Lives in Ruins

by Marilyn Johnson

  THE HEADQUARTERS OF the Cultural Resources department at Fort Drum is upstairs in an Army-issue-beige building, in a spacious storeroom divided by a row of yellow metal shelves and lined with gunmetal-gray file cabinets and map drawers. Rush opened a cabinet and pulled out stone projectile points and beads, the focus of her work for years. She pointed to multiple jagged pieces of stone arranged in a circle on a workbench. “This is what an Indian grinding stone looks like after being run over by a truck,” she said. Things got messy sometimes with tanks rolling around. The last eight years of emergency international activism had taken Rush to Iraq, Afghanistan, Jordan, Turkey, Austria, the United Kingdom, and Italy, but home base was this storeroom, the offices for her and two other full-time archaeologists, plus the workroom downstairs where artifacts were sorted and cleaned. As head of Cultural Resources, Rush was responsible for the residue of the culture of all the people who have lived on Fort Drum’s land, from Native Americans of ten thousand years ago, to twentieth-century farmers and pig-iron workers, to the current population of soldiers. Since she started working on the base full-time in 1998, her team has made discoveries that included a sacred Native American site and the remnant shoreline of a prehistoric glacial lake. When you consider that finding sites was not even their mission—the team’s purpose was to find places for the military to safely build on, not go looking for archaeology—these discoveries were impressive.

  “In 1998, nobody was finding anything around Fort Drum,” said Rush, “though we did find old tools next to ravines—were people trapping animals there?” She had an idea about glacial lakes and shorelines, and called up the map experts on base. She asked the global information system (GIS) people if they could show her the ravines. “There was this magic moment when I was looking at the map with the hills shaded, as if the sun was setting. You could see the sites, bing, bing, bing. That’s where the tributaries had been flowing into the lake.” Finding the shoreline of prehistoric Glacial Lake Iroquois added a previously unknown layer to the history of the area. “Fort Drum—building boats for ten thousand years!” Rush said.

  The team also made discoveries in its own storage cabinets. Rush said a curator had been going through a collection of objects found at a nineteenth-century farmstead when he pulled out a French gun flint. “This doesn’t belong in a farmstead!” he told Rush. “And sure enough,” she elaborated, “we started finding trade beads and Indian assemblage and seventeenth-century cedar posts and all this material that made us realize we were looking at a very different site.” The cultural resource management company that had done much of the early archaeology at the garrison had labeled all the objects from this particular site 19th Century Farmstead. “In fact,” said Rush, “a major component of it turned out to be a seventeenth-century fur-trading and Jesuit site, which for many people is much more interesting. And actually very important—it turns out to be the only one on the New York side of the border.”*

  Rush was reflexively generous about the CRM company’s error. “So much depends on the personal interests of the principal investigators. The one on this team was interested in when cement barn floors first appeared in this part of the country.” Cement barn floors! She laughed, as if to say, I know, archaeologists are weird, and then she told me about a mistake she and her group had made. She said that discovering evidence of boat-building along the remnant shoreline had attracted a prominent archaeologist interested in ancient maritime routes. “We opened up our debitage bag to him—all the bits of stone that we had no idea about but had saved—and he started finding channel flakes in it. Those are really important! This archaeologist could have been so mean. He could have looked at me and said, ‘You stupid, stupid woman, you’re not qualified to be working here. Anyone who can’t identify a channel flake . . . !’”

  We were both laughing, though I had to admit I had no idea what a channel flake was. Rush gave me an indulgent look and explained; it was a better story if you understood the punch line. Fluted paleo-Indian points have a channel or groove in the middle, and to form that groove, someone had to chip out a piece of stone. “That piece is the channel flake,” she said. “The point is, this man found really important things in my debitage bag, but instead of making us miserable and demoralized, he was like, ‘This is so exciting!’ Then he patiently said, ‘Would you like me to show you the characteristics?’ So it became a fabulous learning experience. We have a motto here, that our most exciting days are the days we discover we were wrong. That means we discovered something new, and we’re learning.”

