Lives in Ruins

by Marilyn Johnson

  The archaeologists move single file along one terraced level and circle down to the main court level, descending into the bowl of Machu Picchu, all professional eyes appraising the architecture. Miguel gestures toward the stone buildings we pass, various residences and storerooms, but as he leads us past the entrances, Sinamai and John Schofield and Yo Negishi and Elizabeth Bartley peel off and duck beneath the lintels to explore, marveling at the window frames and door frames and niches, and snapping photos. Our guide scrupulously avoids enclosures, but archaeologists are happy to wiggle into tiny spaces. I follow one into a room the size of a closet. “Do you think Miguel is claustrophobic?” he says.

  You can tell the archaeologists, of course, by their photos. The tourists’ photos feature people in front of mountains, terraces, stone structures, sundials. The archaeologists wait until the people move away to take theirs: they want the terrace, the stone wall, the lintel, the human-made thing, all sans humans.

  I think the archaeologists are like the alpacas that roam the site, scrambling in the heat for hours without food or water. No snacks or drinks inside the gates of Machu Picchu, and the baños are back at the entrance and require a single sol. These arkies are tough. And ultimately they agree: this is one sweet archaeology site, even if there are too many tourists streaming through. One archaeologist leans over to look at the lower slope, overgrown with vines and trees—the groomed and mapped and guided part of Machu Picchu is only the beginning. Up and down the sides of this mountain, more sites are waiting to be excavated. The guide tells us that teams are working now to uncover other parts of the hidden city. Machu Picchu will grow. There are limits now on the number of people allowed to enter the site and hike the Inca Trail. The United Nations, in the form of its committees and advisory groups like ICAHM, will lean on Peru to limit even further the number of people tromping over the site. But as we learned at the conference, Peru, counting the tourists pouring in, is contemplating new entrance gates and information centers, expanded rail service, perhaps a nearby airport in its future.

  Meanwhile, the dashing Veysel Apaydin, a generation or two younger than most of the other archaeologists on this jaunt, has gone off to climb the insane peak of Huayna Picchu, risking life and limb to clamber up to the Incan priests’ summit. Hours later, he catches up with us, sweating testosterone, biceps bulging—and then he’s gone again. While we ride the bus down the mountain, hugging the inside track this time, Veysel makes the ninety-minute descent down the ancient staircase/donkey trail that Hiram Bingham used a century ago. “We’re all old people to him,” one of my companions notes.

  On the tour, our guide, Miguel, mentioned with pride the great Peruvian archaeologist Ruth Shady Solís, who discovered the oldest city in the Americas, Caral, located near the Peruvian coast a few hours north of Lima. How wonderful to hear Shady’s countryman brag about her on this peak, and I think about her as I descend the mountain. Ruth Shady—not Machu Picchu—was what drew me to Peru. Don’t get me wrong. I’m thrilled to see Machu Picchu, but Shady was the reason I came here.

  I LIKE ARCHAEOLOGISTS who throw their whole beings into the work and fight for scraps of rock and bone and their own vision and interpretation of the past. I like originals, and Shady is clearly one of those. As a young archaeologist, she combed aerial photographs of Peru and found some odd-looking features rising out of the Supe Valley. Guided by the photographs, she ventured out into the Peruvian desert a few hours north of Lima. According to a riveting article in Archaeology, “Shady endured an almost unimaginable regime of poverty and lawlessness as she tried to start work,” including being shot at by masked robbers. She dug during the day and went to school at night. She began teaching at Universidad Nacional Mayor de San Marcos in Lima and used students and soldiers from a nearby base to help her excavate the big hills, exposing the pyramids underneath. She was a force: somehow, over the course of fifteen years, she managed to get most of the road from the coast to Caral paved; somehow, she protected Caral from flagrant looting; and, eventually, her efforts led to Caral’s recognition and designation as a World Heritage site. And in another good move, she renamed the site Caral from the original Chupacigarro Grande (East).

