Lives in Ruins

by Marilyn Johnson

  All but one, I noticed, had been sold. Never fear, there were more where these came from. The dealer, who told me he had a deep personal collection, brought out six or seven more for me to drool over. Are their faces really pigs? He thought they might be bears. Here’s a fine one, he said, nudging me toward a large chunk of dark carved jade that had a price of ten or eleven thousand dollars. But for me—only $8,500. I asked him if a purchase included papers. Ah yes, he said, each piece had been authenticated by three experts. Naively, it hadn’t occurred to me that they might be fakes. No, no, I said. How do I know they’re legal? How can I be sure they haven’t been looted? “Ah,” he said. “These are, how do you say it, stray finds. The farmers pick them up in their fields. I declare every one and pay duties and taxes on them, but . . .” Then he shrugged.

  He invited me to take cell-phone photos of my pig dragon, and gave me an official photo with its dimensions and description, and then he made me a gift of the handsome gallery catalog, a seventy-five-dollar item. I usually identify myself as a writer, but somehow, though I signed my real name into the guest book, I never found the right time to share this fact. I was a cultural prospector, and not a fellow collector, like the suited gentleman and smartly dressed women who browsed knowingly by my side. The dealer and I parted ways as fellow lovers of an ancient art form. Perhaps he is still waiting for me to return with my credit card.

  The gallery’s catalog was not as coy as he was. “Most of the jades of the Hongshan Culture were unearthed from medium and small scale tombs,” I read on the first page, then I studied helpful photos of what a grave looked like in situ, in the ground, and how an unearthed grave of the period looked with its skeleton decked out in jade. The text even told us to expect “three to nine artifacts per tomb.” While they last.

  When an object is looted, as any archaeologist would tell you, it loses its archaeological meaning. “For years art historians thought the Hongshan jades were from the Shang dynasty, because they didn’t have any context,” the heroine of Nelson’s novels declared pointedly. Three thousand years separated the Hongshan from the Shang dynasty. Pig dragons, once looted, are still beautiful, even in the hands of a dealer, but they can’t be dated, they can’t illuminate a place, and they can’t tell a people’s story. Looted objects lose the power to speak.

  MY LIFE IS IN RUINS

  Jobs and other problems

  LIKE MANY professionals dedicated to the careful study and preservation of our cultural remains, archaeologists find that work that pays a living wage is scarce. A snapshot of the profession shows salaries and wages lower, on average, than those of artists. One source estimated fifty percent unemployment in the field. In 2014, Forbes identified “Anthropology and Archeology” as the #1 worst college major, “based on high initial unemployment rates and low initial earnings.” At the SAA conference in Memphis in 2012, a gathering of more than three thousand archaeologists, I stepped into the room designated “Employment Service Center.” Only five full-time jobs were posted. Archaeologists could find temporary fieldwork through cultural resource management (CRM) firms, which handled compliance issues for developers, but permanent positions were harder to secure. I mentioned those five lone jobs to John Shea, and told him how much I admired the stubbornness and humor of his fellow professionals in light of their brutal economic prospects. “What does this tell you?” he said, almost grimly. “It tells you how much we love this work.” Not romantic love, bathed in hopeful illusions—something fiercer, that costs dearly.

  At the same conference, one of my archaeological guides took my elbow and urged me past the rooms of Mayans and Africanists, past the exotic “Ethnoarchaeology of Fire Features in Fiji.” “I think you’ll be interested in this,” she said, leading me into and through the labyrinth of the conference center to some forgotten rooms far from the action. There, the Committee on Museums, Collections, and Curation had packed a room with the beleaguered. The next year, the federal sequestration and government shutdown would introduce the rest of Americans to the cutbacks in government support, but these professionals were old hands at austerity. They had been in crisis for a generation.

  In the room, archivists, curators, preservationists, and archaeologists, all keepers of collections of artifacts, discussed their challenges as the stewards of rooms full of excavated material that had not yet been inventoried. The stuff of archaeology, the material, was burying them.