  LAURIE RUSH HAD a preppy upbringing in Connecticut but decided to head to the Midwest for college, because she had heard the people there were nice. Seriously, that was her priority. She met her husband, Jack, at Indiana University in Bloomington, and after he got his medical degree from the University of Chicago and she earned her master’s and doctorate at Northwestern, the couple moved to the Thousand Islands region of Lake Ontario, the North Country, where he could work off a public-health scholarship by practicing in an underserved area. They began their family, which soon totaled five children, and Laurie started to find archaeological work from local engineering firms and the Antique Boat Museum. The Doctors Rush thought Northern Exposure, that early-nineties television series about a new doctor taking a post in Alaska, had been created for their amusement; they referred to it as “The Jack and Laurie Show” and “we swore they were bugging our house to get the dialogue.” The wind howled across Lake Ontario and through the nearby Adirondack Mountains every winter; snow started falling in October. When I visited Rush at Fort Drum, it was mid-May, but a chilly rain blew sideways during our tour of the base; I could have used a pair of warm gloves. “Fort Richardson in Alaska might be a little colder than us, but we get more snow,” Rush said.

  The extreme weather was one reason Fort Drum became the eventual home of the Tenth Mountain Division, the U.S. Army’s first ski-trained soldiers, who fought in World War II and wrested key posts in the mountains of Italy from the Nazis. They “were the guys who started the ski industry in this country,” Rush said. The climate challenges both humans and hardware. After technological disasters caused by torrential thunderstorms, the division’s field computers were reconfigured as “ruggedized” iPads that transmit electronic notes directly to the lab. It isn’t just precipitation that was a problem; in summer, everything gets sticky with bug spray. “It gets buggy here?” I asked. Rush’s rumbling laugh was my answer.

  The physical discomforts of fieldwork had discouraged Rush early on from a career in archaeology. Unlike the other professionals I met, she had imagined an alternate career for herself; her doctorate, in fact, is in public health. But there were no jobs in the Thousand Islands in public health, while CRM firms in this area were begging for trained practitioners in archaeology. She adjusted her expectations and, ever practical, returned to the field.

  RUSH, TWO MEMBERS of her archaeology team, and I all put on bright-orange reflector vests and headed out in the rain to see the home of the Tenth Mountain Division. The base was a network of streets with names like Operation Iraqi Freedom and Enduring Freedom, set against a beige- and-brown landscape striped with evergreen and punctuated by functional prefab offices. We drove past giant open stalls fitted with water hoses and liquid soap—car washes for tanks.

  Our first stop was the interactive map room in the Range Division, where a security team kept a sharp eye on the troops training in the field. Live ordnance was a hazard; we were wearing orange hunters’ vests so we wouldn’t get shot, but all those lit-up firing ranges on the map made me skittish. It didn’t help to hear that one of Rush’s colleagues, who supervises much of the fieldwork on the base, has the bomb squad on speed dial. A display case outside the map room showed some of the weaponry found on Fort Drum—bombs, grenades and rockets from the past century, sleek, barbed, and menacing, the modern version of a museum case full of points, spears, and arrowheads.

  There were over six hundred historic sites and more t
han two hundred prehistoric sites at the fort, but Rush wanted to show me several replicas of Afghan villages, built for training purposes and made of rubber and recycled construction material. A low wall enclosed an area of “avoidance targets”—a mock mosque and a pretend Muslim cemetery—so that soldiers and aerial gunners could train for combat while trying to minimize damage to sacred sites. Another site featured low, flat-roofed shelters, several occupied by bearded dummies in turbans, and a painted car made of sculpted spray polyurethane foam. The cost of each site, Rush said, was less than $2,500, the maximum amount one could then charge on a government credit card. She was especially pleased with the mosaic tower, a copy of one from Uruk, in Iraq, that was made of sonotubes (cheap but durable paper tubes, usually used to pour concrete in), scavenged from the base’s construction supply.

