We Keep the Dead Close

by Becky Cooper

  I spent the next four days in the archives reading through every single paper. Old lectures he gave, blue aerogram letters from Iran, typewritten museum correspondence, his calendars, book reviews, notebooks, and syllabi from his undergraduate and graduate years. In one undated photo, I saw, unmistakably, the seductive Count Dracula who had captivated the graduate students. In the dead center of that photo was the same pinkie signet ring whose emblem I hadn’t been able to make out in class. It was still hard to believe that Karl’s reign in the department was over––that legends have ends.

  Photo of Lamberg-Karlovsky looking similarly debonair in 1983, next to his wife, Martha, and former graduate student David Freidel. (Gift of the Estate of Gordon R. Willey, 2003. Courtesy of the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology, Harvard University, PM 2003.14.28, by permission from Alexandra Guralnick.)

  In the files, there, again, was the Karl quick to injure, easy to anger, hot-tempered, even a touch paranoid. The funniest letter was from Victor Mair, a professor at UPenn, who, in reply to Karl’s “petulant diatribe,” wrote facetiously: “A copy of a strange letter attacking me and appearing over your signature was anonymously sent to my Department by fax. […] Since the charges in the letter are so fallacious and illogical, the language so intemperate and semiliterate, my first thought is that it must have been forged by someone else who wanted to tarnish your reputation.”

  But there, too, were glimpses of a Karl who was a supportive mentor, a daring academic, a dedicated professor. In 1970, he came to the defense of students in the Organization for Black Unity who were facing disciplinary action for occupying University Hall. Karl had been in the building at the beginning of the takeover, and he wrote in support of the students’ good behavior. In ’73, he penned a recommendation letter for Richard Meadow that praised Meadow as the rarest of academic finds: a great teacher, scholar, and person. And the span of Karl’s impact was hard to miss––from the “ecstatic appreciation” of two students on the 1967 Yahya survey expedition, to the undergraduate in 1999 who thanked Karl for supporting her interests to an extent no other professor had.

  There was also a draft of the textbook he co-wrote with Jerry Sabloff, a former graduate student who was several years older than Jane. In the text, Karl explained that Sumerian and Akkadian, the languages of ancient Mesopotamia, lacked the word for “history.” But this absence, Karl wrote, “does not indicate a disinterest in history or in the past, for numerous inscribed clay tablets indicate the contrary to be true. The absence of the word history signifies a wholly different approach to the past, or to that which we call history.” If we insisted on our conception of history in analyzing their attitudes, we would miss the importance they placed on the past. It was a similar point he had made in that first class I sat in on, and the main thesis of that foreword to the Tepe Yahya monograph that troubled me: The historical gaze is inextricable from the biases of the historian. Even if we think we’re uncovering the past, what we are really doing is reconstructing it, adding our own flesh to old bones.

  By the end of my time in the university archives, I had one group of materials left to go through. I had purposefully saved Karl’s college and graduate school notebooks for last. Karl was a doodler—the margins of his notes were filled with crossbones, skulls, skeletons. A few cartoonish self-portraits were instantly recognizable because of an exaggerated bouffant. One was a man with almost a demonically pointed tongue and sharp teeth, about to lick a set of breasts, drawn on a headless torso.

  Doodles in Lamberg-Karlovsky’s notebook from graduate school, 1959. (Courtesy of the Harvard University Archives)

  But Karl’s margins were also often filled with his signature and the years and institutions of his schooling, as if rehearsing his biography. Over and over, he would write his name. Sometimes it was just his initials, sometimes Cliff, but most often it was his name: Clifford Lamberg Karlovsky, both with and without a hyphen.

  Karl also tried on different names. Once it was Karl von Lamberg, and then for a series of pages, it was nothing but: Clifford A. Rockefeller. Over and over and over. As if he were not only rehearsing his story, but adopting a new identity.

  Lamberg-Karlovsky’s signatures in the same graduate school notebook. (Courtesy of the Harvard University Archives)

  * * *

  At night, I’d go home to Eliot House, where I was staying with friends from college. It was my first time living back in the dorms since graduation. I was even able to sneak in to eat in the dining halls. I felt like no time had elapsed since college until I would catch a reflection of myself in a store window and do a double take, startled by the passage of time reflected back at me.

