We roared through the gates and deep into the rolling expanse of the former sugar plantation, crisscrossed with rutted roads, cows and goats scattering ahead of us. Here and there the remains of a stone wall marked a potential archaeological site, though more modern garbage also appeared: a hill of rubble sparkling with broken glass, piles of tires, and rusted earth-moving equipment. Gilmore barreled through the potholes and stopped under a tangle of vines and “sting stop” plants. He pointed out the ruins of the slave quarters he and his team had surveyed the week before. We picked our way through the foliage on slightly higher ground to the ruins of an eighteenth-century sugar processing facility. We’d be digging outside its crumbled walls.
“We cleared the site three weeks ago and all this has grown since,” Gilmore said. “We found tons of bees’ nests, so if you get stung, break off a piece of the ‘sting stop’ and rub the sap on your skin.” Then he warned us about the manchineel trees over by the foundation of the main plantation house; if it rained and we took shelter under a manchineel, we would emerge with second-degree burns and blisters. Even the smallest dissolved drop of its sap was corrosive, and if we consumed the fruit, it would eat holes in our stomach and we would die an excruciating death, or wish we had. Gilmore gave a short bark of a laugh—Ha! Those crazy tropics!—then we gathered by the crumbling sugar factory wall, for a lesson in excavation.
Gilmore showed us how to dig a “test unit,” or “test pit”—a hole in the shape of a square that we would use to sample a site, to get an idea of what had happened there. Then he directed us to set up two of these test pits in open ground. There is an art to finding the right place to dig: If I had been one of these eighteenth century plantation workers, where would I sleep, cook, drop my trash, bury my dead? Most archaeologists would measure out the square for their test pits, one meter long on each side, then stretch string between the corners to give it boundaries, but Gilmore has tripped over too many strings, so we made do with only the nails marking the corners; tied with a piece of red plastic, they gave the corners a jaunty look. We split into pairs, women and dudes, and measured the ground. We used shovels to bite neat edges around the sides, being careful to keep the perimeter square and straight. Then we pulled up the foliage on top of our test pits and started lifting off the uppermost layer of sediment.
I used a shovel to scoop out some soil and brought it to the screen, a rectangle of mesh in a wooden frame, a simple and ingenious thing with two wooden legs on one side; Kelly held up the other side, balancing the screen, wheelbarrow-style, at her hips, while I dumped dirt. Then she gave the screen several aggressive shakes, rocking it back and forth on its hinged legs. Each shake sent loose soil sifting through the screen to the ground, and soon a “spoil” pile accumulated at her feet. After a few shakes, what was left on the screen was the flotsam too big to sift. Rocks? Treasure? Or lumps of dirt? We eagerly brought our heads in and picked through the debris. Our task was to pluck out anything made or possibly used by humans—pottery, nails, bits of glass and bone, shells, the fun stuff. We squashed the lumps of dirt and rubbed the rocks. Nothing. Then Kelly gave an expert flip of the screen, and the unwanted bits of rock and soil flew off to the side. Gilmore left us with the mission to dig down through the topsoil to the gray layer several inches below the surface, and fill a plastic bag with meaningful shards—the story of the people who worked this sugar plantation hundreds of years ago and who spoke to us now through their trash.
The work was repetitive and might have been boring had we not had the suspense of the hunt for artifacts. And there we were in that sublime setting, on a faraway island, a tropical storm brewing in the Atlantic, surrounded by toxic trees.
While we battled poisonous undergrowth and sifted dirt in the hot sun, Gilmore was crisscrossing the island, doing everything from manual labor—he scavenged a load of heavy stones from an old site and heaved them over the fence of the museum for use in the blacksmith shop—to negotiating for a private pilot to fly a consulting geologist and his bulky ground-penetrating radar equipment off the island. Now our leader had returned. He squatted where I had filled a bag with possible pottery chips and fragments of brick, poured them into his hand, and without breaking stride, tossed them over his shoulder, into the creeping vines. “Next!” My first morning as a shovelbum, and already I was a failure.
