Lives in Ruins

by Marilyn Johnson

  When Shea and Crawford dug together in Roman ruins in Jordan, “We used to sit in the old Bronze Age Temple mound up above our excavation. The sun would go down. We’d have a drink, and we’d watch the kids playing musical tents, sneaking in and out. It was Jane Goodall and the chimps. The alpha male is going to the beta female . . .” He laughed. “I love my job.” He talked about the dig in Ethiopia where everything went wrong. “We had cattle raids, we had brush fires, we put the car into the river. You name the disaster, we had it.” His students’ response? “Let’s do it again next year!” The students who became passionate about archaeology were especially rewarding, but all seemed to amuse him and Crawford. “You want to have comic relief, bring a bunch of twenty-year-olds on an expedition.”

  THE MORNING OF the goat roast was brilliant, an April sky bright blue with streaky white clouds and just enough of a chill for a sweatshirt. I drove around Long Island looking for the wilderness site and finally found it, at the intersection of yesterday and nowhere. The location felt like a Scout camp with a circular road for school buses, and a field alongside it with wooden stocks. Yes, stocks, those public tools of shaming from colonial times. The site was a destination for school groups studying American history. Shea had found that rare spot with few rules or regulations or insurance anxieties where students could play with fire and sharp knives and projectile weapons without anybody freaking out about liability. He bustled around in a bright-red shirt, supervising the digging of a coffin-sized pit behind the red outbuildings where the students would pile sticks and build a fire. Fire! When Shea talked about fire in class, he grunt-laughed like Beavis (or was it Butt-head?). “Fire! Hunh hunh. Fire is cool! Hunh hunh hunh.”

  I had told everybody I was going to a goat roast; bragging was more like it—I had milked this goat roast. But it turned out the supplier was fresh out of goat. So we stood around the fire pit, drank coffee from a Dunkin’ Donuts Box O’ Joe, watched Shea unpack his flintknapping kit, and waited for the car of grad students who would deliver . . . a lamb. I dropped my head to scrawl my disappointment in a notebook. I butchered a goat seemed so cool, semibarbarous, but I butchered a lamb? No. Even the way it sounded—the brutish hard g and hard t of “goat”—was preferable to the soft baby mewls in “lamb.” Shea avoided calling it a lamb, I noticed. “They’ve got the dead animal and are en route,” he reported.

  At last the rusty transport vehicle arrived and the grad students dragged out a plastic sack with a pitiful, dead lamb inside. It didn’t look like nearly enough to feed the thirty or so people gathered—grads, undergrads, and even two of Shea’s fellow professors, but Shea was unconcerned. Perhaps he suspected that, after the butchering lesson, some would lose their appetites. The bloody sack waited while a group of us assembled in the shade in front of the sandbox and Shea shook out bloodstained mats and laid out hammerstones, a bag of low-grade obsidian, and a first-aid kit. He draped a piece of leather over one of his thighs for a safe work area. “You will get cut doing this,” he said gravely.

  The obsidian came from a dealer in Texas who “supplies thousands of us,” according to Shea. The dealer got the volcanic rock from Washington state, “and it’s sharp enough to shave with.” With that, Shea passed me a hunk of obsidian and a striker, and I looked at these objects. But what was I looking for? I breathed in and, trying to imitate him, brought the striker down forcefully on the obsidian. Instantly, a chip of the glassy rock flew into Shea’s cheek. Bloody hell—I could have put out his eye. “No, that’s okay,” he said, wiping his face. He put on safety glasses for the rest of the lesson.

  Then he took my lump of obsidian, my core, in flintknap-speak, and, rotating it, looked for a good angle for me. Somehow, with intensive coaching, I managed to flake off a few thin, triangular points. With the first point, I abraded the side of one piece to dull it so I could hold the thing without slicing my hand, and shaped it—and there was my knife. Then I made two more, crude but sharp. “You are now a cavewoman,” Shea told me.

