To disinter or disturb it, or to subject it to chemical or physical analysis, is to take a liberty—not with the thing itself but with the person to whom it once belonged.” Yet here, it was a necessity. Cox had to personally figure out how this liberty was to be taken. Objectivity is prized in professional archaeology, but how could she not imagine how each death came to this place; the tears, the clenched jaw as another beloved sister, daughter, wife went into the ground.

  I asked Cox how many individuals she herself had excavated from this site, and she counted in her head, then said around a hundred.

  The crew chief was listening. He pointed out, “We have her do most of the skeletons.”

  I looked at Cox. She looked away. I asked her, “Do you have some special qualification?”

  “No,” Cox answered, not looking at me.

  “Why you, then?”

  She glanced across mounds dug up a
round us, trying to avoid the question.

  “Tell him,” the crew chief urged.

  She looked at him, then me. I sensed it was none of my business.

  “Tell him,” he said again. “Tell him why.”

  She considered my face for a moment.

  “I cry the whole time,” she finally said.

  With that, she stubbed her cigarette on the tailgate and went back to work.

  She was the chosen gravedigger because she grieved. I was speechless, watching her snap up a dustpan and a broom—the tools of the trade to get the dead out of our way.

  PART THREE

  WHERE ARTIFACTS END UP

  CHAPTER 10

  THE GOLDEN JAR

  Everything that is removed goes somewhere, pauses briefly in a pocket or on a shelf. Pieces end up in museums or private collections, or they are reburied in very private repatriation ceremonies. They are destroyed by fires or wars, or they vanish into garages and rented storage containers. The only known surviving statue by the Greek sculptor Praxiteles was, according to its most recent paperwork, found a decade ago in a rubbish pile on a German estate. Apparently it once stood in an immaculate garden, but the vicissitudes of decades left the place in ruins. This famous life-size rendering of Apollo the Lizard Slayer—seen and commented upon by Pliny the Elder in the first century—was discovered in pieces. Once its value was ascertained, it sailed from dealer to dealer until it was purchased by Hicham Aboutaam, who turned it around to the Cleveland Art Museum, whereupon both Italy and Greece immediately demanded its return. If the provenance for this statue is accurate, this last surviving work of the most celebrated of ancient sculptors could have just as easily been hauled to a dump. Would that have been such an unfortunate end? One could imagine that thousands of years from now, if such a people exist, they might dig in our dumps to discover sculptures for their own future museums. For now, Cleveland is preparing a space for its exhibit so today’s visitors can enjoy the caprice and wonder of the past.

  Where should artifacts go? Is one place better than another, or is each a mere stopover along the well-traveled itinerary of these things? My own preference is that if they cannot remain in situ, they are best curated where they can hold on to as much of their original context as possible. I think back to my friend the bead thief in Arizona, clutching his find and telling me he was now the context for the beads. The trouble was that their new context began and ended with him. He was a blip, a reboot. He found the beads and then lost them. Their story was for him alone, their connection to that cave and to the people who first made or carried them severed.

  I believe that the history of artifacts is better served if memory can accompany them. The last known work by Praxiteles would have probably been lost to the dump, so, yes, it is preferable that the Cleveland museum picked up the 2,000-year-old sculpture and reestablished its connection with the past. But reestablishing a connection can mean many things, and, as I discovered, they are not always easy to swallow.

  I was traveling through northern Mexico, stopping frequently to ask if anyone knew about local archaeology. There would always be at least one story about an old farmer who plowed graves out of his field (skeletons, turquoise, shell pendants). On occasion a person would be kind enough to scribble a map onto a rip of paper showing how to find some mound or ruin. In a logging town along the eastern flank of the Sierra Madre I met a man named Mario. At least I think that was his name; his Spanish was so swift I barely caught it. When I told him I was interested in archaeology Mario brightened. The next day he took me out into the barrancas, a rifle slung over his shoulder. We followed game trails into a canyon and found its rocky walls trussed with many cliff dwellings.

  No money was exchanged for his service. Mario simply wanted me to see what he had also seen, an ancient wealth of caves stuffed with adobe rooms: black-timbered ceilings, floors dusted with broken artifacts, a human skull left slack-jawed on one floor.

  Mario and I sat at the edge of a rock outcrop, and he told me no one else seemed to care about what is out here; everyone was too busy hunting or logging or driving transport trucks on the highway. To them these ancient things were fanciful, like fairy tales, things you looked for as a kid. When drug runners found these ruins they used them as labs and shelters, knocking down walls for their work. Ranchers broke open doorways and corralled their cattle inside. There were few untouched places left, he said, which is why he had brought me here. He wanted someone else to participate in his appreciation.