  Shady’s only misstep seemed to be inviting a husband- and-wife team of American archaeologists, Jonathan Haas and Winifred Creamer, to help her complete the expensive work of carbon-dating that would allow her to calculate the age of Caral. An article in Discover titled “Showdown at the O.K. Caral” recounted Haas’s pitch to Shady about the advantages of a partnership: “as a stateside coauthor, he could secure grants for her project—hard to come by in impoverished Peru—from U.S. sources.” The Americans took the samples from Caral and sent them to the lab, which established the surprisingly ancient date of 2,627 B.C.; then they published the results in Science under all three bylines. This was sensational news. It meant Caral was as old as the Egyptian pyramids! Haas and Creamer were hailed as discoverers and quoted widely, particularly in the English-language press. Though the couple later tried to correct the misconception that they were anything but latecomers to this research, Shady was furious; she refused to work or speak with them again.

  Haas and Creamer weren’t going away, however; they had seen mounds all over the river valleys near Caral and were eager to dig in. In spite of the damage to their reputation and prominent archaeologists denouncing their appropriation, they won additional funding, hired Shady’s graduate assistant and other students from her university, pulled together a big team of American students, and began their own dig just north of Caral.

  For two years I’d been following the indomitable Ruth Shady, though she had no interest in corresponding with me, and I had seized on this cultural heritage conference as, among other things, a chance to see her keynote. I had settled into my front-row seat the first morning with such anticipation. At least I would get to see her imposing, fierce self, Peruvian earrings and necklaces gleaming, describe the place she had discovered in rapid Spanish, about one in ten words of which I might grasp. The conference organizer, Helaine Silverman, welcomed us to Cusco in both English and Spanish and began with the announcements, which led with the news: Alas, due to the urgent press of work, Ruth Shady Solís had, regrettably, canceled.

  I had a ticket. I came here for her. She was one of those archaeologists whose challenges had been epic, even operatic, whose accomplishments had rewritten human history—and she would not come out of her hole. I bit my cheek and swallowed the blood. I’ve lost count of the archaeologists I’ve chased who got away. They are an elusive bunch, in motion or in the thrall of another time. Even the ones who alight on a terraced ledge long enough to have a conversation would, before I knew it, shimmer like the good witch Glinda before evaporating into thin air.

  TOO BAD RUTH Shady wasn’t here at the ultimate archaeological conference, with two hundred of her international peers. She missed the PowerPoints from every corner of the globe. She missed the disappointment that rippled through the audience that had come to hear her—disappointment that conveyed our admiration.

  I considered the woman who announced her absence, Helaine Silverman, our fluent host. In English, she was all elbows and bustle, the brisk professor of archaeology at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and force behind the conference celebrating and reevaluating forty years of UNESCO’s World Heritage list. In Spanish, Silverman turned fluid and charming; her whole body came to life, hands moving gracefully, face animated. By day she wore glasses and sensible shoes and ran archaeologists on and off the raised stage, one every fifteen minutes, so we’d have time to hear everyone: scores of presentations from sites low and high, humble and spectacular, neglected and thriving. At night, Silverman switched into contacts and makeup, and in a woven shawl, swept a few of us to her favorite place to have drinks at a stunning former monastery on the steep hill overlooking Cusco, decked out with old tapestries and Baroque paintings. It was a place where you order one expensive pisco sour, then nurse it for hours on leathe
r cushions, basking in the luxury of this historic and beautifully restored piece of Peru. When we got hungry, we followed Silverman as she threaded her way through the narrow streets and a snakelike passage to the perfect hole-in-the-wall for a feast of quinoa soup for a few soles: a lesson in how to dine well on an archaeologist’s budget. I watched her talking to the waiter, hands like hummingbirds, ordering our casks and tureens.