  * * *

  “Pencils only,” the Peabody Museum archivist reminded me.

  For my last day of research, I moved from the university archives to the museum’s to look for Jane’s expedition notebook. My suspicion was right: There was a whole cache of Tepe Yahya material that hadn’t appeared on Harvard’s library website. I had requested the expedition notebooks from 1967, 1968, and 1969, and now the cart in front of me was full of flip-top boxes.

  I opened the first carton. It was neatly organized with dividers, each one containing a field notebook from a different trench. One jumped out at me: “Field notebook: Site E, J.S.B.” Jane Sanders Britton.

  I pulled the notebook out from the divider. It was moss green, fabric-covered, and discolored around the edges.

  I opened it to the first page: “Tepe Yahya 1969 Site E Field Notebook. By: JSB / [ ].” The second name had been taped over with a piece of paper.

  Nineteen sixty-nine? By the summer of 1969 Jane was dead. Why was her name on a field notebook six months after her death? I knew some poor archivist had had to put that piece of paper there before the file reached me because it pertained to a student who was still alive. I rifled through my Tepe Yahya research to see if I knew who dug Site E in 1969. “J.H.” a note said. Jim Humphries.

  Going on a hunch, I quickly opened the other boxes until I found what I was looking for: the 1968 Site E notebook. Just as I’d guessed. Site E had been Jane’s trench.

  That meant Jim had been put in charge of Jane’s trench the summer after her death. And when it came to writing up his expedition notes, he had given her credit. It was so different from the tales of hyper-competitiveness in academia I had grown used to. It was a gesture that felt all the more beautiful for how silent it was. No fanfare, no celebration, no calling attention to himself. In a field where everyone was fighting to get their names on things, he’d added hers. First.

  I skimmed Jane’s notebook. It chronicled her day-to-day, just as I had hoped. Her handwriting was neat and in all caps like an architect’s, but it lacked any personal dimension. Instead, it was filled with dozens of to-scale drawings, and tiny handwritten recordings of the features and finds from her trench. The entries were detailed descriptions of where and what she dug on any given day. For example, on the first day of excavation that summer: “30 June 1968: Removed surface sherds; wash + dust cover entire area of trench. Large number of sherds in sandy brown soil.” On August 21, Jane wrote that she found “traces of red ochre” in the hearth she was unearthing. It was startling to see “red ochre” in her handwriting.

  I looked through the rest of the notebooks. Phil’s was the least neat. Arthur Bankoff’s included a note to self: “First day of digging. My technique is a bit rocky. I don’t think I would know a wall if it bit me.”

  Richard Meadow’s was meticulous. I scrutinized every page. There on blue millimeter graph paper was Richard’s to-scale drawing of where he’d found a Neolithic figurine, which was to remain the find of the season. It was made of green soapstone. Along with it were numerous flint chips and worked-stone tools, three soapstone shaft straighteners, and two bone razors and a bone spatula. The figure had a belly button and a round dot for its mouth, which left it in a permanent state of surprise.

  At the bottom of the page, Richard had written “Red ochre un
der and around bone.” It was possible that the bone tools near the figurine might have been what Karl was referring to when he told reporters that “there are relics which show that the bones of decomposed bodies were coated with a red material.” But I was surprised to see, as I read on in the Tepe Yahya reports, that a human burial with red ochre had in fact been found at Tepe Yahya: In 1970, a body was discovered lying on its left side, its skull crushed, with red ochre on the ulna of one of the arms. Even though this body was only unearthed after Jane’s death, it was an eerie coincidence; Karl had been quoted as saying that a composed corpse with any type of powder spread over it had never been found in Iran. Yet, just six months later, there it was, at his very site. And far from a fluke, that burial turned out to be characteristic of those in the oldest layer of the mound. Thomas Beale, a graduate student who had joined the Iranian expedition the year after Jane died, wrote in his monograph on the Tepe Yahya expedition: “In Period VII, Yahya inhabitants painted the bodies of their dead with red ochre.”

  I pulled my hands away from the notebooks and realized my fingertips were coated in the fine sand from the Tepe Yahya desert, and for an instant the years collapsed.

