Lives in Ruins

by Marilyn Johnson

  Laurie Rush found her first partner in the creation of these playing cards at her high school reunion. There she renewed her teenage friendship with Roger Ulrich, now an archaeologist teaching classics at Dartmouth and an Old World expert who could link her to specialists in classical archaeology. These specialists advised Ulrich and Rush on the content on the cards; Ulrich’s students fact-checked the information, did the photo research, and secured the rights to reprint the images of sites and artifacts; and the Colorado State University Center for Environmental Management of Military Lands was enlisted to design and produce the cards. Soon there were three decks, one for Iraqi and Afghan heritage, one a dedicated Afghan deck, and one for American and Egyptian troops, who participated in war maneuvers every two years.

  The only complaints Rush heard from the troops about the cards and the training on replica sites was, Where were these years ago? Stories about the cards appeared in Archaeology magazine and in USA Today—positive stories about the military and cultural heritage. Rush was heartened. The cards reached the soldiers in desert tents who could deal themselves useful and interesting facts about the heritage of the area, while studying images of landmarks captioned pointedly: “This site has survived 17 [or 23 or 35] centuries. Will it and others survive you?” But the cards were equally valuable as business cards that directed those working on these issues in the compartmentalized world of archaeology and the bureaucratic maze of the military to an open and direct channel of action. Information about the Cultural Resources staff of Fort Drum and the Colorado center, where one could find a network of professionals who were dedicated to preserving heritage and minimizing military harm, was printed on every deck and accompanied every press story. “It’s funny how many military people found out about the project through the mass media,” Rush said. The cards had been beacons.

  For all the approval she’s earned from military leadership and the troops, Rush has been criticized by some archaeologists for deigning to work with them at all. At the 2008 World Archaeological Congress, in Dublin, she faced so much resistance that she needed police protection while presiding over a panel about the benefits of collaborating with the military: a post in an online chat room had proposed storming her session, so the Irish Garda accompanied Rush and her fellow speakers throughout the conference. “One of the Gardaí said, ‘Ma’am, we need to review the evacuation plan with you,’” Rush recalled. “I must tell you, if you’re ever worried about your speakers getting there on time, this will solve that!” Then she added, perhaps unnecessarily, “This work is not for the fainthearted.”

  Responding to her critics, Rush wrote an essay titled “Mars Turns to Minerva: Thoughts on Archaeology, the Military, and Collegial Discourse,” a defense of the U.S. military’s efforts to protect cultural heritage and a plea for reasoned and dignified dialogue—essentially, a call for everyone to please be nice and remember that there are lives at stake. Rush began working full-time at Fort Drum the year after the sudden death of her oldest child, at seventeen, and there is something extremely personal about her indefatigable efforts to help soldiers appreciate every scrap and crumb of human culture. She saw young men and women going off to war, and she wanted to help them earn and offer respect. The old complaint—why would we worry about potsherds and graves and ruins when we should be worrying about people?—was moot to her. Potsherds and graves and ruins were the stuff of people.

  Rush welcomed the debate. “Even the most seasoned and analytical anthropologists can find themselves becoming rapidly acculturated when exposed to a military environment,” she acknowledged, “and our colleagues can play a very important role in helping us to continually question the nature of our participation and the . . . effects that our work may have.” But she couldn’t condone withholding knowledge because you refused to work with those who waged war. “We had Iraqis die at checkpoints,” she said, “because our soldiers were extending their hands with the palms up to indicate ‘Stop.’ To Iraqis, extending the hand palm up means ‘Welcome.’ Now, as an anthropologist, if you have knowledge that could save people, how can you not share that?”

  Rush didn’t want to silence archaeologists who disagreed; she didn’t want to silence any constituency. She felt there should be room for everybody at the cultural table. TV reality shows featuring treasure hunters who used metal detectors, for instance, were roundly decried by archaeologists, but Rush saw the treasure hunters as potential allies in preservation. “The legislation is not going our way at all, and the archaeologists are all angry. That’s our image now, angry archaeologists. I want to say, ‘Wait, you have a constituency who loves these resources [the artifacts]. Can’t we figure out how to channel that enthusiasm?’ We are missing a tremendous opportunity here.

