As I began putting together my own archaeological projects for a fraction of the money required for mountaineering expeditions, my enthusiasm for giant peaks waned. More important, I was thrilled to have something to show for my more academic efforts. Scholarship and scientific projects provided something to share, and occasionally inspire, in the form of original contributions to human knowledge rather than just a good feeling and a hook for motivational speaking. (“Pursue your dreams, whatever they may be, one step at a time, just like when I was the 2,467th person to climb Everest,” etc.)
Finally, the birth of my son, Samuel, also convinced me to tame some of my more reckless activities. My child needs his father, and though I’m still physically capable, I now use a rope and take a climbing partner more often than not. I’ve also replaced some of the physical and mental addiction of mountaineering with other activities that are much safer, like long-distance running on wilderness trails, mountain biking, and the occasional game of croquet.
The author climbing with his son, Samuel, on a peak near Mount Rainier.
Sherry Ryan
In retrospect, archaeology probably saved my life. Anyone who has participated seriously in climbing for a decade or more can recite the names of several acquaintances and friends who didn’t survive the experience. I personally quit counting after two dozen. Of eight people I worked with at one climbing school, only half of us are still alive, including one who had a leg nearly torn off by a falling rock. None were killed while working as professional guides, where our attention to client safety is foremost. Each perished pushing his own personal limits, often extreme, all of them doing what they loved to do.
After I’d completed my undergraduate career and spent a fun summer following graduation, fall arrived with its accompanying poor weather in the Northwest. In short order I found myself increasingly bored and wishing I had applied directly to graduate school. Scrambling in an attempt to make up for lost time, I managed to get admitted to two great schools in Southern California beginning in January, for the beginning of their winter quarters. One was a program in international relations and the other in Egyptology. I attended each for a week and dropped out of both. I learned quickly from the former that I didn’t have the obsession or dedication to pursue a professional career in the very real and often ugly world of Cold War politics. Many of the professors at the school were presidential advisers or other prominent individuals, and the subject matter was immediately current and very, very serious. The career path seemed to be directed toward positions in the State Department, policy institutes, or university-level teaching. It wasn’t political science per se that attracted me as an undergraduate, but the history surrounding it. I was more interested in its fascinating past than in its frightening present.
I had very different misgivings about the Egyptology program, mostly logistical, but my turning away from it was ultimately for the best. Somewhat trackless, I spent the rest of the spring climbing, returned to the Northwest, married the ever-patient Sherry, and directed a climbing school for the summer. In the meanwhile I applied to a graduate archaeology program at a very large institution that I will hereafter refer to as Big University.
FROM THE VERY BEGINNING, it was clear that my new graduate school would require some major adjustment. The campus was huge, and I was just one of thirty thousand students, about ten times more than my previous university. PLU had spoiled me. When I was an undergraduate, each of my professors knew me by name and was genuinely concerned about my academic progress and personal welfare. At the new school, I felt like just another face in the crowd, another herring in the ocean, a number just like the one I was issued.
My first quarter at Big University was like taking a plunge off a high board into unfamiliar and deep waters. There were two required classes that were seemingly designed to flush out the less-than-serious student. The first class dealt with archaeological theory. Behind the shovels, pots, and other physical manifestations of the archaeological practice, there is a level of abstraction that provides a theoretical framework for the organization and interpretation of the work. That particular class was taught by a quirky and eccentric archaeological version of Professor Kingsfield, the arrogant trainer of law students in the book, movie, and TV series The Paper Chase. Like Kingsfield, this professor was intent upon training our mush-filled heads into ones that could think critically.
Our massive reading list for the course consisted of 147 articles and books to be read and, more important, comprehended. During our first meeting, class was immediately dismissed for a week so that we could prepare with twenty-one of these readings, five of which were complete books. Needless to say, we left class that day in shock as we scrambled to the library. Even four years of undergraduate study had not prepared us for this level of intensity, but the only option was to get used to it and get used to it quickly.
Despite his numerous intimidating eccentricities, our theory professor was absolutely brilliant. The required courses taught by this pedagogue from Hades involved the critical examination of major theoretical issues in archaeology, including classification (how does one organize what is found?) and explanation (how does one interpret what is found?). Quotes scribbled in the margins of my notes from his classes retain the flavor of the experience. Classification, for example, is necessary for order in this world so “you can tell your grandmother from your dog” and so that “you can tell a round red rubber ball from an apple, the consequences of a mistake being gastric distress.”
