Lives in Ruins

by Marilyn Johnson

  I found my way back to the field station, where two resident scientists finally steered me down the right path; deep in the woods, I ran into Moran herself, who had gone looking for her missing student. I’d needed three rescuers, a personal record.

  Moran and I reached the pig burial site just after the others had marked off a generous area around the grave with yellow crime-scene tape. I pulled on my lightweight white Tyvek suit, with booties and a hood to keep me from contaminating evidence, then finished my outfit with two layers of latex gloves, and joined the crew. We looked like a platoon of astronauts, dispatched to a sandy semilunar landscape that was littered with little pine cones and dead leaves. First, we photographed and mapped the site. Then, inside the taped area, we lined up a couple feet apart and walked slowly, south to north, through the site, eight abreast, veering around trees, the cistern, and the grave. As we searched for shell casings or any other evidence, we used our pin flags to probe the leaves and soft ground, marking anything that looked like a human might have left it behind. Then we spread out and walked west to east across the site. Next we studied each of the flags and mapped them. “Why is this one marked?” Moran asked. “There’s your shell casing,” said the homicide cop, pointing out the shell camouflaged in the brown grass.

  This excavation was a painstaking affair. We measured, photographed, and logged every step of it; checked the color of the soil against our soil charts; and ended up with a rectangular area four feet by eight, divided into quadrants, marked by nails at the corners; we tied string between the nails to mark the perimeter of the excavation. Eventually, as we took turns carefully troweling the surface to reverse the hasty burial, we started finding trotters and toes and lumps of fat covered with hair from the rotting pig; we also found water bottles and even a beer can and cigarette butts, all potentially powerful evidence. “Cigarette butts are great for DNA, and bad guys like to smoke,” Moran noted.

  Lucky for us it was a chilly spring; we were sweating in the Tyvek suits, and I could just imagine what ninety degrees and swarms of insects could do to make this more difficult. We were already afflicted by buzzing gnats. As the hole deepened, reaching into the center of the grave to carefully extract the dirt required a stretch that made my ribs ache. “Try excavating over your head,” Moran said, laughing. “Try excavating on a steep slope!”

  When she was twenty years old, a recent graduate of Bryn Mawr in classical and Near East archaeology, Moran had been so determined to work as an archaeologist that she took a job on a field crew for a CRM firm. “It was tough, physical work, all day, every day,” she said. Safety was not a priority, so, not surprisingly, she suffered lead contamination working at a hazardous site. In the year 2000, she made $9.50 an hour, with no benefits. It was a punishing job, but it had one reward. When anyone asked her profession, she could say, with satisfaction, professional archaeologist.

  “Here’s a maggot,” Amanda called, and Moran offered her a vial and a label for the white, grublike creature. “I’m surprised we haven’t found more of them,” Moran said. “Sometimes, you’ll remove a layer of dirt over the grave and there will be a whole bed of writhing maggots.” Maggots, the larval stage of various flies, are activated by heat. Moran described how systematic and careful attention to them could, like everything else in the realm of forensics, build a true picture and timeline of the scene and even help make a criminal case. Identifying which species of fly a maggot represented, for instance, can be correlated with air temperature and burial conditions and used to calculate how long a body has been dead. “It’s one of the more accurate indicators of time of death,” Moran said. She was fascinated by all the ways nature recycled its dead and an eager scientist of decomposition. “I have forty-five rats buried in my backyard to study,” she said.

  By mid-afternoon, we had excavated a foot deep into the grave and were stretched out on our stomachs to reach inside—five excavators radiating out from the hole, a star with white Tyvek points. I scraped and brushed in dirt from around the pig into the dustpan, then, still on my stomach, twisted back to dump it in a bucket, which others would screen. The smell from the emerging carcass rose like a powerful repulsing wave. I forced myself to breathe it in and tried to describe it, along with my fellow crime-scene analysts. Organic, foul as sewage or fetid water, but with a persistent, cloying density, it clung to my hair and clothes. When I got home later that night, my dog went crazy over the smell.

  Moran’s assistant Eric Young was about fifty, the oldest person at the gravesite besides me. Bald and mustached, he was a retired cop who had gone back to school to earn two degrees in archaeology. He stood over us, amused by our efforts to describe the stench. “You think this smells bad?” he asked, and began telling stories from his days as a detective. One involved the shotgun suicide of a man who never bathed. He told me he did forensic work “because somebody has to do it.” His passion, it turned out, was Mesoamerican archaeology, circa 3,000 B.C.; he excavated, when he could, in Mexico and Guatemala. Next week he and Moran would be in Austin, at the annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

  Since Moran had earned a graduate degree in the U.K., she had been promoting British advances in the applied science of forensics (inspired, in part, she is convinced, by Sherlock Holmes—“He really anticipated a lot of forensics.”). She is an advocate for developing standard operating procedures for crime-scene analysis and for the past seven years, she has helped organize the SAA’s annual panel on forensics. This year, she would be presenting a paper on her latest experiment, giving law enforcement and forensics professionals a chance to conduct a “full-scale post-blast investigation.” This had involved obtaining a bus, filling it with dead farm animals, and constructing an identity for each animal, complete with personal effects like cell phones and jewelry. The final step was to simulate a terrorist attack during the morning commute and blow up the bus.* “The animals were dressed in clothing,” Young said appreciatively as Moran nodded. “Children’s clothing!” The professionals participating in this exercise had to respond to the blast, secure the area, and process the site. They had to gather evidence, gleaning what information they could from the debris that could lead to the perpetrators. And they had to try to gather and properly identify each animal and its property—their duty to the survivors. Moran was proud of the results: every animal in the simulation (and fifty-eight of the sixty-one personal items she had planted) had been recovered and identified.