  Thresholds of Irritation

  “TODAY’S THE DAY RICHARD FOUND the statue. Jealous! You wouldn’t believe it. I feel so inferior it’s amazing—I mean, I don’t begrudge him the discovery but it makes me wonder if I’ve missed even more than I think I already have,” Jane wrote in her journal.

  Richard’s discovery really was remarkable. A ten-inch soapstone figurine, thousands of years old yet almost completely undamaged. It had been carved from a single piece of chlorite, and it was striking: long and thin, with punctured eyes and a linear nose, no breasts but female genitalia. It looked like a hybrid of the sexes: a woman carved onto a phallus. Karl would later refer to it as a fertility goddess and predicted in five years, it will be a “prize example of primitive sculpture.” There hadn’t been anything else like it found in any Iranian or Mesopotamian site.

  Neolithic figurine discovered by Richard Meadow. (Fig 7.25 on page 200 from Thomas Wight Beale, “Excavations at Tepe Yahya, Iran 1967-1975: The Early Periods,” American School of Prehistoric Research, Bulletin 38. © 1986 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College, courtesy of the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology, Harvard University)

  The discovery couldn’t have come at a better time. It was Martie Lamberg-Karlovsky’s second day on the site. The crew had been looking forward to her arrival. By that point, supplies were getting low and people were eager for Martie to bring “food, news, and a new face.” Even Jane had been excited for Martie—as much for Preparation H for Jim’s hemorrhoids as for anything else. Jane’s optimism was also fueled by the fact that she and Jim had figured out that Jane’s trench was the center of a five-meter wall—possibly the city wall. It was no soapstone figurine, but it would be enough for a dissertation topic.

  When Jane sat down to draw the figurine, she was too exhausted to eke it out. She opened her journal instead and started to describe the discovery below that morning’s entry where she had written: “Madame L-K, much as I like her, is not exactly a breath of fresh air on this scene, altho am sure CCL-K must be rather glad. One month and some left. Then I have to face the fall all alone.”

  * * *

  It’s never easy to step into an already-formed group dynamic, and Martie irritated the crew almost immediately. She insisted on dressing to the nines and changing her outfit multiple times a day, despite the fact that they were in the middle of the desert. Jane and Andrea Bankoff, who felt particularly grubby in their sweat-stained clothes, took her new wardrobe as an affront, but they recognized that in cooler climates, their grievances would seem petty. “I like her well enough but her awesome enthusiasm for the place leaves one drained,” Jane wrote to her parents.

  Andrea was quick to suffer the punctilious side to Martie. She recounted the scene to police when they asked about “hostilities” at the dig in Iran. It was Martie’s first week at the site, and Andrea discovered that her and Arthur’s pet sparrow had made a giant mess over their sleeping bags. She let out a single curse, which displeased Martie who was standing nearby with the antiquities representative. She told Andrea to be quiet and walked away:

  only to return a few minutes later and rather violently bawl me out. She said Karl told her I had embarrassed him at the British Institute by cursing and I must think myself “a cool little chick” but if she ever caught me using foul language, she’d punish me as my mother should have.

  It never occurred to Andrea to correct Martie. The first cursing incident at the British Institute wasn’t Andrea at all. It had been Jane.

  When Andrea recounted the incident to Jane, Jane thought she must have been exaggerating. Indeed, when Martie found out it hadn’t been Andrea who had cursed at the British Institute, Martie apologized profusely.

  Jane felt a small burst of generosity toward Martie, but it soon wore off. “Everyone in heartily bad mood,” Jane wrote in her journal.

  Before, even if the food was terrible, it was bearable because everyone was treated equally. But when Martie arrived, she blithely blew through her two-Coke ration that everyone else had regarded as sacrosanct. She also decided—without consulting Andrea, who, as registrar, was also the pantry manager—that people should eat more. Only Richard and Peter, she clarified, because she thought they were getting too thin.

  Martie seemed to treat archaeology as a cute hobby. What a nice game, can I play, too? she would imply, antagonizing the crew. But she was very serious in thinking that her husband could do no wrong, and the Bankoffs felt she expected his authority to extend to her as well.