  Fort Drum’s fake sites looked almost cartoonish, but they represented the first efforts by the military to give soldiers explicit practice at being both effective warriors and sensitive occupiers. “We’ve been short on practical solutions. We’re like, ‘Guys, be more careful.’ But we never tell them how,” Rush said. Fort Drum’s sites are now being duplicated on other bases, and Rush and her team are in demand to guide other military archaeologists in the construction of replica archaeological features.

  Archaeology is full of creative improvisation, but that usually means pulling trucks out of ditches or figuring out how to excavate in hard-to-reach places, not sculpting replica sites. But the top priority of everyone at Fort Drum was to support the troops, so Rush, who has a reputation as a pragmatist willing to work with the command, is resourceful almost by definition, a mission-oriented archaeologist. She recalled an early presentation on cultural sensitivity she made to Iraq-bound soldiers, and the soldier who said, “‘What do we do when they shoot at us from cemeteries? Is it all right to shoot back?’ I said, ‘Hell, yes!’ and another soldier said, ‘You’re my kind of archaeologist.’”*

  We drove past the historic village of Leraysville, with its old mansion and servants’ quarters, now used for visiting officers and military celebrations, and the rural outpost of Sterlingville, both acquired by eminent domain around World War II. The residents were resettled, and in the 1990s the empty villages were placed on the National Register of Historic Places. Cultural Resources guided the repairs to the LeRay Mansion (even advising volunteers how to decorate it authentically during the holidays) and took over management of the ruins and crumbling foundations of Sterlingville’s old homes for preservation purposes. Rush and her team gave a tour to the former residents of Sterlingville and their descendants, and were surprised to hear complaints that the land was off-limits to soldiers. What, these people wondered, had been the point of sacrificing their homes if the soldiers couldn’t train here?

  The feedback gave the Cultural Resources crew the idea to adapt the real archaeological site at Sterlingville to help prepare troops who were soon to deploy. They got the top layers of vegetation cleared, then began stabilizing the site so it could be used without damage—“hardening the site,” Rush called it. They reinforced crumbling walls with sandbags and covered open foundations with tough but permeable geotextiles or recycled tank treads, then spread clean sand and dirt on the coverings. The result was a site strengthened at its vulnerable points, but still an obvious and authentic ruin where soldiers could practice combat scenarios that avoided damage to its archaeological features. With the blessing of Sterlingville’s former residents and the gratitude of the commanding officers, the first archaeological site in the United States was opened to train soldiers headed overseas, two years after the Babylonian temple was damaged in Iraq.

  And Rush continues to reach young soldiers and to arm them with respect: one of her former Army commanders, now in cadet command, has incorporated her cultural heritage lessons into the curriculum, where they will become a part of every cadet’s ROTC training.

  BECAUSE RUSH DROVE us the long way around the base, we had to reenter at one of the gates. She passed her team’s Army IDs and my driver’s license to the soldier in the booth. “One alien?” he said, looking at me. Certainly I had started the day as an alien, trying to find my way through this big base and all those roads with Freedom in their name, and following directions like “turn right at the bomb” (there was a big painted bomb at the corner on Rush’s team’s road). But hadn’t I made progress since then? Hadn’t Rush invited me to come back in the buggy summertime and toil with the shovelbums? “Yes,” I admitted to the guard. “One alien.”

  We parked in a sandy area at the edge of pine-and-birch woods and walked through a strand of pine trees to a clearing. The air was saturated, and mist hung over the site, making it feel hushed and separate from the rest of the base—like a place where people gathered to chant and sing, not fire weapons. One of Rush’s team wandered off to track native flora, such as the British soldier lichen, which look like little red hats. Another inspected the ground like a diligent archaeologist, and found a tiny porcelain doll’s head with a seam across its skull.

  Laurie Rush stood looking over the sandy site. She had sent a survey team here years ago, knowing it was a sensitive area; it bore recent evidence of tanks rolling through, but was also scattered with stone tool debris thousands of years old. Rush remembered getting the call from one of the surveyors: “‘I think I’m standing in a stone circle.’” An arrangement of standing stones could mean a sacred gathering place.