The Dutch guys had better luck, or sharper eyes. The test pit they dug a few feet away had yielded more promising artifacts—a couple of rust-crusted nails and what might be a piece of Afro-Caribbean pottery, crude and red. “You find one of these with markings on it, I’ll buy you a case of anything, beer, rum, Ting [Jamaican grapefruit soda],” Gilmore announced. “There are maybe a hundred good, marked pieces of Afro-Caribbean pottery in the world, and SECAR has a quarter of them.”
BACK AT THE center, we wrote up our field notes, recording the day’s yield of nails and pieces of pottery. Gilmore told us a cautionary tale about a student who was entering site records on a laptop in the field; instead of creating a new file to record the finds from each test pit, she would type in a fresh set of data over the old set and hit “save.” What should have been the records of sixty pits ended up being the record of only one. This was the risk of using volunteers and students on excavations: mistakes would be made. Fortunately, Gilmore was, in the words of a colleague, “that rare thing, a type A personality with the ability to let things roll off his back.” Every day, from early morning to late afternoon, he coped, drove, fetched, strategized, taught, trained, mocked, challenged, and forgave us our lapses. Then he swam off the sliver of a black-sand beach in Oranjestad harbor with Joanna and their four-year-old daughter and two-year-old son and headed home to eat with his family. At night, while the volunteers relaxed and headed for Cool Corners, the bar down the hill that served not-too-bad Chinese food, Gilmore would hole up in his home office, researching until late in the evening, tracking nearby tropical storms and the appearance of looted artifacts on eBay, and piecing together Statia’s colonial past through its history and archaeology, the subject of his writing. He wrote about Honen Dalim—the second-oldest standing synagogue in the Americas, built in 1739, which he had helped to excavate and preserve on Statia. Reading that report, I could sense the urgency that drives his profession, the bulldozers looming on the edge of so many excavations. As Gilmore concluded, “The complete destruction of this amazing structure was narrowly avoided.”
More often, the archaeological literature of the Caribbean was about what was missing. Gilmore had been a contributor to Preserving Heritage in the Caribbean, a collection of dispatches from the islands that charted the challenges of practicing archaeology in a place where development to stimulate tourism frequently destroyed places that might have attracted tourists. Hurricanes weren’t the only force trying to erase cultural heritage here. In St. Thomas, one owner agreed, after long negotiations, to preserve a former slave village on his land; then he sold the land to a developer who, without warning or notice, destroyed the site. In Barbados, archaeological sites were nominally under the protection of the Preservation of Antiquities Act; but the act was enforced by the Antiquities Advisory Committee, which had no members and had never convened. Noting such illogic, the editor wrote that Samuel Beckett himself should “give the legislators of Barbados a special award.”
Gilmore’s stories, filtered through his research reports, were full of heartbreak. One man building a house on the island discovered human remains in his yard, so Gilmore and his team went to work. After a few days, the man grew impatient with the pace of archaeological recovery and took a backhoe to the yard. Gilmore wrote that “due to the lack of legislation to protect archaeological remains at the time, little could be done to prevent the wanton destruction of the burial site,” possibly “the first known slave burial ground excavated” on the island, and one of the few in the Caribbean. Gilmore concluded his paper with the mantra of archaeologists everywhere: “Much important history has been lost forever.” This is the most common
thread in the archaeological literature, not just in the Caribbean but everywhere, from the bulldozing of a pre-Inca pyramid in Peru by developers to the dynamiting of Afghanistan’s massive Buddhas of Bamiyan by the Taliban.
GILMORE’S SPECIALTY, HISTORICAL archaeology, is the study of the recent past, particularly the last few hundred years; it uses the documentary record alongside the artifacts. He likes to poke fun at the archaeologists who study earlier periods, which is to say, most archaeologists. His sites were full of artifacts like ivory combs, medicine bottles, meerschaum pipes, and the industrial parts that helped turn sugar into rum; what did they get to study, stone tools? When a new student, fresh from a pre-Columbian dig in the Dominican Republic, arrived, Gilmore teased, “Find any postholes?”—these were the dark, moist dirt where wooden posts for dwellings might have once been sunk. Yes, the student said earnestly, he found three postholes in a circle. We acted impressed, though I, too, found ivory combs, glass bottles, and other eighteenth-century artifacts vastly more interesting than dark, moist earth; imagine digging for weeks to find three postholes! As for Gilmore, I had the feeling that his japes and barbs were the language he spoke to keep his spirits up. It could be lonely on this island.
