by Becky Cooper
Detective Halliday: Now, could this red ochre, Professor, be obtained in classrooms at Harvard?
Professor Williams: Well, I mean, Dr. Lamberg-Karlovsky has some in his office. Students are in and out of his office all the time.
Keep the Dead Close
I CONTINUED AUDITING KARL’S CLASS, always leaving a few seats between me and him. I tried not to find it too loaded when he said something like, “Could we just kill the lights?” The third class began with a presentation on the history of agriculture. Click. He changed the slide. Click. He showed a picture of a twelve-thousand-year-old site in Israel called Ain Mallaha. It was unique, Karl explained, because people settled there permanently before the invention of agriculture in the Levant. In other words, it wasn’t the need to tend crops and to raise animals that led these people to give up their nomadic ways. It was complex ritual beliefs, he said, as exhibited by one particular pattern of behavior: They buried the dead under their houses. A lot of attention was paid to that dead individual, he went on. “By attention, I mean you embellish it with jewelry, with items of significance.”
It struck me then that the way we relate to our dead is the oldest mark of our humanity.
“The dead are kept close to you,” he said.
I circled it in my notebook.
The Peabody
HOWEVER ENIGMATIC RED OCHRE WAS as a symbol—it could be hubris, a red herring, an act of remorse, a sign of psychosis—much of the attention within the Peabody community focused on one man who stood out from the rest of the museum: Professor Karl Lamberg-Karlovsky.
Karl’s first day as an assistant professor at Harvard was in the fall of 1965. Just shy of his twenty-eighth birthday, Karl was about the same age as many of the older students in Harvard’s anthropology program, having just finished his PhD at UPenn that spring. He was tall and lean, with hair down to his shoulders. He wore a leather jacket and drove a motorcycle.
By the time Karl arrived, Harvard’s Anthropology department was one of the best in the world, and its center was the Peabody, which was celebrating its ninety-ninth birthday. When the Peabody was founded, anthropology was just coming into its own in the United States. The Smithsonian Institution’s Castle was only ten years old; the American Museum of Natural History wouldn’t be founded for another four years. The Peabody slowly changed that. What had started as a collection of artifacts became home to a codified program of teaching and research in all fields of anthropology, including archaeology.
Over the decades, the museum became cramped, split haphazardly among exhibitions for the public, office space for members of the Anthropology department and museum staff, labs, and classrooms. But it still bore the traces of its founding, when anthropology was tied to the collectors’ instinct. The red brick of the building held countless dusty treasures. Barbara Allen, a former registrar of the museum, said that when you held these objects, it was impossible to ignore the feeling that they “were made to hold powerful magic.” The museum’s storage units overflowed with golden artifacts from Mexico’s sacred cenotes. The rafters in the attic were filled with feathers and spirit masks and saliva samples from the long dead. It was disorganized enough that finding materials in the collection could feel like conducting an expedition. An unsuspecting student rooting around in the hall of New Guinea artifacts could stumble across P. T. Barnum’s mermaid casually tossed in a cabinet.
Stephen Williams in the Peabody Museum’s attic storage. The photo’s original caption: “Archaeological material consigned to the attic is almost as inaccessible as it was when it was in the ground.” (Museum Collection © President and Fellows of Harvard College, Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology, PM2015.1.23.2)
The building itself had its own mysterious allure. A network of secret passages ran under the Peabody Museum and connected it to the neighboring Harvard University Herbaria. The basement doors that provided access were locked, but there were ways to press on their molding that would unlock them. The buttons might have been designed for housekeeping and repairmen to get around the buildings, but graduate students held it as a point of insider pride to know these entry points. During the ’70s, a researcher named Andrew was often to be found hanging on his hammock in one of these tunnels, surrounded by giant jars cultivating every kind of hallucinogen. “He was perfectly happy if you wanted to go by and get a supply,” a graduate student would later remember.