  “We are not encouraging our master’s and Ph.D. students to stop digging—and we must. Look, we don’t have room to put everything you’re digging up!”

  “This collection is going to be out in the trash dump! We can’t be asked to fund this storage! We just had the third worst year in a row!”

  “Do we really need to dig more 1880s farmhouse sites?”

  “Tell them to slow down the digging!” one called, and the voices chimed back: “We’ve tried!”

  There was no funding for volunteers to help catalog the collections that piled up. The professionals felt “lucky even to be paid,” one said. Everywhere there were collections orphaned because the cultural resource management firms that excavated them had gone out of business. The federal Save America’s Treasures program was one of the largest and most successful grant programs “for the protection of our nation’s endangered and irreplaceable cultural heritage,” I learned, but it was not funded at all for that year, so the National Park Service, which administered it, was no longer accepting applications. The federal Advisory Council on Historic Preservation would not even talk about collections. Every six years, the National Historic Preservation Act of 1966, which was created to fund this work, was renewed at smaller and smaller margins.

  In this room, the archaeologist who directed the curation and management of archaeological collections for the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers said, mournfully, as if he were a farmer during the Great Depression and the last crop had just blown away: “National historic preservation is a first-generation job. I began when that legislation came through, as so many of us did, and we are the first and perhaps the last people to be employed our whole lives in this field. We’ve had too many warnings that this is not popular legislation, though, and too many people are blissfully unaware of the consequences. We are keeping our history alive, but if that legislation goes down and we are all gone, there will not be a ripple on the water for the loss of this discipline.”*

  Two rays of hope: the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) continues to breathe life into the storerooms of artifacts with an average of eighteen grants awarded each year, giving archivists and museum guardians some tools and support. And archaeologist Giovanna Vitelli reported that she had just been funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation to direct the “University Engagement Programme” for the Ashmolean Museum at Oxford, charged with dreaming up new ways for teachers to engage with its collection. “I have a ton of money and a bunch of postdocs,” she said, inviting everyone to network. “I’m in a sandbox with a bunch of toys.”

  She was the only one who did not seem to be wailing and rending her garments.

  I followed several of the Cassandras of archaeological collections to the next panel—on the access and preservation of archaeological information—and watched them confront the elegant and affable John Yellen, who heads the National Science Foundation’s powerful grant program that sends many archaeologists into the field. NSF archaeology grants are made only to scientists with plans for long-term preservation of their data, such that it could be accessed by other researchers. But “after they have the money,” Yellen allowed, “there’s not a lot we can do.” How long should an archaeologist have exclusive access to the data?—this was a burning question. There is a limbo between excavation and publication that some archaeologists never got out of—a limbo where intellectual work stalled and the artifacts and information gathered were out of reach, invisible to other researchers.

  Yellen said that the National Science Foundation, too, “is being pushed by Congress to save mone
y. Our travel budget is down fifteen percent. We have panelists come to advise us and review applications, and we do not have money to buy them refreshments. At the same time the number of proposals is increasing enormously.”

  Was it any wonder the noise in the hotel lobby that night was deafening? In the roar of the late evening’s libations, the archaeologists shouted across tables, sat perched on the lip of the fountain outside, laughed at the gods. The field archaeologists, the lucky ones, would soon be heading to Turkey or the caves along the coast of South Africa or the Peruvian desert or Washington State or Dmanisi, Georgia (nice Homo erectus skulls!), or they’d be spreading out across the countryside, ahead of the bulldozers, chasing history. The graduate students roamed in packs, lean and hungry. The assistant professors counted their crumpled bills and compared travel grants. The keepers of the collections muttered into their beer.

  IN THE SUMMER of 2011, Grant Gilmore had warned me not to wait to come to St. Eustatius, and I soon learned why. The shiny job he’d enjoyed for so long, directing the independent archaeology center on Statia, had tarnished somewhat by the time I met him.