The professor also maintained a highly critical view of the study of the human past. “We’re no worse off than alchemy!” he would declare after enlightening us with the hidden foolhardiness of the very subject we were devoted to studying. Very importantly, though, he urged us to develop the ability to analyze the theories, books, and journals in the field critically no matter how prestigious the author or pompous the prose. He insisted that we not be afraid to call a spade a spade (no archaeological pun intended). “Free yourself from the tyranny of the written word!” he would orate. “Don’t be afraid to say, ‘This is crap!’” In some of his classes, we were assigned a cutting-edge scientific article and asked to deconstruct it to reveal its basic theoretical flaws. The process was certainly surprising, as we discovered that a lot of what initially impressed us as quality archaeological methodology really was defective (and some of it still is!). In short, he taught us to think in new and different ways, something that might come in handy, for instance, in finding such things as lost Egyptian tombs.
Another class to be taken by new students during our first quarter was on the subject of “paleoenvironmental reconstruction,” in which we were to study how to make sense of the greater world in which ancient people lived. After all, it’s not only manufactured artifacts and human bones that are uncovered by archaeologists. Humans are just one component of a greater picture of the planet’s past, which also includes plants and animals and variables such as landforms, landscapes, and climate. The class was at least as demanding as that of our theory professor and required us to read and summarize the hundred or so items on the reading list. We then had to give a critical presentation of a prominent article or book to be critiqued by our peers.
This, however, was no ordinary class on how to reconstruct the past. The professor was an outstanding specialist in “faunal analysis,” and much of our work involved learning the fine art of animal bone identification. Every class period new bones of the mammalian skeleton would be introduced, and we were expected to learn their major features and be able to identify them in whole or fragmentary form. Boxes of disarticulated cat skeletons served as the basic model, supplemented with the remains of other creatures large and small. It wasn’t so bad; I happen to like bones. Apart from their obvious anatomical necessity, they are a striking form of art in nature, worthy of admiration and wonder.
To check our progress, “bone quizzes” were held on a regular basis and consisted of a series of small cardboard boxes that held bone fr
agments for our identification. We lined up along the tables spaced throughout the room that held the bone-filled boxes while a teaching assistant held a stopwatch; every thirty seconds we were required to shuffle over to the next box. A calm demeanor and nerves of steel were helpful, and attention to detail was essential. Our anxious hands would quickly grab the bone, spinning it rapidly to take note of any distinguishing features. Is it a sliver of a left distal humerus or a battered chunk of a right proximal radius? An answer was hastily jotted down before we were promptly moved to the next box.
The number of bones we were required to know intimately grew with each class, so at the end we were to have a cumulative knowledge of the two hundred plus bones in the skeleton. Our proficiency would be tested at the end of the course with the much dreaded “FBQ,” or “Final Bone Quiz.” We were taunted by veterans of previous classes with stories of the horrors ahead, including one about a rat skeleton’s being placed in a blender, from which fifty fragments would be randomly selected for our identification. Ultimately, a pureed rat might have been preferable, as the bones during the final were an amazing assortment of bizarre bits and pieces from peculiar creatures. I had never seen such odd bones. With the phrase “You may begin,” a living nightmare ensued: the intense concentration, the rapidly spinning bones, and, as in the song by Jacques Brel, the horror of the word “Next!” called out every thirty seconds…the sea-lion scapula…the fragment of the antelope metatarsal…the fractured rabbit tibia…and box number 50.
We had heard that the final box could go one of two ways: If the professor were in a happy mood or liked the class, we might find something on the order of a rubber-squeaky-toy dog bone. On the other hand, the box might contain a bone sent from hell, whose identification would boggle even the most discriminately trained eyes. Unsurprisingly, the latter was the case—something from a manatee, perhaps—and the Final Bone Quiz left us exhausted. One young lady fled the room in tears; she had somehow written her answers out of order during the shuffle around the room, completely fouling her entire test. After it was all over, I knew a lot about methods to reconstruct ancient environments and a whole lot about bones.
I also studied human bones with a wonderful professor named Daris Swindler. His love of the subject permeated his teaching, and his lectures were a sunny light in an otherwise terse and frantic graduate-school existence. My having already studied the bones of dead cats and assorted mammals certainly aided the process, and given other circumstances I might have become one of those forensic anatomists with whom television currently seems so enamored.