Gilmore seemed energized by the Dutch crew—Corinne Hofman and her husband Menno Hoogland and their students—who were in Statia for a few weeks to survey the land where the new oil tanks would go. The relatively small numbers of Caribbean archaeologists could breed rivalries, but these people collaborated, on digs and on monitoring the larger political climate. Statia had been part of the Netherlands Antilles, which was dissolved in 2010; now it was a Dutch municipality, subject to Dutch laws and treaties. Part of Gilmore’s job, as he saw it, was to team up with Hoogland to lobby the Netherlands to preserve archaeological resources here—time-consuming political work that would pave the way for all their archaeological work. Gilmore, Hofman, and Hoogland also functioned as old-fashioned rural neighbors, pitching in to help when needed. “There’s so much development, we do a lot of ‘rescue’ archaeology,” Hofman said. “We go everywhere. Last month we all went to [the island of] Saba when a developer ran into skeletons that needed excavating.”
That neighborly coexistence flourished in late afternoons, when, overheated from a day in the field, we hung out together at SECAR’s headquarters and did the other work of archaeology, washing and recording our finds. Hofman, an expert on pre-Columbian populations of the Caribbean, held court at the picnic table in the backyard. Two of her Ph.D. students and I cleaned artifacts with old toothbrushes, scrubbing dirt and grime from fractured pottery and goats’ teeth. Chickens pecked under the clothesline and lizards (brown, striped, and green with blue heads) scurried over the broken porch and around the bucket where an old anchor, another artifact, soaked. Hofman, in her early fifties, was tan and languid in shorts and a low-cut T, ball cap pulled over dark hair, gold earrings flashing—a dead ringer for Ali MacGraw. Her students call her the god (her husband was the demigod, their son, the semigod). One told me, “Picture her with everyone gathered around, awaiting her instructions. The question is, who gets to wave the fan?”
I asked Hofman if she ever had to work with organic remains, and she said no, but her husband, Menno, was digging some graves from the 1820s in the Netherlands recently and “he had to deal with facial hair and eyeballs.” Eyeballs! She grimaced and I shuddered, but the two lovely Ph.D. candidates on the picnic bench didn’t flinch; one was an expert on teeth and the other on the cranial modification of infant skulls. Cranial modification apparently occurred all over the ancient world, with parents clamping and flattening and binding their babies’ skulls to grow into—“Not points!” I interrupted—but, yes, some of them did what was necessary to make pointy-headed children. Others preferred their children’s skulls to bulge at the top, like Megamind. I could see how this could make an irresistible thesis topic.
Suddenly, Hofman slapped her hand on the picnic table and announced, “I have a wonderful idea. We will go on an Indiana Jones expedition—how about that? Grant? Can we all go out Friday looking for prehistoric sites?” At this, Gilmore emerged from the cluttered gloom of SECAR, where he and a group of students and volunteers had been entering data for the 3-D computer map of the island. He agreed. We would consult the maps left by their colleague, an archaeologist on St. Maarten, who had walked across the island in 1989 with a troop of students, noting surface finds and likely locations for digs. There was a spot halfway up the old volcano called the Quill that we could check out, and another in the jungle near the top of the Quill where one of Gilmore’s students found a tool fashioned from a shell.
EXPLORERS’ DAY DAWNED with the call of a mad, strangled-sounding rooster. When Gilmore came at eight to pick us up, we spilled out from the bright-blue doors of the back gate into a misty rain and an already-packed truck. Field School Goes on a Field Trip! “Come on, everybody,” Gilmore said brightly. “This Land Cruiser holds thirteen Marines!” So ten of us, including a couple new volunteers and the Dutch Ph.D. students, squeezed into a cheerful jumble and bounced up the road to the Quill, backpacks full of insect spray and water bottles. Once again, I was swathed in lightweight nylon, long sleeves and pants, boots, thick socks, and a floppy hat with a cord under my chin, prepared for the tropics to attack at any minute. The Dutch were in sleeveless tops and shorts, cool and bubbly with anticipation; the others showed only slightly less enthusiasm and skin. Gilmore parked up the Quill where the road was rutted out, and one of the guys used the GPS to find the area the students from the eighties had marked.