  His unusual temperament, the combination of fierce energy and equanimity, had worked well for doing the demanding work of archaeology in the tropics, on an island where nothing happened quickly. Gilmore helped found SECAR with the locals in 1997, and though it was not funded until 2004, its creation had been nothing less than, as even he said, “astounding.” Gilmore’s old teacher, Norman Barka, who first began charting the island’s role in the global economy of colonial times, had told him, “If Statia gets an archaeological center, I will eat my hat.” As the years passed, local support waxed and waned, and the recent election of fundamentalists to key political offices did not augur well for the center. Then, the month before I arrived, two female volunteers were assaulted, a first for SECAR. The young women fought off the drunken locals and reported the attack, but the police declined to follow up. Gilmore demanded a meeting with the chief and objected strongly to the casual dismissal of the case. Soon after that, the old car the volunteers drove was impounded, and Gilmore himself was stopped several times; he began to feel unwelcome.

  I remember bouncing in the Land Cruiser over the charming cobblestones in Oranjestad, and Gilmore snorting. “Completely inauthentic. This road was in terrible shape. The original stones are underneath. I told them they should just uncover the junk on top of it. But that wasn’t in the plan.” He stopped at the waterfront one morning to loan out Matt, the perpetual volunteer, this time to act as SECAR’s eyes, keeping vigil over a dredging operation to expand the harbor, to make sure the dredgers didn’t destroy the remains of the old warehouses that had sunk when the wharfs were burned. When I asked what Matt was doing, Gilmore said, “He’s watching them destroy our archaeological heritage.” Barka, his mentor, had lasted twenty years in the islands, long enough to become “a jaded pessimist—that point that I would get to,” Gilmore said wryly. And as their children approached school age, he and Joanna took stock and decided that they needed a fresh context.

  So my first, revelatory visit to Statia happened as his own time there was coming to an end.

  Neither Grant nor Jo had another job, but their plan was to head to the U.K., the U.S., or the Netherlands, trusting they would find work before their savings ran out. This was a terrible time to find archaeology jobs, but Joanna had a master’s degree, experience working with museums, a calm disposition, and an indefatigable will, while Grant was strong, personable, and confident, a font of knowledge and resourcefulness, with a Ph.D. and seven years’ experience running his own archaeology center. Both had studied at University College London, which, according to the Guardian, edged out venerable Cambridge University as the top-ranked archaeology school in the U.K. Gilmore would leave with “a lifetime of stories” and plans to write at least three books rooted in Statia, including an encyclopedia of Caribbean archaeology.

  I STAYED IN touch with Grant and Joanna via Skype, where Grant’s profile pictured him grinning in a T-shirt with the legend, MY LIFE IS IN RUINS.* I met up with them in June, seven months after their departure from Statia. They had taken up temporary residence at Jo’s mother’s house a few hours north of London in Lichfield, the beautiful old city in England’s West Midlands, but as the seasons changed, as Grant turned forty, as their almost-five-year-old daughter started school, and their two-year-old son preschool, one job interview after another failed to yield a paying position. Gilmore was a finalist for a number of these jobs, but that didn’t change the tally: 190 applications, zero jobs. Jo had stopped keeping track; she’d applied for perhaps thirty. “We psych ourselves up, and it’s a tremendous lift to do well in the interview. Then there’s a period of hope. Then . . .” She shrugged. “We start all over again.”

  Grant and Jo were still on Caribbean time and late picking me up from my hotel in Lichfield. We piled into the little yellow car they had bought from her mother, Grant squeezing between the empty children’s car seats in the back, and headed off to see the sights of the charming and ancient city. Their children were in school all morning for the first time, and the hours stretched ahead of us, a recess for adults.

  We wandered through the medieval Lichfield Cathedral under the soaring eaves and the stained glass, and lingered in a side room off the chapel, where major archaeological booty was displayed: the eighth-century Lichfield angel, unearthed from beneath the altar, and some of the priceless Staffordshire Hoard, the bounty of gold and silver weapons uncovered in a nearby field in 2009. The woman in charge of the exhibit couldn’t figure out how to illuminate the display cases, so Grant helpfully trotted off to find a guard who could decode the lighting panel.