The community that gravitated to the Peabody was fittingly eccentric. There was Joe Johns, a Creek Indian wood carver, turned navy sniper, turned Harvard police officer, turned Peabody Museum building manager. And Ian Graham, a Maya scholar descended from the Duke of Montrose. And of course, there was the underworld of smokers in the Peabody basement, particularly Tatiana Proskouriakoff, another preeminent Maya scholar, who smoked like a chimney and carried her own ashtray—a tiny one that flipped open, with a fan. She was meticulous about her ash. Harvard never gave her an official position in the department, not to mention a proper office, so she was always in the smoking room, drawing hieroglyphics and chatting with the graduate students who had also come down for a break. By the late ’60s, it was the only place to smoke in the building, and the air was so dense it was almost blue.
The era when Karl began at Harvard was defined by the confrontations between these vestiges of the past and the demands of the present. There was still the Old Guard who had started in the era of gentlemen archaeologists. Many were known as dollar-a-year men—they came from such wealth that they only needed to be paid a token salary by the university. The head of the museum, the dapper but academically uninspiring Stephen Williams, was responsible as much for pleasing the museum’s Boston Brahmin donors as for maintaining the collections. Professors wore suits and ties and ate lunch every day in the stuffy all-male faculty club. They hardly talked about work, preferring, instead, to discuss the West End duck hunting club. The one tenured female professor in the department, the cultural anthropologist Cora Du Bois, was, for some years at the beginning of her time at Harvard, the only tenured woman. When she walked through the halls, other professors literally turned away from her.
The scholars of this generation were better scientists than their predecessors—embracing such techniques as stratigraphy and radiocarbon dating—but in their way they, too, had become relics of the past. No one embodied the Old Guard more than Hallam Movius, Jane Britton’s undergraduate adviser. A specialist in the European Paleolithic, Movius was straight out of the 1930s, with his hair parted in the middle and Brylcreemed. He was an old Harvard man and had been a lieutenant colonel in World War II. He ran his expeditions like an army platoon, with an egg timer to make sure conversation during the twelve-minute break never ran over.
Though Movius, unlike many of his colleagues, accepted women on his excavations, his acceptance came with certain unspoken expectations. When he found out one of his female graduate students was getting married, he tried to get her National Science Foundation funding revoked. And misogyny was far from the only prejudice he harbored. For a time he had a young woman named Adrienne Cohen as his lab technician. When she got married and became Adrienne Hamilton, he said, “Hamilton, that’s a much better name.” Adrienne knew better than to tell him that her husband was Black.
Then there was the New Guard. They were in their thirties, ambitious, hungry, from backgrounds that weren’t just the upper class. But it wasn’t just the demographic that was changing. Archaeologists of the younger generation were starting to rethink the discipline. They put great emphasis on the interpretative aspects of historical reconstruction and the ultimate subjectivity of all archaeologists’ work. Karl summed up this new stance well in his foreword to one of the Tepe Yahya monographs: “All archaeology is the re-enactment of past thought in the archaeologist’s own mind.” Scholars of history don’t uncover the past; they create it.
Students found themselves in the middle: caught between tenured professors whose approach to archaeology felt increasingly dated and younger profess
ors who wielded less power in the department.
Karl was a unique bridge. He embodied the youth and rebellion of the unapologetic New Guard, but, as a descendant of Austrian nobles, the Lambergs, he was fluent in the etiquette and mannerisms of the older professors. While people made fun of Assistant Professor Tom Patterson for wearing the wrong ties to faculty club lunches, Karl prided himself on his black-tie parties. When Karl flouted the dress code––he rarely wore jackets outside formal occasions––he did so not because he didn’t know the game, but because he didn’t have to play it.
As Karl settled in, he seemed to become even more untouchable. Peabody rules be damned, when Karl wanted a smoke, he would close his office door and puff out the window. One time, he heard a knock on his door. It was Hallam Movius. Movius was horrified. Being a scholar to Movius meant being a gentleman. He took two steps into Karl’s office. “You’ve been smoking!” Movius exclaimed. “I’m working!” Karl replied, unapologetic. “He was the most judicious and correct person,” Karl would later say. “I wasn’t.”
