Bees, you say? A band of fit and hearty archaeologists brought low by little flying insects? I know it seems silly, but consider the words of the archaeologist who listed all of the terrible snakes and spiders and scorpions he encountered in the course of excavating in Central America, then waved his hand dismissively—snakes are stupid, spiders are kind of cute, and our fears about these creatures are irrational. Then what would be a rational fear? “What is deadly in the jungle is the mosquitoes,” he declared. What is most likely to kill us? “The bugs.”
And these bugs were not little honeybees. “Africanized bees,” Gilmore explained. “They appeared on the island about five years ago. They have sentry bees who patrol their territory. They’ll bounce against your head, bump into your forehead, and then, if you don’t get away, they’ll come after you.” Ah, bugs that stalk people.
But the archaeologists didn’t seem horrified, or upset. Everyone’s cheeks were flushed. They seemed recharged, in a heightened state of—could this be pleasure? Why yes, they were having fun. Even Thomas, who had had two mad bees trying to drill through his skull, was shaking off the stings and grinning. This was much more fun than law school! This was the adventure we longed for, the Indiana Jones adventure, starring us and a swarm of—let’s go ahead and say it—killer bees.
GRANT GILMORE WAS sitting in his comfortable home on the north side of the island, on Zeelander Bay, beaming at his wife as she told me how she fell in love with archaeology as a teenager. Joanna, a decade younger than Grant, was soft-voiced, gentle, but steely at the core; she had analyzed bone damage in the skeletons of leprosy victims. She first came to Statia to work with Gilmore when she was a master’s student and he a doctoral candidate at University College London; she returned as his girlfriend, then moved in as his wife. “Grant gave me a human skull for my birthday one year,” she told me, shyly. “Really? Which year?” I asked. And they discussed it, back and forth in the night breeze blowing off the bay, their children asleep in the back of the house. “Twenty-one?” she guessed—“. . . no, later. Not Christmas, surely.” He said, “No, your mother would have freaked. Valentine’s Day?” It was a puzzle—people who were trained to take any puzzle out there and pin it to a map and date it couldn’t quite locate this oddly endearing event in their own past.
The rain from the tropical storm that had been threatening since I arrived finally came, a hot August downpour. It kept our little band of volunteers indoors for pottery lessons and a show-and-tell about eighteenth-century pipes, mirrors, and ink bottles, some of them marked POLICE EVIDENCE because they had been confiscated from a doctor trying to smuggle them out of the country.
Why do we study pottery? Because it endures; because, for thousands of years, most cultures have made it in one form or another; because it appears in breathtaking variety and tells us stories about the people who made and used it. I rubbed the pieces of creamware and pearlware from Europe and Asia and felt the rough salt glaze on a local piece of stoneware. Gilmore quickly figured out that Courtney, the newest volunteer, had taken pottery classes, and used her experience to explain the differences in how each was made. Then he told us about the beautiful hexagonal blue beads of Statia, the famous blue beads worth $150 or $200 apiece to collectors. I briefly entertained a detour into the archaeology of beads, following bead archaeologists, subscribing to the Journal of the Society of Bead Researchers, flying to the International Bead Conference in Borneo—it was not too late to go to Borneo. Whenever there was a storm, beads and other goods that had sunk when the British burned Statia’s warehouses would wash ashore. “I bet you there are thirty or forty people combing the beach after this storm, looking for blue beads,” Gilmore said.
The next day, a steamy one, we returned to the plantation, this time to learn how to operate the “total station,” a surveying tool that measured distances and helped archaeologists map their sites. Gilmore carried the high-tech tool and an equally important low-tech one: a nineteenth-century edition of Diderot’s Pictorial Encyclopedia of Trades and Industry, with its detailed drawings of how various industries, including sugar mills, worked. You can’t identify artifacts if you don’t know what they are—it’s one of the challenges of historical archaeology, industrial archaeology, military archaeology, any type of archaeology: you have to know what you’re looking for. Which meant, since we were digging in a sugar plantation, we had to know the components of a sugar mill, so we could recognize the pieces that went into refining sugar and turning it into rum. If we looked sharp, maybe we could find a conical sugar pot used to drain molasses from raw sugar.