  The Band-Aids came out several times as nicks appeared in the students’ fingers. When a dozen or so of us had made our tools, Shea wrestled the lamb out of the plastic and, with help, hung it upside down from a corner of the sandbox’s wood frame and placed a big sheet of plastic on the ground. The lamb’s head had already been removed. As Shea explained, “The head is complex. Good meat, lots of structure, but it takes time to extract, and working around the teeth is dangerous.” Ice Age people had to practice speed butchery while looking over their shoulders for lions; they would have carried the head home rather than try to field-dress it. Holding one of his stone blades lightly, Shea knelt down and sliced and peeled back the lamb’s skin, then ripped it back so that it hung below the neck cavity like a fluttering cape. The sacrificial carcass, rib bones visible and little lamb feet dangling in front of the cape, managed to look both vulnerable and intimidating.

  Shea washed his hands after handling the skin, the dirtiest part of the animal, then lifted the foreleg, “the easiest to take off—the bone floats right there. And I haven’t made a single cut mark on the bone yet,” he said pointedly. Cut marks were one way archaeologists registered ancient human activity, and the literature is full of dissertations and papers comparing natural breaks on bone with deliberate cut marks made by one sort of tool or another. Shea continued his careful butchery, using an ax to cut the ribs off—“Don’t grab near the severed bones” (too sharp)—then he took off the long back steaks. “There’s great sinew here, excellent for bowstrings or sewing up wounds, and it’s pretty. Anyone want to render it out?” He cut along the throat, then wiped the blade on his jeans to get off the gummy fat. The smell of raw lamb, almost the same as the smell of cooked lamb, permeated the air.

  Shea divided us into butchering teams to separate the ribs and cut up the steaks on a clean tarp. “Scrape it,” he suggested. “Some of the best meat is on the bone and on the underside of the vertebrae. Don’t worry about the flies,” he said. “They’re there to tell you the food is still edible.” I tried to get into the spirit of the enterprise, and not think about fly-borne illnesses, or the goop on fly legs.

  I sliced dutifully with my stone knife, which worked better than some of the cutlery in my kitchen, but because the knife was small, I got lamb blood all over me. Then I washed my hands in the clean restroom and watched little bits of lamb go down the drain. I wandered to the pit where the students were laying the ribs and sliced meat on grills and setting them in the fire. They were talking about the crazy stuff they had eaten in their travels—Bavarian wild boar, mare’s milk, eyeballs.

  “Were you here last year when we played football with the head?” one asked. (I bet it was a goat head.) I ate some grilled lamb steak on a round pat of homemade pita, delicious and disgusting at the same time, and stood with Shea, who grinned as he gnawed on a leg bone with still-bloody hands. “Not bad,” he said, and I recalled that “not bad” was what he told me when I got all but one of the quiz questions right. “Not bad” was good.

  Then he rounded up a group for a lesson in atlatl throwing and ran down to the field with a handful of spears. Not an unusual weekend for the archaeologists and the archaeology grad students: have a barbecue; throw projectile weapons.

  Shea’s wilderness and flintknapping experience had shaped his work, and he wanted his students, too, to benefit from such practical knowledge. Encouraging us to get familiar with fire, stone tools, and butchery and engage in experimental archaeology was really just uniformitarianism in action. “I want you to expand the range of experience about which you can make observations about the past,” he said. Shea occasionally offered a class called Primitive Technologies, where, a mile from the Long Island thoroughfare of big-box stores and fast-food joints, he taught suburban students to flintknap, throw spears, and make fire. He doesn’t want the current crop of Homo sapiens to forget what we can do.

  Shea’s motto, he told me, was “Never effing quit. My students were out there making fire in the snow
one year, ‘Eww, it’s cold. It’s wet. Can we go inside?’ ‘No, if you make fire now, you’ll be able to make fire anytime. This is the perfect opportunity. You should thank the Great Spirit for this opportunity. So shut the ef up and make that goddamn fire.’ And it got to be where a couple of them couldn’t do it, so students who could have gone in stayed out to make sure every single member of that class finished. Cooperation among big groups of strangers is another derived human characteristic—you can’t get chimps to stay on the same topic for more than a few minutes—and these students were systematically finding different ways of making fire to bring everybody in. I was so proud of them. I told them, ‘Now you are human beings.’”