  Those hands had dug deep into Peru, particularly the culture of the Nasca, a mysterious people who lived in the southern desert of Peru between 1,200 and 2,000 years ago. (Even the spelling of their name is mysterious; scholars are split on whether they are Nazca or Nasca; I follow Silverman, who calls the culture Nasca and the place and the lines Nazca.)* The Nasca left behind vivid textiles, pottery covered with creatures like the Fan-headed Mythical Killer Whale, and preserved human heads, their lips pinned together with cactus spines, with holes punched in the forehead and base of the skull to string a cord for carrying. The Nasca also left behind those gigantic lines etched in the desert ground, visible by airplane. The Nazca Lines, called geoglyphs by the archaeologists, had been made by removing the red rubble on the top layer of ground and etching shapes in the gray layer underneath. Millions of people knew them as the landing strips for ancient astronauts from Chariots of the Gods and other books by Erich von Däniken, the Swiss hotelier whose sensational books ruled the bestseller lists in the 1960s and ’70s.* Von Däniken is still manufacturing reasons, in books with names like Gold of the Gods and History Is Wrong, for why ancient natives could not possibly have been smart enough to create their own civilizations. “It is difficult to believe that it originated from a jungle people,” he wrote of the Mayans’ ability to calculate the length of a year on Venus. Silverman was a young student when von Däniken got his start; she has since written extensively about the Nasca, and rather than simply ignore those popular books, she has spoken up for archaeologists and tackled “the more egregious of the pseudoscientific theories about the Nazca Lines” and those people who have done so much harm to archaeology and the Peruvians by their “willful appropriation and misrepresentation of the past.” She did battle on behalf of the real history of Peru and in one of her books plucked out von Däniken’s heart; she feels archaeologists have a responsibility to call nonsense as they see it. To ignore it is costly.

  When Silverman finally took the stage at the conference to deliver her own talk, she didn’t mention the dramatic Nasca or any wacky pseudoarchaeology. She spoke about the neighborhood we were in, the historic center of Cusco and its Plaza de Armas, the World Heritage site that must accommodate both tourists and regular Cusqueños. How can it preserve its authenticity in the midst of a vibrant, changing city? In the past, Silverman tells us, she registered her dismay in the usual way of archaeologists when Inca walls were damaged during hotel construction, and when the beloved local Café Ayllu, the last “truly Cusqueño space, frequented for decades by intellectuals, the local middle class, and visiting anthropologists,” was displaced by its landlord for a KFC.* Silverman had been an outspoken voice for authenticity and preservation.

  Now, she said, she would like to revisit the idea of authenticity and explore the culture of the contemporary space. Cusqueños have taken the three fast-food franchises in the tourist center, KFC, McDonald’s, and the Peruvian chain Bembos, and made them their own. All three are decorated with Cusqueño art, and in a square that belongs to locals only on Sunday mornings or on holidays, they have become places where tourists and Cusqueños regularly interact the rest of the time. Finding contemporary authentic culture in the bright wrappings of fast-food restaurants was not just creative and inclusive; it represents a real shift in the scope and outlook of archaeologists. An archaeologist’s work wasn’t over when she lost a battle to freeze a corner of history in time. As long as there were people remaking that corner, Silverman seemed to be saying, there would be chapters upon chapters for archaeologists to write.

  The World Heritage movement began to preserve monuments and historic buildings after World War II and it has expanded in multiple ways since; that’s the job of this particular kind of conference, sponsored by an international scientific committee of UNESCO and its advisory group, to stretch and test and fine-tune our definition of heritage, and answer the question, What parts of human history are worth preserving? The last four decades have ushered in some mind-boggling adjustments to that question. Natural heritage, historic city centers, historic parks and gardens, underwater cultural heritage, and even intangible culture like dance, music, oral traditions, and festivals have all been added to the idea of heritage. Heather Gill-Frerking took the stage at the conference to make the case for mummies to be officially considered for the list. Though burial places like Pompeii and ancient Thebes, with its necropolis, have been designated World Heritage sites, human remains are not specifically covered in its mission. Tollund Man, who resides now in the Silkeborg Museum in Denmark, and Ötzi the Iceman, a naturally preserved mummy over five thousand years old, discovered in ice in the Alps, are not eligible for World Heritage designation—but, Gill-Frerking wondered, weren’t they important parts of our archaeological patrimony?