  “We still have that potential, but I think I have colleagues who forget that to be paid to do this is such an incredible privilege. We have jobs that other people dream about. I find myself at cocktail parties with doctors gathered around me, all saying, ‘Oh, I always wanted to be an archaeologist.’ I do a lot of pinching myself.”

  It was almost invisible, what she had done to shift the conversation: she waded into a contentious and thorny professional problem, and came out the other side hopeful and eager to make friends, even with treasure hunters.

  THE NIGHT I visited Fort Drum, I had dinner at a pub in Sackets Harbor with Laurie and her husband, Jack, a general practitioner with a droll sense of humor, along with their daughter Cait and her new husband. We watched the sun set over the harbor that had been the scene of several battles in the War of 1812. Our table was arrayed with different kinds of craft beer. The late rays flooded through the picture window and refracted through our drinks, turning each a different jewel-tone—amber, ruby, gold. Laurie told me about when she used to be afraid to speak in public or in front of generals. She took up ice dancing and entered competitions to get over her performance anxiety. Once you’ve literally fallen on your face in front of a crowd, she said, you could talk to anyone.

  Cait teased her mother about another experience she’d had with a journalist. A student had asked for an interview, so Laurie invited her to the fort. Cait quoted the resulting story: “‘You would never in a million years notice this woman. She is plain and short.’” Laurie led the laughter.

  Early in my research, an elder of the profession suggested that I follow at least one archaeologist who worked for the government. I said I was interviewing an archaeologist for the Army, Laurie Rush. The man lit up. “I like her!” he said, then added, hastily, “not that that should matter.”

  But in this case, being likable did matter. Her friendly and engaging manner helped bridge cultures, not to mention compartmentalized professions. And consider: niceness, as wielded by Rush, turned out to be quite the formidable weapon.

  HERITAGE

  BUCKETS OF ARCHAEOLOGISTS

  If archaeologists tried to save the world

  OVERHEARD AT 5:30 a.m. in the clean and charming railway station of Poroy, Peru, a shiny Disneyfied terminal dropped into the slummy, narrow-roaded, dog-clotted outskirts of Cusco: “I heard your paper.” “Yes, I heard yours!” (Many languages, many accents—simple English or Spanish would have to suffice at this hour.) The gathering of the UNESCO International Committee on Archaeological Heritage Management has concluded, four days of archaeologists from six continents talking about how to manage World Heritage sites, forty years after the ambitious program began—how are we doing? Now it’s time for their treat: the field trip to the king of archaeology sites, Machu Picchu. Few of the participants have four days to hike in on the Inca Trail, so they opted instead for the Vistadome train and its three- and-a-half-hour ride to Aguas Calientes at the base of Machu Picchu—neither as luxurious as the first-class Hiram Bingham rail nor as funky as the backpackers’ train. This is my dream, to ride a train stuffed with archaeologists and talk archaeology and cultural identity and repatriated artifacts and other burning topics while the scenery shifts dramatically and a real-life f
antasy kingdom comes into view.