After the lessons, Gilmore worked the sifting screen with a volunteer while I peppered him with questions and took notes.
“Oops, spider,” I heard Gilmore say, but I was scribbling and didn’t see him pick it off the screen and toss it over his shoulder. A few minutes later, it reappeared—a gray tarantula the size of a baby’s fist—on the front of his shirt. I felt fur sprouting around my heart. I had never seen Gilmore motionless before, but there he stood, frozen except for his eyes, which looked at me expectantly. It was one thing to obliterate two test pits, another to stand by and let my first archaeology teacher be attacked by a tarantula. I couldn’t let him down twice. Also, I needed him; he was my source, my guide to poison trees, my ride to the airport. I used my pencil to get under the spider, and tried to lift it off his shirt, but the determined thing kept creeping up toward Gilmore’s neck. When I finally got under the meat of its thorax and flipped it over Gilmore’s shoulder, he said not “Thank you,” but, “I think you hurt its leg.”
“You’re worried about its leg?” I was flabbergasted.
“Come on, it’s harmless,” he said. Then he resumed picking through the dirt on the screen. We saw the blue glint at the same time and he lifted it up. “A blue bead?” I asked, breathless, as he held it close to his face. “Nah,” he said, “it’s the egg case of a cockroach,” and flung it away.
NEAR THE END of my time in field school, I peeled off from Gilmore and the SECAR volunteers and followed the Dutch archaeologists on a beach walk. The beach where we sometimes swam was small, perched between the old pilings of a pier and a stone outcropping. Statia has its charms, but when it came to Caribbean beaches, the island lost out. If you wanted to walk the shoreline north from town, you had to go past one of the diving centers, cut through a parking lot at the back of a hotel bar, ease past its trash cans and a portable toilet, and pick your way over the rocks. I followed Corinne Hofman and two of her students, Anne and Hayley, around the tourist spot and across a spit of sand toward the abandoned leprosarium. The waves lapped in over the rocks.
We could see where the water cut into the land; a cliff face about six feet high dropped off from the grassy outcropping to what was left of the beach. Anne pointed to a whitish surface poking out of the rough gray cliff. “That’s part of a skull,” she said. This shocked me. “Human?” “Yeah,” she said, and she and Hayley moved in to get a closer look. Hofman was examining a nearby pile of rocks and shells. “This is a midden,” she said, “a garbage dump, about a thousand years old.” All these rich sources of archaeological knowledge, sitting out in the open, exposed to the elements; some would be washed away in the next storm. “Who owns this land?” I asked her. “It’s government land,” Hofman said. “I don’t know whether they would think it’s worth excavating.”
I picked my way over the rocks and almost stepped on a shard of painted pottery, lying on a rock in the harbor in low tide, winking up at me. What do you know? I picked it up and turned it over in my fingers: a delicate piece of—was it stoneware?—about three inches long, painted with a band of blue under the lip, and a blue and reddish-brown scene, too worn to say for sure what was pictured. Was this a remnant from the warehouses that had been burnt by the British? I pocketed it and brought it back to Gilmore. “That is a nice piece,” he said, turning it over and calling to Matt to come look. His verdict: Westerwald, most likely seventeenth-century. I felt a glow. He didn’t scold me f
or picking it up, though archaeologists like their artifacts in place, the better to understand where they came from and how they fit in the historic landscape; this piece would have disappeared under the waves had I left it in context. Instead, Gilmore added it to the endless cubic feet of artifacts filed in the SECAR building, old shards plucked out of the earth or sea, carefully labeled, and tucked away—an archaeological record in which I now had a stake.
THE SURVIVALIST’S GUIDE TO ARCHAEOLOGY
Our ancestors were geniuses
JOHN SHEA carried a sheathed Swiss Army knife on the back of his belt, and his teaching assistant lugged a big old Neolithic ax over his shoulder as they strode across the windswept campus of the State University of New York at Stony Brook. The campus, the terminal edge of a glacier from tens of thousands of years ago, is littered with rocky boulders, its winter bleakness relieved only by the young specimens of Homo sapiens milling about. In his lectures for the Archaeology of Human Origins class, Shea drew a picture for me and the other students of what various early humans would look like coming over the horizon. Our ancient ancestors, Homo erectus, were tall and thin, hunters able to run prey to the ground; they would have swarmed over their quarry like a pack of “wolves with knives.” Neandertals, on the other hand—and Shea trained me to spell those early humans Neandertal—were lumberers. They had a barrel-chested build, like football linebackers, or the Boston Bruins—“or me,” Shea said. That Neandertal profile, stocky and hirsute, is quintessential male archaeologist. It commanded the landscape: docile Stony Brook students, working their smart-phones or talking in small groups, yielded and gave way when they saw two armed men looming like Neandertals. “I have been stopped by campus police,” admitted Shea.