  We piled back in the car—this time I took the spot between the car seats—and drove through bucolic country to the old Roman wall where Jo first learned to dig, a crumbling ruin set in a vivid green landscape. We were in a fantasy of English countryside, rolling hills cut by stone walls, green lanes out of Thomas Hardy. “It’s gorgeous here,” I enthused. Jo and Grant exchanged an amused look. “This is the first time the sun’s been out in six weeks,” Grant said. “We did have that nice week in March, remember?” Jo added.

  Jo remembered digging ferociously along the historic wall after having been told how scarce jobs were in archaeology. “I will be an archaeologist; I will be an archaeologist.” The week before I arrived, she and Grant found her old diaries in her mother’s attic, full of her archaeological obsession and her first experience of Statia, when she headed there to study with Gilmore. He had chosen her to be his graduate assistant because she was serious and dedicated and she had the short fingernails to prove it. “Archaeology. Love it. Hate it. Can’t live without it,” as she summed it up. “What a conundrum!” Gilmore had never considered being anything else; his parents (his father is a prominent marine biologist) pegged him as an archaeologist when he was four or five and already collecting fossils and stones. Jo and Grant were in thrall to a profession that couldn’t sustain them.

  We drove to their modest brick house—Jo’s mother had recently married and moved nearby with her new husband—and Jo ran to pick up the children. They came in hiding behind her legs; Elias, named for Elias Ashmole (whose priceless collection is now housed at the Ashmolean Museum at Oxford), was sneezing and his nose was dripping. Both he and Amélie had been sick much of the English spring with viruses and infections, and were just getting healthy when Elias licked a train window and fell ill again.

  The original plan for the afternoon was to whisk Grant to physiotherapy for a knee injury he sustained digging in clay on an old excavation, while the rest of us spent the afternoon at Beaudesert, a fourteenth century estate where the Gilmores had been volunteering, but the children didn’t want to cooperate. Because Grant had flunked the British driving test, figuring out the logistics of the afternoon was as complicated as a typical day on Statia, juggling consultants and volunteers, multiple sites, and one vehicle.

  The easiest cou
rse was for Jo to drive Grant and take Elias, and for Amélie to stay behind with me. The four-year-old and I colored companionably for an hour. “I was scared of you,” Amélie admitted after we covered the table with bright drawings, and I realized with a start, Wow, they just left their kid with me. But all was fine, and we laughed about it later; Grant and Jo were working on being more guarded in England, but their relaxed island habits died hard.

  The Caribbean approach served them well in the storm of children’s moods. These parents were so calm! Grant was in the middle of telling me about the guide to colonial artifacts he had been working on when Elias had a meltdown. It was contagious; soon Amélie fell apart, too. One whimpered in Jo’s arms, one howled in Grant’s, and Jo gave me a little smile. “It’s like this every day,” she said. The weather hadn’t helped, and even this sunny day had turned gray and drizzly. “Last week was so bad and stormy, we saw no one,” Grant said. “We might as well have been in Statia.” “Except for the grocery store,” Jo countered. So many choices! Even the marked-down, days-old produce was fresher than what they could get on the island. And in this age of streaming video, they had been at a disadvantage in Statia, almost the last place in the Western Hemisphere to get broadband. I mentioned a documentary, and Grant looked blank. “Did it come out in the last thirteen years?” he joked.

  It was time for Mister Maker on the BBC, and that was how we all wrapped up the afternoon, watching a rubber-faced Brit make little aliens with three googly eyes out of modeling clay and pipe cleaners. The little aliens in the living room in Staffordshire watched, entranced, and the adults smiled over their heads. Jo’s mother and her new husband were on their way, to free them for an evening of wine and Indian food and, best of all, talk of archaeology.