  EXTREME BEVERAGES

  Taking beer seriously

  THE PLAN for my first conference, the annual Archaeological Institute of America meeting, was simple: to have a drink with the keynote speaker, Patrick McGovern, “the Indiana Jones of Ancient Ales, Wines, and Extreme Beverages.” Extreme beverages was McGovern’s term for mixed wine, beer, and/or mead. Our ancestors’ desire for inebriation is a topic that I could relate to, and as I pored over the conference program on the train to Philadelphia, the site of this year’s gathering, I worried that it might be the only topic I could understand. “Rock-Cut Sanctuaries in the Eastern Rhodope Mountains: The Gloukhite Kamani Cult Complex”? “Cretan Connections in Middle Bronze Age Ayia Irini, Kea”?

  I made my way to the lobby of the Marriott Hotel, and studied the people thronging the halls. Who are you? I wondered. Thirty-two hundred archaeologists—voluble, bearded men in jeans and khakis with sun-damaged faces, and women in exotic earrings and kitten heels and just about any piece of clothing that you would never find in the field. They sorted themselves out, heading decisively in the direction of the Rhodope Mountains (Bulgaria, it turned out) or the Middle Bronze Age. They had heard the call of the desert or the jungle or the catacombs; or they had thrown their darts at a map. They were part of an action profession.

  Archaeological curiosity can take you almost anywhere, but I wanted to ease in on more familiar turf and contemplate inebriation. The organizers of the AIA conference, in their wisdom, must have known that the lecture on the topic of our ancestors’ pursuit of intoxication would be a crowd-pleaser, appealing to professionals and enthusiasts alike. They had secured the auditorium and the beautiful Chinese Rotunda of the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology two miles from the conference hotel, and invited the public. Then they ran packed buses from the hotel to the museum to deliver all the archaeologists who craved edification on this subject.

  The mixed crowd of amateurs and professionals, eight hundred or more, was buzzing. We settled into the seats of the musty old auditorium to consider the science of drunkenness and its persistence through history. Patrick McGovern was a slightly distracted man in his sixties, with a shock of white hair, a full white beard, and a mustache more black than white. He had directed a University of Pennsylvania excavation in Jordan for years and served as a pottery expert on several sites. Somewhere along the way, he told us, he decided to take a close look at what some of those old pots contained. He turned to the university storeroom, two floors above his laboratory, where bronze amphorae from Midas’s tomb at Gordion in Turkey that had been excavated by Penn archaeologists back in the fifties were still “sitting in their original paper bags,” their interiors sticky with unanalyzed residue. “It was one of the easiest excavations I was ever on,” McGovern admitted. He collected scrapings, and, applying his background in chemistry, subjected the gunk to a series of tests (“I won’t bore you with all the details,” he said kindly). In some amphorae, he discovered the residue of a feast of barbecue lamb and lentil stew. In others, he found “a mixture of grape wine, honey, and barley beer. I’d never heard of mixing these things together.” In fact, he said, “It kind of made me wince, thinking of drinking all these things in one go, beer and wine together.” Then he thought, Maybe Midas and his people were on to something?

  Stories about McGovern routinely filter into the popular press. Smithsonian magazine summed up his discoveries: “He has identified the world’s oldest known barley beer . . . the oldest grape wine . . . and the earliest known booze of any kind, a Neolithic grog from China’s Yellow River Valley brewed some 9,000 years ago. . . .” With his deep knowledge of the history and primacy of alcohol in human cultures and his enthusiasm for the technical properties of those crusty patches of alcoholic residue, McGovern is apparently welcome at bars and other watering holes around the world. He often finds himself a guest or guest speaker at various long tables where libations are both subject and refreshment. At one such gathering on the topic of microbrews, McGovern spoke about his harvest of residue from the dirty bronze vessels in Penn’s storerooms, and threw out a challenge to the brewers in the crowd: come to my lab at nine the next morning if you want to try to reverse-engineer Midas’s drink. He told the crowd at Penn that twenty microbrewers took him up on the challenge; the last man standing was Sam Calagione of Dogfish Head Craft Brewery, who had been experimenting on his own with a medieval plum drink. The two men joined forces to cook up Midas Touch, a mix of honey, white Muscat grape, and saffron. The award-winning brew led to other concoctions, all reverse-engineered from archaeological remains. For the brewer, it was intriguing business; for McGovern, it was experimental archaeology in action, “taking the clues from the past and seeing if we could come up with a modern day scenario of how these beverages were actually made.”