In his office, all manner of weapons, blades, triangular points, and axes were arrayed on his desk, windowsill, and bookshelves, mementoes from his digs or the products of his skill as a flintknapper who fashions his own stone tools. Shea is a paleoanthropologist and lithics specialist who studies ancient humans and their tools. A boyish forty-nine when we met in late 2011, Shea had spent his childhood in the woods in Massachusetts, behind his working-class family’s home, and in northern Maine near his Acadian grandmother’s. “They all knew I was going to be an archaeologist when I was, like, seven or eight,” he said. “I was digging holes in the backyard, making primitive tools. The Last Child in the Woods, that’s me. I was snowbound one winter in the late sixties, and the Time/Life book about prehistory came just before the snowfall did, and here it is—pictures about how these early humans are making the tools and different kinds of points—and I thought, ‘Gee, that would be fun.’” Good raw material for flintknapping, quartzite or basalt, was hard to come by in Shea’s neighborhood, but glass was plentiful at the town dump, where he worked in college. “Dump keeper, the perfect job for an archaeologist,” he said. Once he discovered that the bottoms of cheap wine bottles yielded the best material, he began knapping wine bottles. “You can make big arrowheads out of those,” he said.
“For me, archaeology is basically a part of natural history, and stone tools are a connection between humans and how they dealt with their environment. So, they’re tools; they’re a means to an end. I look at an artifact like this—” He held up a hefty old ax blade, a big bearded man lifting a weapon in a darkening office, and I held my breath. “My colleagues will say it’s a type three Maya classic ax.” That was fine as a label, and an expert could explain how the type three differed from the type two or one, but Shea’s experience as a flintknapper made him look at it as something more, a unique artifact with a particular history. “I can see the scars. I can see this fracture pattern. [Its makers] probably broke it when they were resharpening it. It’s like, I look at a stone tool just like you would look at a text in your book.”
When Shea talked about the early humans who have been in the news recently—the Homo erectus skulls discovered in faraway Georgia, or the tiny Homo floresiensis (nicknamed “the hobbit”) unearthed in Indonesia, or the little finger bone used to identify a branch of Homo sapiens called Denisovans—he was not talking about remote ancestors whose lives interested him only as archaeological subjects. He identified with them. He, too, built fires, made string, tracked animals (though he doesn’t hunt; “I think hunting for sport is cruel”), spent hours chipping stone and making points. How could you understand early humans if you didn’t try to experience how they lived?
Stone tools pried open Shea’s career. His practical experience with them earned him a spot on an excavation in Belize, where a graduate student digging nearby offered to introduce him to the famous South African archaeologist Glynn Isaac, who had just been hired at Harvard. “They’ll let anybody in,” the student told him. Harvard’s graduate school had already rejected Shea, but Isaac met him and asked about his tools. Shea reached into his loaded backpack and began pulling out points and blades, and Isaac arranged a full scholarship to Harvard for him. Shea has since been on excavations across the world as the stone tool expert—“I’m the Forrest Gump of archaeology,” he says. He has worked in Europe and in Jordan and Israel (where he picked up a nasty fungus on his lips and gum; “The kibbutz doc said, ‘Yah, you got mushrooms in your mouth.’”). He recently wrote an encyclopedic guide to the stone tools of the Near East. He has worked in Eritrea and Tanzania, in Kenya with his Stony Brook colleague Richard Leakey, the son of legendary archaeologists Louis Leakey and Mary Leakey, and in Ethiopia, where local kids run around carrying Kalashnikovs.