This aura made a big impression on David Freidel, a Near Eastern archaeology undergraduate student at the time. “I mean the first time I saw him I thought, This man’s Count Dracula. He’s the real deal.” Karl even looked like him. “Tall, black hair, handsome, widow’s peak, big smile…That was not an off-putting thing, you know? It was attractive that he was so edgy.”
Karl Lamberg-Karlovsky in the window of the Peabody. (Museum Collection © President and Fellows of Harvard College, Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology, PM2004.24.29514.12)
* * *
Karl wouldn’t have Jane in his class till the spring of 1967––the same semester he also served on the committee for her undergraduate thesis––but she had made an impression on him the year before. During her junior year, Karl had dangled in front of her the possibility of joining him on his next Mideast expedition. But out of loyalty or obligation, Jane returned to Movius’s dig in Les Eyzies, France, for the third straight summer. She fantasized about putting Movius, “a pigheaded old bastard,” in his place, but she knew she would have to bite her tongue. Since he was the one who had supported her application for grad school, Movius was going to be her adviser for at least another five years. “The only thing I can do is keep playing this part—even until I’m 36 or so—until I know more than he does, and then watch the fur fly.”
When Karl returned from his survey of southeastern Iran in the fall of 1967, the rumor was that there was space opening up in the department for at least one more faculty member. Tepe Yahya seemed like exactly the kind of site a young professor could stake his reputation on, and the Peabody gossip was that Karl stood a very good chance of being the first person in the New Guard to be elevated to the ranks of tenured faculty member. They weren’t wrong.
Around the same time, Movius suddenly announced that he would be relocating full-time to Les Eyzies and was no longer able to supervise Jane’s dissertation. What was abandonment by another name became Jane’s chance to free herself. The charismatic young superstar must have seemed like an escape.
* * *
Decades later, Francesco Pellizzi, a former student in the department, and I would talk about the rampant speculation that cropped up around Karl after Jane’s death and the mystery of the red ochre. Pellizzi, who told me he was grateful to Karl despite “all his quirks,” would say, “I think he’s the last person who would have made that kind of mise-en-scène.” I replied that it was a funny way of exonerating someone: not that he isn’t capable of murder, but that he’s too smart to have done it that way. Francesco laughed. “Yes, exactly.”
Speaking of Silences
I INTRODUCED MYSELF TO KARL after the third class—as someone thinking of applying to graduate school for ethnographic studies, which was true, if only a fraction of the story. “You don’t need much background to be a superstar in anthropology,” he told me. We bantered for a bit about what it takes to be a great ethnographer—give people time to open up and be reasonable—before I asked permission to audit his class for the semester. “Sure,” he said, “if you want that kind of punishment.”
After Karl’s fourth class, I noticed a poster in the hallway for “Social Anthropology Day.” Though social anthro was housed in the same department as archaeology, I had already come to learn that archaeology and social anthropology could not be further from each other. There was almost an animosity that came from being forced to inhabit the same department despite all the obvious differences. But, I reasoned, since it was being billed in part as an introduction to the department for prospective students, important characters in anthropology—and therefore in Jane’s story—might be there.
In particular, I hoped to run into someone named Richard Meadow. Richard lurked everywhere in the periphery of Jane’s story. He took that 1968 expedition photograph in Iran. He had been Jim Humphries’s roommate at the time of Jane’s death. Karl had been his dissertation adviser. And, like Karl, he had stayed at Harvard all these years; Richard had been the director of the Peabody’s Zooarchaeology Laboratory and a senior lecturer in the department for decades now.