We walked up a lush, green lane. Hofman leaned down and picked up a piece of coral and turned it over. “Look at this,” she said. “Do you see this flat side? This was absolutely altered by hand.” The students marveled at Hofman’s laser-beam ability to find the ancient tool in the landscape; I was impressed by her certainty. How do you discriminate between an edge shaped by humans and a break made by natural forces? That takes experience, and an eye for subtle differences and the patterns a human makes. Matt ran back to the Land Cruiser and returned with a sharpened machete, and began hacking away at the vines behind where the coral tool had been spotted. Hofman grinned. “It’s nice to point and say, ‘Do this’ and he just does it, yes?” The hacking disturbed nests of what the Dutch call “jacky” wasps, which hovered in the lane, looking vicious. “You don’t want them after you,” one of the Ph.D. students said, so we poked around on the ground gingerly, but, finding nothing else, abandoned the spot. We wandered farther down the path and emerged in a cow field, on a promontory high above the gorgeous Atlantic side of the island. The beauty of the surroundings was simply the most obvious reason to be a Caribbean archaeologist.
We regrouped and hiked back to the road, leaving the coral tool guarded by hovering wasps, and headed up to a trailhead, mostly overgrown, to climb the Quill. Gilmore took the lead and we filed behind him, up an ascent that had me gasping; everyone else was flashing brown muscles and chattering as they climbed. When we reached the area where his student had reported finding a tool, Gilmore told us to look for fruit trees. No matter when they lived, in colonial, pre-Columbian, or ancient times, people gravitated to fruit trees. We fanned out, balancing and picking our way like goats around giant termite nests and spiderwebs. We located a mango tree by the rotting smell of its windfalls and concentrated our search there.
We all felt the anticipation—ancient people walked here!—and the suspense was delicious, but my eagerness had a particular edge. After the second day digging at the plantation, Gilmore told me I could fill in our two test pits. I filled the holes carefully with dirt, but the nail markers at the corner looked messy, so I gathered them up, too, as if tidying up after children. Later I heard two of the Dutch guys surveying the area shout to Gilmore that they couldn’t find the markings for two test pits. “Was I not supposed to remove the nails?” I said. “Did I tell you to remove the nails?” Gilmore replied calmly. I tried to fix the depth of my error. “Not a
s bad as erasing sixty sites?” I said. “No, no,” Gilmore allowed. “You erased only two.” So on Explorers’ Day, least trained and most repentant, I looked harder than anyone. And I found something under the mango tree, two things, in fact: broken shells. Unbroken, they would be nothing special, but broken might mean someone had crafted them into tools. Gilmore came over and examined one of the shells, an act of attention that was gratifying. He pointed it out to one of the Ph.D. students, who didn’t bother to stop. “It’s most likely hermit crabs,” he said. So much for my redemption.
Suddenly a commotion broke out above us on the hill. “Bees!” someone shouted, and another slapped at her ear. One of the Dutch archaeologists yelled, “Get out!” and suddenly all ten of us were in a downhill rush, crashing through the undergrowth. Thomas the law student was slapping at his head, so Gilmore stopped and pulled a bee out of his long hair. The Dutch crew stumbled past, yelling. I stuck close to Gilmore, who hesitated again partway down and pointed. “Lilies,” he said, reaching down for the leaves of two plants. “They don’t grow wild here, but slaves planted them at grave sites,” and of all the markers we had seen today, this would seem the most promising—but he would have to note it on a map for later investigation. “Hurry, they’re still on us!” came the cry from the volunteers farther up, so we stumbled down the last stretch of the slope. When we broke through to the road, Thomas had his head bowed and Hofman was pulling another bee out of his hair with a tissue. One Dutch student was nursing a sting at her waist, one shrugged off a sting on his arm.
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