It was in Ethiopia that Shea made his latest contribution to the archaeological record. Back in the sixties, Richard Leakey had found pieces of ancient Homo sapiens skulls, which he estimated were 130,000 years old, at Omo Kibish in southern Ethiopia. “It’s a very remote area,” Shea said, “very difficult to work, and tribes are constantly cattle-raiding each other, so it’s dangerous, but several of the anthropologists here decided, ‘We have new methods for dating rocks. Let’s go see!’” They wanted to find the burial site and try to date the undisturbed rocks around it, but Leakey’s earlier expedition had predated GPS. “We piled in the Land Rovers with the geologist and we found the sites by matching up still frames from Super 8 millimeter movies made at the time.” It was almost forty years later, but—“We found the same bush, same trees, and same gravel exposures, and pieces of the same bone with the fracture that fit right back together. It doesn’t get much better than that.” Dating the rocks above the skulls, the team estimated the Omo Kibish bones to be not 130,000 but 195,000 years old, which made them the oldest Homo sapiens fossils yet found—“A Stony Brook discovery,” Shea said with pride.
Omo Kibish also gave Shea fresh evidence to support his belief in the intelligence of our prehistoric ancestors. He is one of a growing cadre of scientists who see the genius in “primitive” peoples. The idea that at some point early humans began to think and act like modern humans had always bothered him. He told Science magazine that that was “a nineteenth-century model, the idea that evolution is directional and ends with us. . . . It’s an embarrassment, and we don’t need it anymore.”* According to Shea, the stone points that he found while hunting Homo sapiens fossils in Ethiopia were so well made that the people who fashioned them could not have been primitive. “These were people just like me,” he declared, people as smart and adaptive as contemporary humans, and as different from each other as we are from other humans; they simply had different environments and challenges than we do.
Shea is like a one-man antidefamation league for our genus and species. Neandertal was the only primate whose name has become an insult, he pointed out, but Homo neanderthalensis survived as a species for hundreds of thousands of years. Shouldn’t that command some respect? Naturally, Shea was a fan of the old GEICO commercials with their intelligent and maligned cavemen. “There’s an element of truth in those,” he said. He enjoyed the commercials so much that he wrote a fan letter to the advertising agency that created them, to say, “‘Thank you. You just made it so much eas
ier to teach paleoarchaeology.’” Though no one at the company ever responded, GEICO later gave him permission to reproduce a photo of its misunderstood caveman in one of his scientific papers.
John Shea’s passion could be narrowed down to an epoch, specifically the Middle Paleolithic, from 200,000 years ago to 40,000 years ago (2,000 centuries to 400 centuries ago). “I’d like to live in the Ice Age. I’d like to be one of those first people coming out of Siberia down here into the Lower 48, one of the first Americans, just to see the brand-new world,” he said. “One of the advantages of living in the Ice Age would be that there are not very many people around. You’re constantly moving, and you have to live by your wits. You can’t just have fifteen different kinds of tools, you can’t carry them. And no villages—no village idiots. Imagine a world free of idiots!” Idiots, he liked to point out, “don’t survive in environments with lions.”
The least probable habitat for someone like Shea was where he was most often found, at Stony Brook, amid the suburban sprawl of Long Island. He remembers flying over this place as a student. “When I was coming back from Egypt, my first trip overseas, the plane pulled out of JFK and then rolled to head up to Boston. I looked out the window and all I could see was Nassau County—you know, house house house house house, car car car car car, swimming pool swimming pool swimming pool swimming pool swimming pool. I said to one of my professors, ‘Look at that. I could never live there.’ Then I got this job, and I called him up. ‘Good for you, John. Where is it?’ he asked. I said, ‘You’re not going to believe it.’ He says, ‘Long Island?’ I said, ‘Yep.’”
Shea lives with his wife, Patricia Crawford, also an archaeologist, two minutes from campus by mountain bike, close enough, he said, “to hear the human sacrifices in the dorms.” He and Crawford cope with the claustrophobia of the suburbs by routinely biking thirty-five miles or more, and Shea usually heads to Africa for the summer dig season. They recently bought a little place in Santa Fe, and travel there four or five times a year. The high desert is where Shea feels most at home. “You just walk out the door and you’re in the mountains. We have mountain lions running around the neighborhood.”
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