  I looked at the huge, partially decayed pig, the stand-in for our waitress, and thought how much more difficult this would be with scraps of blue jeans or a T-shirt. And what if . . . ? Most of my fellow excavators here had already handled human remains, and reported for work each day prepared to encounter more. I breathed deep, in a kind of salute to their fortitude.

  It was late in the afternoon. Moran regretted that we didn’t have time to remove the carcass from the grave. Sometimes what was underneath a body was telling: a weapon, or footprints. “Or even dead leaves,” she said. “If the killer dug the hole in advance and left it open, this could be a sign of premeditation.” But the partially excavated pig would be reburied and left for another class to find. Young, Moran, and one of the students puffed on a few of Young’s cigarettes, then threw the butts into the grave, along with some soda cans and water bottles—criminal evidence for future forensic students to puzzle over. We filled in the pit with screened dirt, tamped it down, and hiked back through the pines with our shovels and crime-scene tape and evidence bags.

  Amateurs

  SINCE WORKING FOR the medical examiner of New York City, going through the debris from the neighborhood of the Twin Towers, Erin Coward had decided to make forensic anthropology her specialty. While she applied for programs, she was staying with her mother near Washington, D.C. We arranged to meet one afternoon near the Capitol. Coward and her mother, Lane, picked me up at my hotel to whisk me off to check out an archaeological museum Erin had found online. “We never heard of this place,” h
er mother said, “but Erin called and made arrangements for a private showing.” How great is this? I thought happily, as her mother chauffeured us around the circles and loops of suburban D.C. and chatted knowledgeably about her daughter’s archaeological career. “Did she tell you about finding a seashell in the middle of the desert?”

  It was an adventure with lively and well-read companions. The bedtime story that Erin had wanted to hear each night in childhood had been Beowulf; now she consumed biography, travel essays, British novels, Stephen Jay Gould, Bill Bryson. Of Bryson’s A Short History of Nearly Everything, Erin said: “I was prepared to be a skeptic—‘I will take you down!’—but he was amazing on evolution.”

  The car climbed the hills above D.C. to the Palisades, a residential neighborhood of lovely homes on an old river terrace above the Potomac. We would never have found the Palisades Museum of Prehistory without GPS. We were running a little late, and Erin nervously chewed a nail while her mother drove up and down a road of pretty houses, all of us squinting at street numbers. There were no signs, no indication that anything commercial was happening here—and, as it turned out, nothing commercial was. The address was for the corner house on the big lot, with a grape arbor and an outbuilding and children’s toys littering the patio. Our host, Doug Dupin, was a relaxed young dad, a skateboarder, who led us out back. We walked across the lawn to the outbuilding, an elaborate clubhouse with just enough room inside for four. “I’ve been working for a few years on this thing, and every once in a while people come through,” Doug Dupin said. He had been digging the foundation for a wine cellar when he began to uncover layers of history: old medicine bottles, Civil War bullets, shards of pottery, and Native American points. While Lane Coward and I admired the decor, burlap walls with bark accents, and the posters he made and sold (Smoking Pipes of the American Indian, Stone Points of the Potomac Palisades), Erin gravitated toward the display cases of mounted Indian points. She and Dupin began speaking the language of stone tools.

  Dupin’s personal collection, and his determination to salvage what he could of the archaeology of the area, had deepened when a soccer field was dug in his neighborhood. He watched bulldozers churn up the earth, exposing all sorts of artifacts. He alerted the archaeologist who worked for the District of Columbia, but could not get him to halt the construction or gather the artifacts, so he and a couple neighbors began surface-collecting points and pottery in the evenings. He posted his finds on an archaeology listserv, only to earn a scolding from the local historic preservation office. “Look,” he told us, “I’m happy to let the professionals take over, but if they aren’t going to do their jobs, I will step in.” Dupin began noticing how little actually got surveyed and mitigated in the Palisades before developers broke ground. So he decided to intervene on his own, collecting and cataloging artifacts for public display. He bought some display cases, fixed up his clubhouse as a museum, put together a website, and stepped into the cavernous gap left by the local professionals. He also started to document local violations of historic preservation laws, to create a record of the local history that had been found—as well as the history that had been erased.