  So much archaeological knowledge and experience is gathered in this pleasant terminal, embodied by the cheerful Elizabeth; the grandfatherly Willem; John, the Brit; Veysel, the handsome young doctoral student with two silver earrings who, while the rest of us hiked or taxied to the ruins above Cusco last night, rode a horse hired for the occasion; Monique, tiny and pretty with a severe haircut who made an impassioned presentation about the Palestinian heritage sites that no one can visit; Fritz, the German; Neale and the other sardonic Australians; Sato and his colleague Yo. Yo Negishi particularly enjoys the idea of a train full of archaeologists. It is the start of an amusing article, he thinks. Or an Agatha Christie mystery? There are apparently no murderers in our midst. In fact, we could not be a milder bunch. Professor Dr. Willem J. H. Willems, for instance, the copresident of the International Committee on Archaeological Heritage Management (ICAHM),* is sporting enough, even at this ungodly hour, to spar with Negishi as he tries to come up with a good collective noun for this group. A wheelbarrow? A dump? A field of archaeologists? Here, on the sanitized floor of the train station, we put it to a vote: a bucket of archaeologists sounds just right. But before the bucket of archaeologists can be transported, it is spilled and scattered: the seats on the Vistadome to Machu Picchu have been assigned already, based on when each of us booked our tickets. The archaeologists are sprinkled through the multiple cars of the train, mixed in with tourists, and indistinguishable. Only one is seated in my car: Ashton Sinamai, who works at a World Heritage site in Zimbabwe that has been all but abandoned by the local population, but I am separated from him by a family of chatty Canadians. Sinamai closes his eyes; I open my book.

  While the train’s stewards fuss over us like flight attendants, serving miniature food with unnecessary flourish, and as “El Cóndor Pasa” and other trembling pan pipe music plays over the train’s speakers, the scenery shifts from green plots and llama farms framed by picturesque mountains to jagged desert-like canyons to jungle terrain with giant, vivid flora. The huge windows on the side and roof of the train are spotless, the better to see the rock formations and succulent plants as we descend via switchbacks from very high ground into the Sacred Valley of the Incas.

  In Andes, my companion book for this journey, Michael Jacobs writes about geographer Alexander von Humboldt and botanist Aimé Bonpland’s expedition to South America at the turn of the nineteenth century: their “sensory intoxication,” excited by “absolutely everything, almost incapable of taking in so many new phenomena: the climate, the natural abundance, the unusualness of the plants . . . the overwhelming sensuality of a world in which even the crabs were sky-blue and yellow.” It’s an astute and amusing read for a journey like this, and Jacobs’s accounts of traffic accidents involving plunging buses are fresh in my mind as the bus we transfer to in Aguas Calientes barrels up the mountain toward our destination.

  We are within reach of what is arguably the most iconic archaeological find in a world that includes Pompeii, Petra, Angkor Wat, Stonehenge, and the great pyramids of Egypt, but anticipation is mixed with trepidation. Our driver meets another bus rocketing downhill and stomps the brakes; then slowly, painfully, and without any promise of success, our bus eases toward the unfenced edge, where a spectacular vista opens perilously close to our outer wheels. Then the buses creep past each other, close enough to suggest the Inca stonework that somehow features massive stone blocks wedged together so tightly that a credit card cannot fit between them. What would happen to world heritage if a bus full of archaeologists on the road to Machu Picchu tumbled over the edge and into the Urubamba River? For half an hour, such a fate is easy to imagine.

  Perhaps it is fear that turns Elizabeth Bartley talkative. All the way up the mountain, she chats about the mounds of Ohio, the archaeology near her home in Cincinnati that remains largely unstudied. For years, the University of Cincinnati didn’t even have a specialist in Ohio archaeology. Why don’t more people care about mounds? she wonders. I feel guilty hearing this. Because they’re dirt! is the phrase I swallow all the way up the mountain. Then I remember Poverty Point and silently vow to make a pilgrimage to some really big, really obvious mounds soon. It’s not just my bias, though: stone always trumps dirt in archaeological destinations. We are, after all, a busload of people, a parade of buses, ascending to a site carved out of stone.

  Several archaeologists spoke at the conference about the problem of “invisible archaeology,” significant sites that are so humble in appearance, or buried, or otherwise hidden from the view of tourists, that they have trouble winning support. It’s an interesting problem. Fritz the German—Friedrich Lüth, the president of the European Association of Archaeologists—mentioned the European continental shelf, which was above ground 20,000 years ago and now lies drowned along the current coastline and throughout most of the North and Baltic seas, a vast Paleolithic site. Scientists are working to try to map and preserve this tremendous resource, but because it will never be visible to tourists, it will probably never earn World Heritage protection. The millions of boots that trample through Machu Picchu and Petra take a toll, but they also support archaeology and help make the case for investing in preservation.

