Submerged: Adventures of America's Most Elite Underwater Archeology Team

by Daniel Lenihan

  CHAPTER SIX

  DAMMING THE PAST

  Reservoirs. Water impounded by dams. Damn reservoirs. The Southwest is full of these creations. Improvements on nature, they tame indolent rivers, allow people to live in floodplains, make profitable farmlands from desert scrub, generate hydroelectric power for towns near and far, and ensure the supremacy of the outboard engine as the primary means of human transport. Shimmering, green reservoir waters have become the domain of a brave new breed of men and women. Feeling the surge of mega-horsepower, gasoline-fed energy under their thighs, and fortified with a six pack of desert courage, they careen about the aquatic playgrounds, confident in their ability to control skittering hulls of souped-up boats and “personal watercraft.”

  Reservoir recreation areas can also be remarkably beautiful places, even if bastardized pieces of nature. I must admit succumbing to their charms myself. Particularly Glen Canyon, which captures the Colorado through stretches of Arizona and Utah. But the decision to sacrifice hundreds of square miles of pristine wilderness and red rock canyons to reap the benefits of electric power, flood control, and desert boating infuriates many environmentalists, particularly in the West. Eco-warrior Edward Abbey wrote a cult classic entitled The Monkey Wrench Gang, in which Glen Canyon Dam was the target of a plot to bomb the “abomination” out of existence.

  It isn’t only the aesthetics of reservoirs that causes significant ambivalence. Archeologists in the 1960s and 1970s couldn’t agree on the effects of inundation on remnants of the human past. Were history and prehistory destroyed when covered by impounded river waters or were they preserved forever in an underwater data bank for future generations? Environmental Impact Statements written by archeologists authoritatively maintained both convictions. Because these contradictory positions formed the basis of research assumptions for the most comprehensive and expensive archeological projects ever conducted using public funds, the federal bureaucracy wanted some definitive answers to the “inundation effects” question—fast.

  One factor that made the effects of dam construction on archeology so severe was the very nature of reservoirs. River drainage systems are like arteries that provide life-giving water throughout a region. Human settlements from the earliest times to present cities tend to cluster around rivers and streams. This is dramatically evident in water-marginal places like the American Southwest. When dams back water up over the length of a river drainage, the most archeologically rich zone in the entire region is impacted.

  To answer the effects-of-inundation-on-archeology question, the NPS was given the ball, and Cal Cummings wanted me to be quarterback. Cal had earned the confidence of the environmental offices in the Corp of Engineers, Bureau of Reclamation, and Soil Conservation Service. They wanted the NPS to conduct the study because it was an agency with no conflict of interest (it doesn’t build dams) and is the nation’s lead agency in historic preservation.

  Cal had every intention of picking up that gauntlet and doing the job right, but he also had clear ulterior motives. He knew the construction agencies had more than a big need—they had funding levels for single dam projects that dwarfed the entire operating budget of the National Park Service. If the NPS was ever going to build a serious in-house capability for underwater archeology, it would be most feasible if it was first funded from the outside and given time to prove itself. Cal knew that underwater archeology isn’t terribly more expensive than land archeology once you have an infrastructure in place. Gearing up and getting started was the trick. The deal he cut with the construction agencies was: We’ll do the job and solve your problem—you fellas leave the equipment and personnel with us when the four-year job is over.

  Although it was clear that his logic was sound, I had a strange ambivalence toward directing the inundation study. I knew it was going to be an extremely long and difficult job and though I could see its importance and urgency, it would distract me from shipwrecks and caves. And four years—well, four years seemed like an awfully long time to pursue an intense study one wasn’t wild about. I decided to level with Cal. He was eminently approachable, and we had communicated well ever since first meeting at Gulf Islands.