  He was driven by a connection to this landscape, the people who once inhabited it, and the next generation who would inherit it. “The river below is full of fish,” Dupin said. “You can see why the Native Americans loved it. I take my three boys exploring in the caves in the bluffs, and we’ve found petroglyphs [rock carvings] and arrowheads.”

  Coward told him about her work in the Southwest, and they found common ground in their love of the Native American past. Both were frustrated by the lack of economic support for Native American cultural history. These days, Erin and Dupin agreed, funding went to colonial sites and African-American projects. The extraordinary record of Native American life that stretched back more than ten thousand years was going begging.

  Later Erin admitted that, after she met Dupin, “I had to reevaluate my thinking toward amateur archaeologists.” If they were as responsible as he was, she wouldn’t mind seeing them train volunteers. Come to think of it, “teaching the public how to properly deal with accidental finds would be a huge help to a number of professionals.” She was ready to put the man to work!

  Before Dupin’s sons got home from school, we headed to Erin and Lane’s family home in Annandale, Virginia, where we cooked mahi-mahi and Erin talked about working on the Big Island in Hawaii. She remembered finding petroglyphs full of piko holes everywhere. Piko holes—tiny gouges in the basalt where natives once buried the stumps of their babies’ umbilical cords for good luck.

  Lane beamed at the daughter who could find such marvels in the world. But when Erin carried our dishes out to the kitchen, Lane leaned my way, the concerned mother harking back to the World Trade Center rubble, and whispered, “Did she tell you about finding the baby’s T-shirt?”

  ARCHAEOLOGY IN A DANGEROUS WORLD

  A historic alliance

  “CHAMPIONS, TAKE your seats!” I heard the bark from a hotel meeting room and was swept from the crowded corridor and into a folding seat. I had been wandering the halls at the annual meeting of the AIA, looking for a tantalizing place to land, contemplating the sign posted outside this room: “Cultural Heritage Preservation in a Dangerous World.” I liked the sound of that dangerous world. Certainly it was a difficult world I entered, one where archaeology met the military and acronyms spawned more acronyms.* This was a meeting of CHAMP, short for Cultural Heritage by AIA/Military Panel,† a complicated name but useful, if only so about fifty of us could be called to order with the words, “Champions, let’s start!”

  Who were these people? I looked around and noticed how many men wore suits and ties and sat coiled and alert: the military was here in force—the Army, Navy, Air Force, even Central Command,* not to mention multiple members of the National Guard and a man who identified himself as the Special Assistant to the U.S. Army Judge Advocate General for Law of War Matters—now there was someone I hadn’t expected to see at an archaeology conference. Polite, with a steely, attentive edge, the military people introduced themselves, along with several dozen archaeology graduate students and professors from multiple countries, a 3-D digital archivist, the former president of the American Institute of Archaeology, and me.

  What was happening here? The archaeologists were collaborating with the military to protect the world’s cultural heritage from tanks, bombs, guns, boots, and sticky fingers. With the blessing of high command, archaeologists had begun to arm U.S. soldiers with enough cultural information to conduct missions, and engage in combat without destroying the world’s archaeological treasures.

  Soldiers and archaeologists had worked together before. The Monuments Men and Women of World War II famously and cinematically helped reclaim the artistic heritage of Europe after it was plundered by the Nazis. But the collaboration stopped there. Then, in 2003, the National Museum of Iraq was looted, an event that tarnished the military and traumatized the archaeological profession. American troops had stood by while it happened, we were told in news reports; some accounts had the troops firing on the museum and opening the doors to looters.* Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld compounded the damage, dismissing the plunder with the memorable observation, “Stuff happens.”

  The shock waves from this event and its aftermath galvanized Congress to finally sign the 1954 treaty, The Hague Convention for the Protection of Cultural Property in the Event of Armed Conflict (called simply The Hague Convention). It also propelled some alarmed archaeologists and military personnel to discuss joining forces again. Though it’s hard to imagine two more cautious, even paranoid, professions, their members shared a fervent desire to minimize damage to the institutions and artifacts that preserve cultural identity. The people behind CHAMP, I learned, had been working for the better part of a decade to create trust between the two groups and advance their mutual interests. Some of their contacts had never been to an archaeology conference.

  After being told of
the reasons CHAMP had been formed, we split up into working groups. I gravitated toward the take-charge woman in a leopard-print wrap dress and black boots who was organizing those interested in cultural heritage information. Corine (Cori) Wegener, a retired U.S. Army Reserve major and museum curator, had served as the Civil Affairs officer assigned to the National Museum of Iraq after its looting. She was the founder of the U.S. Committee of the Blue Shield†—not the insurance company, but the American branch of an international nonprofit organization dedicated to the wartime protection of cultural property worldwide, the cultural equivalent of the Red Cross. Now in her forties, she presided over the group gathered at this table with the mission to place crucial archaeological information into the hands of military strategists. Ah, information, as in intelligence! I settled into a chair in the outer row, a satellite, an eavesdropper, drawn by nothing more than the thought of archaeologists throwing their bodies on the treasures of past civilizations.