  Jane was particularly irritated by Martie’s constant references to her relationship with Jim. They had fought hard to maintain their privacy and dignity in such close quarters, and now Martie was constantly referring to Jim as “her boy.”

  And then Jane experienced what Andrea had been talking about firsthand. Per Andrea:

  One morning Jane woke up late for breakfast, was more grouchy than usual, drank a cup of coffee quickly and stubbed her foot on her way out and shouted a four-letter word. Martie quickly started to tell Jane ladies shouldn’t curse, but Jane didn’t even turn around and walked right out. This double standard about men can and ladies can’t really annoyed Jane.

  The momentary reprieve of the discovery, the new face, and the resupply of peanut butter (“thank Christ”) had ended. Tension resurfaced. And now, with less recourse to cursing and crude jokes as relief, there was no outlet for the pressure. The atmosphere—frayed nerves, latent aggressions, bitterness, edginess, interactions brittle enough to snap—became claustrophobic.

  One day, the son of the local khan came around and insisted on charging Karl a land tax for digging on “his” mound. Karl knew all archaeological sites in Iran were considered the property of the government and recognized the tax for what it was: extortion. The dig’s government representative advised Karl not to pay anything.

  In retaliation, the son of the khan called a local workers’ strike. The situation grew heated, and Karl eventually flew into a “towering rage,” as Arthur Bankoff would later say.

  Karl grabbed a pickax. If the khan’s son refused to leave without collecting his money, then Karl refused to leave any of his property standing, starting with this mud-brick house right here. He pounded the pickax through its facade. In a “couple of hours [he] could have reduced any of these little houses to rubble,” Peter Dane recounted. Eventually the khan’s son––likely because the government representative had called in the local gendarmes and threatened to take him to jail––acquiesced.

  By that point, the unease had become almost unbearable. Phil Kohl and Peter Dane left early. (Phil’s mother didn’t recognize her son when she met him at the airport; down with dysentery, he’d lost more than thirty pounds that summer.) And the arrival of the visiting archaeologist Benno Rothenberg made things even worse as Karl, eager to im
press him, became harder to bear. Alcohol was suddenly reserved for “adults only”—Benno, Martie, and Karl. Arthur recalled that people were to consider themselves lucky if they were invited to sit on the rug and drink booze with the adults.

  Arthur and Andrea became so paranoid by the end of the season—everything a “we-thought-they-thought mental construction”—that they only felt comfortable talking to Jim and Jane. “Defamation was by innuendo, as it always is in academic pursuits, and not a clear word of hate was spoken by anyone,” they later wrote to police. Any remaining hope that the Bankoffs had exaggerated the Lamberg-Karlovskys’ distaste for them evaporated when Karl told Arthur he wouldn’t in fact be invited back for next year’s dig. The Bankoffs had planned to spend the year abroad and to work in Tepe Yahya the following season, to earn their return trip home. But now they were stuck in Iran without the funds to get home, which was why they eventually found themselves in Italy when Jane died. “It wasn’t a very human thing to do,” Arthur would later say.

  Even the unrufflable Jim had reached his limit. Per Arthur and Andrea’s joint police statement, he confided in Arthur that he thought Martie was a “stupid, vicious, jealous bitch.” And he couldn’t always bite his tongue when it came to Karl, though he would always go back to “Yes, Boss”-ing him as soon as the tiff was over. The night of Benno’s arrival, in the middle of the cocktail party to celebrate the scholar, Karl found out that Jim had arranged for Arthur to take a sick baby, the child of a local, to the doctor at the neighboring mining camp and that Jim had given him $2.26 from his own pocket to pay for the treatment. There was no shouting—Karl didn’t want to do it in front of Benno—but his fury was unmistakable. Jim responded that it was “after all, a baby, and his money, and not really Karl’s business,” but Karl wasn’t having any of it. It was reminiscent of a tussle they’d had earlier that summer about Karl threatening to unfairly fire a worker: Jim expected humane treatment of locals; Karl demanded obedience from his crew. “There was some shouting, but nothing violent like physical blows,” Arthur remembered, but for Jim, who would sooner walk away than argue his case, it was striking. Karl himself said he did not remember this incident.