  Speaking to the rapt audience at the AIA conference about the “extreme beverages” at the heart of his research, McGovern expressed just the right amount of concern about problems of addiction and overindulgence, which not only defused a loaded topic, but also reminded us of the transgressive nature of studying intoxication. Because he was operating this evening at the intersection of scholarship and entertainment, his talk also included a screening of several YouTube videos of elephants and monkeys getting drunk. All creatures enjoy alcohol! It’s not just us! Malaysian tree shrews love it, too! And the crowd lapped it up. “When you drink a fermented beverage, as you will later, some of you, it triggers a pleasure cascade,” he pointed out. Then he offered, solicitously, that he didn’t want to keep us from the reception, and soon we were swarming up the stairs to the gorgeous, huge galleries with vaulted ceilings, dotted with treasures and stocked with bracing drinks.

  McGovern’s talk was free, but the reception cost $29. That sounded a little steep to me, particularly if you wasted your single drink ticket on a bottle of Yuengling or Bud. But here they were serving the very special microbrews that McGovern has helped Dogfish Head create since that first collaboration on Midas Touch: Chateau Jiahu, a rice/honey concoction based on nine-thousand-year-old residue McGovern found in China; the chocolatey Theobroma, based on a Honduran drink; Ta Henket, an Egyptian beer; and even the rare and hard-to-find Chicha,* inspired by a South American maize drink and fermented with the help of Calagione’s and McGovern’s personal saliva. (No thanks.) None are cheap; occasionally I can get a four-pack of Midas Touch at a specialty market for $20. The price was partly due to the saffron, the most valuable spice in the world, that turned it golden.

  I FOUND MCGOVERN in the rotunda after his talk, sitting at a folding table, making change for a fan who had just bought a copy of his book Uncorking the Past: The Quest for Wine, Beer, and Other Alcoholic Beverages. Here was the triumphant keynote speaker who had just lectured, and who was also, by virtue of his position as scientific director of the museum’s biomolecular laboratory, our host. It seemed undignified for him to be selling his own books. I offered to get him a beer and take over the handling of his money box, freeing him to sign autographs and talk to his fans. He looked nonplussed, but the beer offer was too tempting. After talking for an hour about our ancient thirst, he was thirsty.

  The bartender was delighted to pop the top on a Midas Touch for its cocreator. McGovern and I clinked bottles and savored our first sips.
To describe it as a “honey beer,” or an ale/wine combo, doesn’t do the beverage justice. It is divine. I didn’t want to swallow, just hold each sip in my mouth. McGovern called it a “Phrygian grog,” and I liked that. Yes, a wonderful Phrygian grog! It took me a while to figure out the reason the stuff tasted so delicious—perhaps because it had about three times as many calories as an ordinary beer. If beer is liquid bread, Midas Touch is liquid pound cake, drenched in honey. It did not inhibit me from making correct change for McGovern’s admirers, and I made it my job to push copies of Uncorking the Past, which I had already read and found stimulating, effervescent, even intoxicating, its chemical geekery leavened with enthusiasm. After expounding on the details of some fermented banana remains in Africa, the author exulted, for example, over an “archaeological bombshell” that had rocked his world: “At one fell swoop, the date for the earliest banana in Africa was moved back three thousand years.”

  For the rest of the evening, I got to observe the beer archaeologist under assault from his fans, many of them professionals I would hear make sober presentations about ancient chariot roads or rock art, who practically launched themselves across the table to share their pleasure in McGovern’s work. Was he the star or was the star his subject, ancient beer and ale? It was hard to separate the two. Some of these people had drunk with him at a seminal beer conference in Barcelona in 2004; others were local brewers, or even old colleagues, unsteady on their feet from age, not drink. One pushed her student at him, a young man doing, she said, some impressive work with the archaeology of distilled spirits. I felt like I was sitting with Elvis, as bashful and aw-shucks as Elvis himself was reported to be. As we sipped and chatted in the interludes, McGovern confided that when he runs low on one of his brews, Dogfish Head sends more. Nice perk!