  I told Cal I appreciated the opportunity to head a large program that could be the basis for a permanent NPS underwater cadre, but I didn’t like reservoir research and would much rather work on maritime or submerged cave studies. He gave me a warm, sympathetic look and said, “Too bad, Lenihan. This is where the need is, this is where the money is—you can use this to build your dream or you can go back to Florida.” Once I was provided such a clear set of alternatives, the merits of running the Inundation Study grew more apparent.

  With green lights in all directions, it was time to start the recruiting process. Because the conclusions of our study would have so much effect on the decisions made by reservoir managers, and hence, the funding and careers of so many traditional land archeologists, I knew that our research design had to be impeccable. I settled on a strategy that would be carried on through the entire course of the reservoir study and two more decades running SCRU. First, I hired people who were smarter than me. Then, we worked hard together to lay a theoretical framework for our field studies that would be unassailable.

  The last thing anyone expected from underwater archeologists in the 1970s was that they would take great pains with method and theory. The so-called New Archeology was in full momentum at the time. Proponents of this approach maintained that for archeology to qualify as science, it must work in a hypthetico-deductive framework.

  While many established archeologists bridled against the scientific constructs being proposed by upstart young lions, they presented me no problem. I had nothing to lose in going along with these exacting protocols because I didn’t have a significant history doing anything else. All that the New Archeologists were basically saying was: Don’t dig then inductively provide conclusions; rather, lay out your problems, be clear about your assumptions, describe explicitly what it would take to solve your problems, then dig.

  As clumsy as this procedure was for people trying to prove some abstract aspect of human behavior, it was ideal for us. Our project asked what happened to potsherds, lithics, metal, and wood artifacts after inundation. These weren’t soft, behavioral questions, these were hard physical problems that just happened to deal with archeological artifacts.

  For eighteen months we searched the literature, laid out testable hypotheses, and developed an explicit 275-page research design that laid out step by step the scientific rationale for everything we were about to do. The only remarkable thing about this approach was that we actually did it. Many archeologists were preaching the necessity of explicit, problem-oriented research designs but we had one tucked under our arms.

  During this year and a half, SCRU archeologists also learned advanced diving techniques in almost boot-camp conditions. I had the team take the disciplined mind-set of cave diving and apply it to this new environment. This meant: Practice total redundancy in life-support gear and train to meet each new variable in the underwater environment methodically and carefully. To help in this training process, I contracted with my longtime associates in cave and deep diving. There was even a heated pool on the premises that allowed our divers to keep in tiptop shape. During winter off-seasons the archeologists walked long distances at seven thousand foot elevation in Santa Fe with double tanks on their backs, followed by grueling pool exercises.

  When the National Reservoir Inundation Study (NRIS), predecessor of the SCRU team, finally left its mountain hideaway and hit the field in the late spring of 1976 they were wearing NPS uniforms, were well disciplined, well equipped, and in superb diving condition. As luck would have it, three of the five archeologists I hired to commence the study were female. They were smart, ambitious, and highly motivated. One of them, Toni Carrell would end up staying through the transition into SCRU and work for the NPS for twelve years.

  Even the crankiest, grizzled, blood-and-guts Chief Rangers had to admi
t that they were dealing with solid professionals—they began to take particular delight in showing off the females to peers in other agencies. None of the gals were over 5’5” in height and all were lady-like in demeanor, but when hauling tanks and diving, they seemed more like Navy SEALS than lady researchers.

  And so began the process of building a permanent program from a four-year project. While we tackled the difficult scientific questions of reservoir inundation on a day-to-day basis, we built a reputation for diving and being park-friendly. By the fall of 1976 we organized and ran the first diving workshop for rangers in the Southwest Region. An indication of the seriousness of the demands we placed on the participants was the logo on the T-shirts the twenty-three trainees had purchased for those completing the course: “NPS Southwest Region Diving Workshop Survivor.”

  The first workshop was such a hit that it was funded for the next twenty-five years to the present, except for the odd year when the unit has been unavailable to run them. My mind during those first five years was focused on the inundation study but my heart was on a very different prize: a full-fledged permanent commitment by the Service to an underwater team.