  I was heartened to meet a man who shared my impassioned private study of archaeology, and Mario seemed to feel the same. He invited me back to his house in town: dirt street, cinderblock walls, front door a strong plank of wood leaning a bit askew. Young sons and daughters remained at a polite distance as he beckoned me in, showing me over to his wooden eating table as his words quickened. It seemed important to him that I appreciate his table.

  My Spanish was rough, but I thought we understood each other, and I agreed that it was a fine and sturdy table. I gripped it with my hand to prove the point. As I shook the table, dried flowers stuck in a gaudy, gold-colored jar rattled at its far end. Probably they were placed there by his wife, Asucena, who was coming out to greet us, wiping hands dry on her towel.

  “O, Asucena, me gusta!” I announced to her, ridiculously.

  Mario directed my attention back to the table, slowing his voice as he said, “La olla.”

  The jar. I turned and realized the jar at the end of the table was pre-Columbian. The room changed shape at that moment. What was this doing here? By its form I could see it was a simple utility vessel that would once have been used for cooking or holding water, a classic of fifteenth-century northern Mexico. Only the color was wrong—it should have been dirt brown, not gold.

  “Oro, por qué?” slipped from my mouth. Why gold?

  Mario proudly explained that his wife thought the original color was ugly, so he had spray-painted it for her.

  My face went blank as I thought, You spray-painted a pre-Columbian jar because your wife didn’t like the color?

  He waited excitedly for my response. Did I not see it was beautiful, and how well he had chosen? I laughed, but in a pained way, not sure what expression to put on my face. I had thought Mario and I were of like mind, seekers of untouched places. They were, after all, what had drawn Mario and me out there to begin with. Now I was looking at a man who was not only a thief, but a vandal with a can of spray paint. What could I possibly say? It was his house, not a place where a stranger should show alarm. Nor did I have the kind of Spanish at my disposal to say What the hell were you thinking? This thing is an artifact of a lost civilization, and you spray-painted it gold!

  “Donde?” I asked.

  Mario happily told me he had found it in one of the ruins. I asked if he had dug for it. A little, he said. A touch of shame in his smile said that it had been more than a little.

  He explained that there had been another one, much larger and richly painted, but while bringing it out he had lost his grip, dropped it, and now nothing remained but pieces. He described the broken one as a fine specimen of what was probably a Ramos Polychrome, a style he could have easily sold to a passing dealer. I tried not to look sickened as he explained how the second one would have been a nice jar to have in the house, how his wife would have liked all the pretty colors, but it was in so many pieces he could not possibly put it back together. Now it was trash. He was trying to impress me, and I was racking my brain to understand how I had not seen this coming. He was a looter. His wife was a partner in crime, their sweet children accomplices.

  Mario asked how old I thought this jar on their table was. His wife watched my lips.

  I told them, “Siete cien años, mas o menos”—about seven hundred years.

  I told you so, he said to her.

  She nodded with a small, proud smile and said, “Es verdad, muy vieja.”

  Then I began to notice how the entire family was facing the jar with an alm
ost dignified worshipfulness. They were not looking at the picture of Jesus on the wall, not the fine white propane stove or the couch with a horse blanket over it, but at the jar. It was a beautiful and powerful thing he had brought home. Mario gestured for me to look closely, saying I should notice fingerprints in the clay. The spray paint highlighted them, showing where a potter had once pressed her thumbs into wet clay as she turned back the jar’s lip.

  “Sí, sí, bonita,” Mario said, big smile on his face.

  Yes, I had to agree, it was beautiful. Suddenly I felt unsure of what to think about Mario. We were both meddlers snooping along trails of the past, and there was only a slight difference in what we chose to do with what we found. Born to a different family, he might have been an archaeologist or a museum conservator. And born to a different family, I would happily have been a pothunter. I hesitated to speak for fear that I might commit myself, unsure whether I should condemn the man or embrace him for bringing this jar out of the ground and putting it back into use. In a kind of connection with the past I had never even imagined, the jar, and its purpose, were still alive in his home, back on the kitchen table after so many years.

  What would excavators think centuries from now, digging into an early-twenty-first-century Mexican logging village and finding this fifteenth-century jar? Outlier, off the charts, it would be labeled a ritual artifact. Through chemical analysis they would discover traces of gold aerosol paint applied late in its use. Perhaps they would return to their glowing cubes or whatever huts they occupy in the future and marvel at the cyclic wonders of time, how even people of long ago took possession of the past. We find that kind of evidence even now. For instance, a thumb-sized piece of Roman sculpture nearly 2,000 years old was excavated from a native grave in Mexico from the year 1510. However it got there—whether carried across by Columbus’s first colonists and traded into indigenous networks or, more unlikely, arrived from Rome on a ship blown terribly off course much earlier—it is a sign of preoccupation with what is old and exotic. We move these things around like charms, and the more of the past they contain, the more powerful they become for us.