  As more than one archaeologist pointed out to me, the field advances one obituary at a time. Archaeologists took ages to embrace historical archaeology as a legitimate branch of the profession. And once they accepted the idea that sites with seventeenth-, eighteenth-, and nineteenth-century artifacts could be understood in fresh ways by field methodology, what was to stop them from turning to twentieth- and even twenty-first-century sites? Could archaeologists bring their observational and scientific skills to bear on the room you just inhabited? The field that once counted classical or prehistoric bones, stones, and pottery as its turf now excavates (and observes and ruminates about) everything from 2.5-million-year-old ancestral human tools to the context of the chicken nugget you just threw away.

  BETWEEN TECHNICAL PRESENTATIONS about some of the dazzling tools of archaeology and testimonies on the success and failure of various sites to engage local communities, thwart looters, and survive human and environmental threats, there were talks like Silverman’s with a humble and surprising human focus. These are the ones that end up fixed in my memory.

  John Schofield, now a professor at York University, in the U.K., gave a presentation with a particularly populist and modern take on archaeology. An unprepossessing guy with a mobile, everyman’s face, Schofield specializes in what he calls “the archaeology of the contemporary past”—what I think of as the archaeology of five minutes ago. He once worked with a team that “excavated” a worn-out Ford Explorer that had been used for archaeological excavations. They documented the van like a piece of material culture. They scrutinized it, measured it, swept up the dirt and fragments of seventeenth-century pottery found in the van’s corners, sampled the rust on the frame, recorded the dents on the roof where it had been used as a diving board, and then dismantled the body and the engine. For two months, they studied the van as a thing that had been made and altered and littered by human beings. Partly an exercise, even a kind of stunt, this was also a fascinating application of controlled scientific investigation: observe, measure, record, take apart. One conclusion the team reached struck me as illuminating: the interior of the van was in excellent shape; it had been well-maintained by its archaeologists, regularly serviced and repaired. But its body and exterior were so battered by the rough demands of fieldwork that it looked like a wreck. Everywhere in and on the van were traces of the archaeologists and evidence from their various digs.* Even things we use every day and think we know can, when rigorously investigated, tell us something new.

  Schofield talked to the auditorium full of archaeologists about this shift, from thinking about cultural heritage as icons and buildings to thinking about it as another way to document the lives of ordinary people. He mentioned in particular the Maltese capital of Valletta, the city chosen as a World Heritage site because of its density of historic monuments, a
beautiful city in the southern Mediterranean, largely unchanged, at least in its architecture, since the late 1700s. Malta had been a port stop for various nations’ navies for years, and the visiting sailors would head to the bars and cabarets of Strait Street in Valletta. The bars have been shuttered since 1970, the street all but abandoned, and the powers in Malta, including the Catholic Church, have no interest in preserving that part of the city or even acknowledging it. But some of those who once worked on Strait Street have been found living in its ruins, including a former dancer, a man named Joe. Schofield wondered: Isn’t Joe’s Valletta an important part of the history and heritage of the city?

  I thought about what John Schofield sees when he looks around this conference, the multicolored faces squinting up at the elevated stage in the dark, funky municipal building, the headphones that transmit rough simultaneous translations in Spanish or English, our litter of flyers and notes and business cards and the wrappers from the coca candy for those suffering from the soroche (altitude sickness). What does Schofield see when he stands on one of the terraces of Machu Picchu? The fifteenth-century Inca ruins and the remains of shepherds’ huts a century or more old, the traces of boot marks and shovel bites from various digs, the clearing and repairs and planting marks made by the landscapers, and the material residue from the tourists who walk over it now. He sees what people left a couple centuries ago, or last season, or even earlier that day: coins and buttons and tickets and sunglasses and candy wrappers, bandannas, empty suntan lotion containers, smuggled-in water bottles, protein-bar wrappers, little holes where people’s canes punched into the path or where the waffle design on their sneakers or jelly sandals or hobnail boots made marks. He sees the additional wear on the path near the entrance where the flow of the crowd in high season bottlenecks; he sees the wear on the moss of the boulder where the backpackers rest before climbing Huayna Picchu. It is possible to read a piece of their stories in what they left behind. And it is worthwhile to gather evidence that doesn’t turn up anywhere else in the historic record, or the visitor logs, or turnstile counts, or the time cards of the landscapers, bus drivers, and guides, that takes into account the various subversive or alternative ways that people might use the site.