  So the National Reservoir Inundation Study archeologists visited many of these watery worlds in the desert where the dam builders had preceded. During the four-year study my team dived in most major water impoundment areas in the United States, particularly those in the arid Southwest.

  Although we focused almost entirely on reservoirs, we still did some occasional work on shipwrecks and in caves. In October 1977, an instructive incident occurred when we set about obtaining samples of inundated wood for the NRIS. We were moving between impoundments in the Ozark area when Ervan Garrison, an archeologist from the University of Missouri, suggested we might be able to get some tightly dated wood samples by removing small plugs from the wreck Queen City sunk near Clarendon, Arkansas, in the White River.

  We knew the date of the sinking to the day—couldn’t get much tighter than that. It shouldn’t be far from a bridge crossing the river and we could probably find it with our magnetometer. The Queen City was a Union “tin clad” (lightly armored vessel) that had been sunk by Shelby’s raiders during what was known locally as the late great war of northern aggression.

  Toni Carrell, Wayne Prokopetz (another NRIS archeologist), Erv, and Alan May from the university, and I headed down a stretch of dirt road next to the river for a quarter mile. We fired up a magnetometer, which located metal through detecting disturbances in the earth’s magnetic field. Then we hung the sensor on a pole and began doing sweeps right about where local lore had it that the gunboat should be. Within twenty minutes we got a hit that almost knocked us out of the boat—“must be it.” We hurriedly suited up for the dive, figuring we would devote half a day to securing this plug of wood before moving on to nearby reservoirs.

  We found the ship, tried unsuccessfully to video a bit of the wreckage in the murky water, and took our plug of wood for lab testing. The remarkable thing about this story is not that we found the Queen City. It appeared to us that anybody who felt like it and purchased a low-end mag could do that; the lesson came from the reaction of the populace. When I surfaced from the dive, I saw close to a hundred people lined up along the riverbank.

  My first thought was, God, there’s been an accident! Then, remembering we were in Arkansas, and seeing a couple people waving Confederate battle pennants, I thought it might be a lynching . . . mine. Natural reaction after spending years in the civil rights movement. We were in headlines in Memphis papers the next day, then national. We were absolutely flabbergasted by the intensity of the reaction to our “discovery.”

  Here we had arduously been conducting some first-rate underwater science for two years, visited numerous prehistoric and historic sites in reservoirs, and gotten not a glimmer of interest from the press. The lesson was shipwrecks hold a special place in the heart of the public, and Civil War shipwrecks are more compelling than even gold or silver. I put that lesson to good service in years to come. There was a natural sex appeal to what we were doing that, if packaged right, could generate support and dollars for our program.

  But that was something to note for later. We were facing enough challenges in the inundation study—reservoir diving was a frontier of its own at the time. Besides low visibility and concerns over entanglement in barbed-wire fences, and the like, there was the problem of altitude diving, which was poorly understood at the time. The crux of the issue was that people diving from a lower ambient pressure were being exposed to a greater rate of pressure release when they surfaced, thereby intensifying decompression concerns. Because all reservoirs are backed-up rivers and rivers flow downhill, ergo all rivers are at some elevation above sea level.

  So we developed one of the first manuals for diving at higher elevations. It was nothing fancy, but it became a staple in the Park Service and beyond. We ended up printing several hundred copies after receiving requests for the booklet from places as far afield as the Royal Australian Navy.

  Then there was the major problem we were given to solve about the effects of flooding on archeological sites. It had as many facets as a bag of crystals. With more than a little dismay, we realized that we had to do no less than define the nature of archeological values before we could decide whether or not they had been destroyed.

  It’s basic philosophical questions like these that veteran practitioners of any science are usually wise enough to avoid, but they are heady fare for a handful of young archeologists selected for the job largely on the criteria that we could dive. We were delighted to rush in where angels feared to tread.