  The travelers ascend the trail from the turnstile entrance, then gather on one of the terraces overlooking Machu Picchu: archaeologists from five continents standing on the sixth. We have reached a spectacular pinnacle of civilization. You don’t have to know a thing to have your breath taken away. No amount of grooming—weeding, fitting stones back into place, keeping the golf-course-green grass tamed on terraces that once would have spilled over with potatoes and beans—can spoil the wildly improbable and spectacular jewel of a city, carved out of a mountain and brushed by clouds. But make no mistake, this site has been tidied. Look at old pictures of Machu Picchu when it was discovered by the American explorer Hiram Bingham (in the quaint way that representatives of empire nations could “discover” a site that local families lived on) to see what an effort has been made to strip out its overgrowth and tame its unruly and jungly tendencies.

  We look down on the lawns of the ceremonial plazas of Machu Picchu, nestled by a pretty maze of stone walls, with banked terraces and cliff faces forming a natural bowl; a game of badminton or croquet could be played on the plazas where a few alpaca roam. A European archaeologist turns to John Schofield, who used to work for the agency that oversees the historic buildings and monuments of England, and says wryly: “Looks like English Heritage is managing this.” They laugh, and those nearby laugh, too. Schofield points out one crucial difference—an English Heritage site would be crawling with tourists with self-guided tours clamped to their heads. And look at this gorgeous site, he says admiringly, and no personal audio devices!

  Even with the help of trains and buses, we are breathless. How did the Incas live here, much less haul up the stones to create this? We get as close as we dare to the edge of the terrace, but there are few railings, and thousands of opportunities to misstep and tumble off the mountain. “Do you think the Incas raised children here?” someone says speculatively. “How did they keep them from falling off?”

  The place is swarming with people, primarily people with gray hair and canes, and even one in a wheelchair, being lifted like a litter from terrace to terrace. Machu Picchu is a bucket-list destination, and, apparently, many people take the full span of their lives to work down their list. By the time we emerge on a ledge above the site and look down, we are 8,000 feet in the air and my heart is fluttering. Before descending to the plaza, we see two men carry a stretcher to a terrace above us and then hustle off with a stricken, strapped-on tourist. Buena suerte, turista. Like a band of monkeys who watch a tiger snatch one of their kind and carry him away, we blink and return to the alluring vista.

  There are so many of us that we split into two groups, each with a guide. I fall in with the Brits, the Japanese, the African, and the American. As is the custom, our guide is native—in this case, a Peruvian descen
dant of the Incas. I am a descendant of those geniuses who built the Fishkill Supply Depot and used it to manage and win the War for Independence; I am also a descendant of the geniuses who boiled mammoth and buffalo bones for bone grease. But our guide, Miguel, is the descendant of the geniuses who built Machu Picchu, and he stands here, magisterial, his eyes locked on ours as he details in a musical voice the wondrous accomplishments of the Inca from half a millennium ago. His ancestors did not just haul tons of stone a ridiculous vertical distance (without wheels, no less), carve them with great skill and artistry, and engineer the remote site with an ingenuity we can still learn from—they also apparently laid out the whole thing so at certain times of year, the light of the sun or moon would beam on particular sacred spots. For a stargazer who squints at the night sky through the ambient light pollution of New York City, this is almost impossible to imagine, but our guide tells us something new about astronomy at every stop—this tiny window in this stone wall lights up only on the winter solstice; that structure was an observatory—until the displays of mathematical and celestial expertise of those old Peruvians begins to feel like the work of superhumans. And they were artists, as well. On one of the center terraces I see an elegant, jagged rock sculpture placed squarely in front of an elegant, jagged mountain, a harmonic echo of the sort that can be seen all over the site. Day and night, summer and winter, the human construction chimes with nature.