  The process of archaeological identification can take a long time; this site took Rush’s team years to scope out. “Over four hundred hearths on the site, but—no pottery! That was a big clue that something special happened here. This was not a place where the work of daily life happened.” Eventually, Cultural Resources radiocarbon-dated most of the hearths in the area back to A.D. 375, and consulted one of the pioneers of the field of archaeoastronomy [the cultural history of astronomy]. The field had more than five hundred stones bigger than ten inches, and they were arranged in pairs—“that’s an important part of the site. Some of them line up with the Dog Star [Sirius] at the midpoint of the Iroquois lunar calendar,” Rush said.

  Once the archaeologists figured out that the stones were aligned with the stars, they invited local Mohawk families to a gathering. The children danced that night, then they all camped out and assembled before dawn the next morning. Rush recalled her own silent prayer that day: Please, God, let the sun rise here. And it did: gloriously, the sun shone at dawn “for a whole ten minutes,” she said, “before a cloud bank moved in.” The archaeoastronomer, Anthony Aveni, told Rush that other boulders probably lined up on the equinox, one of the two days each year when the sun is directly above the equator. Was Aveni right? “Yes,” Rush confirmed. “Me and a porcupine were there for that sunrise.”

  The site was made accessible to the Native Americans anytime but is off-limits to Army soldiers and employees, though the Cultural Resources crew and their guests are an exception. “Once the Army decides to protect it, our work is done,” Rush said. “This frustrates the crew. Archaeologists like to dig, not leave things in situ. To them, they’re just getting started.” But for the Iroquois nations, including the Mohawks, “that suited them.” Rush loved to talk about the Native American visits to the base, the time one of the elders took a stick and drew a constellation in the sand, then poked holes for stars to represent the Pleiades and “smoothed all the marks—very theatrical,” or the poetic moment when the spiritual leader of the New York tribes, the Iroquoian Tadodaho, thanked “‘the stars whose names we have forgotten.’”

  Rush viewed her connection with all of the Iroquois, who call themselves Haudenosaunee, as one of the outstanding benefits of her job. “We’ve learned so much about them since working for the Army.” Whether she was making presentations with her playing cards, or lobbying to include an archaeologist in the planning of international war exercises, she promoted the rewards of consulting other cultures about archaeology, depicting the Army’s relationship with the Iroquois a
s a model. Rush referred to Native Americans not as stakeholders or descendant communities, but as the Army’s “host nation”; when the Haudenosaunee chiefs, clan mothers, and Tadodaho visited the base, they were received with ceremony, as heads of state.

  Heads of state? It hasn’t always been like this. After a costly lawsuit between the Makua Military Reservation in Oahu and native Hawaiians, the Department of Defense decided to try a new tack late in the nineties. The DoD consulted tribal leaders throughout the country, asking them how they expected to be treated. The results were made policy in October 1998, formalizing the new government-to-government model—essentially a resolution by the Department of Defense to consult Native Americans in all matters that related to them and a pledge to treat them respectfully.

  Rush has been honored by the Secretary of the Army and the Secretary of Defense multiple times and by her fellow professional archaeologists, for her innovative leadership, but when she was cited for her work with the Iroquois, her husband shrugged. “I don’t get it,” he said. “All you did was treat them with respect. And they gave you an award for that?”

  “Yes,” she told him. “That’s the point!”

  THE IRAQ AND Afghan Heritage playing cards are a triumph of geekery, handsome black decks of cards that work just fine for solitaire or poker or war, but are rich with archaeological images. The decks display an internal logic that a poet would love: each suit stands for a different aspect of culture—diamonds for artifacts, spades for digs and sites, hearts for “winning hearts and minds,” and clubs for heritage preservation. Each card contains a different message, from the most basic (“Stop digging if you find ancient artifacts or archaeological features”) to the revelatory (“Karez, the ancient water system tunnels in Afghanistan, look like ant hills on aerial imagery”). The decks can also be laid out as puzzles, with the backs of each card forming part of a larger picture of an archaeological icon. As artifacts themselves, the cards tell a great deal about the conscientiousness, creativity, and playfulness of the people who devised them.