  Is the stuff of archeology composed only of artifacts and bones and their relationships in space? What about the textures and colors of soils they occur in; how are they impacted by flooding? What of the chemistry of the soil that is used by archeologists to establish where humans performed different day-to-day functions? Did it become a homogenized soup useless as a cultural indicator? And what about thermoluminesence, radiocarbon, fluorine analyses, and other arcane laboratory tricks. Did those techniques work on materials that had been underwater for years?

  Luckily, our systematic addressing of the issues through adhering to that laborious research design served us quite well. Five years later and a thousand-page report wiser, we were able to answer most of these questions with a respectable degree of certainty. The resultant document Final Report of the National Reservoir Inundation Study would affect archeology on large public works projects for many years to come.

  The reservoirs had simultaneously become a convenient classroom for training, where the highly developed diving skills of the team could be transferred to rangers who were dealing with totally different concerns on a day-to-day basis. At the beginning of the NRIS, I was appointed regional dive officer for the Southwest Region, giving me direct responsibility for the training of rangers involved in underwater search and recovery and boating-related accidents. Reservoir recreation areas were the scenes of a disproportionate number of drownings. A particular trouble zone was the boat ramps where people often accidentally launched their vehicles along with their boats.

  I took a deep breath and looked around full circle. West Texas scenery just doesn’t look the same when you’re sinking into a lake in a ’72 Chevy. Moments before, I had been at the top of the boat ramp, both hands on the steering wheel, thinking the car I was about to drive had seen better days. It had been confiscated by the Del Rio County sheriff from one of the less classy felons his deputies had recently apprehended. The clutch pad was kind of slushy, probably due to the lack of both an intact transmission and much of the engine.

  I watched a half dozen park rangers donning their scuba gear on the loading dock at the bottom of the boat launching ramp. They were casting expectant looks back at me, sharing those nervous laughs that usually accompany a situation that isn’t entirely funny. The year was 1977, and we were conducting one of the first experiments to determine what actually happened whe
n people sank in cars. The NPS managed many large reservoir areas (such as Lake Mead, Glen Canyon, Bighorn Canyon, and Amistad) with boat ramps. People were ending up in the lakes inside their cars more often as use of these parks increased. As regional dive officer, it was only proper that I should be the first guinea pig. At the top of the ramp I cranked down the window and called to Larry. Since he was not yet working for the Service, I had shipped him in from Florida to help with the workshop on contract.

  “Hey, Murphy.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Pretty good experiment, don’t ya think?”

  “Yeah, brilliant.”

  I rolled the window back up. I was annoyed that Larry wasn’t demonstrating a reassuring demeanor. He seemed nervous about this exercise, and it was becoming contagious. Leaning over toward the passenger seat, I checked for about the fifth time the status of the scuba tank, regulator, and mask and fins that were wedged into a little pile on the floorboard. I rolled the window back down.

  “Hey, Murphy.”

  “Yeah?”

  “I mean, what could go wrong? Six safety divers, hell these old boys could easily get a door open even if I couldn’t or, you know, break the glass out if nothing else.”

  “Yeah. ’Cept, maybe if you was to slide off the ramp and turn over in deep silt.”

  I rolled the window back up.

  “Ready?” I could hear the voice of Warren Beitel, the district ranger, from behind me. I showed him a thumbs-up and heard a click. However the car had been secured to the tow truck, it wasn’t anymore. It surprised me how fast I picked up speed just coasting down the ramp. The steering wheel worked well enough, and then I heard the “whump/splash” of impact with the water. Not really bad, but I was glad to have had the seat belt on. It was the old lap-type, nothing coming down across the shoulder.

  I started monitoring everything that was happening to me, which was, of course, the point of the whole exercise. Rangers had been forever pulling people out of sinking cars and trucks at reservoir recreation areas. Usually the victims were trying to launch boats, and the trailer and vehicle would get away from them. Sometimes they were committing suicide or being murdered but usually they were just panicked folk being visited by disaster while on vacation.