James Ronan, the first person who advised me to speak with Richard, warned me that getting him to talk wouldn’t be easy. He was a diligent scholar and notoriously tight-lipped. But James suspected Richard just might dislike Karl enough to make an exception. “They just kind of avoided each other. Even as recently as a few years ago.” The rumor was the rift had started because Richard was the one who had told police that Karl had been having an extramarital affair with Jane—a line of questioning to which Karl reportedly responded, evoking Paul Newman: “Why would I have a hamburger when I have steak at home?”
* * *
It was a packed house in William James Hall. People were sitting on the floor. I scanned the room, eventually spotting someone who looked similar enough to a 1970s picture of Richard Meadow to plausibly be him: glasses, mustache, sloped shoulders. I spent most of that afternoon’s lecture watching him.
Gary Urton, the head of the Anthropology department, whose limp mop of hair resembled the knotted cords he studied, was up on the stage, introducing the five lecturers. The first speaker talked about her archaeological work in Mexico. The second discussed his work in Kyrgyzstan studying human settlement patterns. He said that the Kyrgyzstani regional government was extremely helpful to his expedition. “They’re under the illusion—which I’m not going to dispel—that there’s only one university in the United States, and that is Harvard.” It got a big laugh.
And then it was Kimberly Theidon’s turn. “She’s just returning to us after a year at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton, and she’s teaching this semester—memory politics…Her talk today is ‘Speaking of Silences: Gender, Violence and Redress in Peru,’” Professor Urton said, and ceded the floor to her.
She was astonishing to watch, wrapped in a purple scarf, sinewy, her neck muscles like the sides of a rope ladder climbing up her throat.
“Thank you. It’s actually nice to be back in certain ways.” The room tittered with nervous laughter. “I say that with sincerity. I look you in the eyes when I say that. Anyway, thanks and thanks to all of you for being here. So let me begin.”
Kimberly’s work had brought her down to Peru to follow a truth commission in its effort to collect women’s stories about violence suffered during the armed conflict in the 1980s and ’90s. Kimberly began her lecture by discussing a death that happened before her arrival.
“There are two versions people tell of how this young woman died,” Kimberly said. “Some told she had fallen, and some said she killed herself.”
Kimberly learned that the woman was mute, and that she lived in a hillside village. At night, the soldiers who lived at the nearby base would come into the house she shared with her grandmother. “The women in the village could hear her at night. Muffled guttural sounds.” These women would later confess, “‘We knew by the sound. We knew what the soldiers were doing
, but we couldn’t say anything.’”
Kimberly broke into the present tense: “It’s impossible to erase the image of this young woman screaming with all her might, but unable to say anything.”
Silence, Kimberly explained, plays a huge role in her work on gender violence. “What do you do with these silences?” she asked. “How do you listen to them? How do you interpret them? When are they oppressive? And when might they constitute a form of agency? How do you understand silences as they enter and contour the archives?”
* * *
By the end of the last talk, the Richard Meadow–like man had fallen asleep. He nodded awake and chewed on the back of his hand as if to help himself stay alert. Gary Urton walked on stage one last time. He thanked the speakers for being indicative of the variety and quality of the teaching in the Harvard Anthropology department and invited everyone to a reception upstairs.
The fifteenth floor of William James Hall was laden with catered food. Sushi. Shrimp and cocktail sauce. Ribs. Artichoke hearts, a cheese plate, and an open bar. I had forgotten how free food abounded at Harvard events.
I headed to the wine table first. The man I was pretty sure was Richard Meadow was there, and so was the food archaeology grad student in Karl’s class. I thought about approaching the professor, but it felt too soon to talk to someone so close to the center of the story. I didn’t yet understand the dynamics within the department, and I worried about the conversation getting repeated and not being able to control to whom.
When maybe-Richard left, I introduced myself to the grad student. Her name was Sadie Weber. I learned she was also auditing Karl’s class. She needed to prepare for next year’s Generals. Sadie told me Karl had been wrong a couple of times in class, and she disagreed with his theory of agricultural development.