WHEN I ENROLLED at Big University, I had heard that a professor in the archaeology program had just conducted his first excavation in Egypt. Dr. W had previously worked in Iran, but with the recent revolution there his research investment was essentially terminated. With generous private funding, however, he was able to gain a fresh start in another ancient land. I sought out Dr. W on my very first day of graduate school. Nervously knocking on his office door, I interrupted the young professor typing away at a document. I quickly introduced myself as a new student, explained my deep interest in Egypt, and acknowledged that I was aware of his recent work there. I eagerly stated that I would be grateful to be involved in any opportunity to learn or participate in anything having to do with the subject. In what some might consider a profound coincidence, Dr. W was at that very moment typing a grant proposal to conduct an archaeological project in the Egyptian desert the following year. “Sign up as one of my advisees and I’ll add you right in!” I did, and the very next summer a dream was realized as I traveled to the land of my childhood fantasies to participate in my first archaeological expedition.
THREE
FIRST IMPRESSIONS
IT WAS A VERY LONG first year in graduate school, and it seemed as if summer was ages away. Dr. W was successful in winning his grants, and the project would begin in June 1981. Egypt at the time was a politically tense place. Anwar Sadat, the president who boldly made peace with Israel, would be assassinated in Cairo in October of that same year. Despite the political complexities, we dealt with the problematic present by holding to our goal of addressing the past.
The expedition’s objectives were fascinating. Everybody is aware of the grandeur of the pharaohs—their massive constructions, the hieroglyphs, and the opulence of royal tombs. But all these marvelous things, these manifestations of advanced “civilization” or what anthropologists call “societal complexity,” didn’t always exist, and they certainly didn’t appear out of nowhere. People in fact lived in the Nile Valley for tens of thousands of years before there were any pyramids, sphinxes, or sprawling temples. Egyptologists and archaeologists tend to agree that what we might call “pharaonic civilization” began only about five thousand years ago, or around 3100–3050 B.C. Long before that, inhabitants of the place we now call Egypt were living off the land, hunting, fishing, and gathering natural produce. And at some time, between nine thousand and six thousand years ago, people in the Nile Valley started to grow their own crops and began the process of domesticating animals for their own benefit. Permanent villages became the norm, and food surpluses allowed for larger populations. Out of this situation, a “civilization” would arise with its relatively sophisticated characteristics, including monumental architecture, a writing system, craft specialists, political and religious bureaucrats, and a supreme ruler.
The transition from living off the land to manipulating the land is a topic of great anthropological mystery and discussion. It happened in many places, and here and there the notion spread through contact with those “in the know,” but elsewhere processes of independent invention seem to be the case. The timing of this profound transition is suspicious; some of the earliest cases of the development of agriculture appear after the last ice age, and climate change may have played a major role. But however it may have happened, it was from this important cultural platform that most early civilizations evolved, not only in Egypt but in regions like Mesopotamia, the Indus Valley, and China. Dr. W’s project would investigate this intriguing and somewhat shadowy transition period through archaeological exploration in a part of Egypt known as the Fayyum.
The Fayyum is a natural basin southwest of Cairo, its principal feature being a large lake known in Arabic today as the Birket Qarun, which has varied in size through the ages. In the 1920s two bold British scholars—archaeologist Gertrude Caton-Thompson and geologist Elinor Gardner—conducted some of the first archaeological surveys of the region and found evidence of early agricultural settlements in what is now desert, including baskets of grain well preserved in the dry sand and other essential clues. Certain portions of the region, including the north side of the lake and the deserts to the southwest, remained undeveloped and thus bore the potential of being excellent places to investigate Egypt’s agricultural transition.
With June fast approaching, Dr. W presented me with an airline ticket that might as well have been a key to my future. I flew to London and from there to Cairo. I remember peering through the airplane window seeking any clue that we were coming close, and after a few hours the blackness of the Mediterranean yielded to a land punctuated by thousands of tiny lights. It was the Nile Delta in northern Egypt, and Cairo was but a couple of hundred miles away.
I arrived in Cairo after dark, and it was an experience right out of a very peculiar and restless dream. As we left the plane, large floodlights illuminated our every gesture and soldiers manning machine guns crouched behind small sandbag bunkers. The air was hot, and the unfamiliar sounds of Arabic added to an atmosphere of both wonder and excitement. And I was finally there! In Egypt! Land of the Pharaohs!
Outside the airport I hired a taxi, and thus began my pandemonic and fun introduction to the city of Cairo. A half hour high-speed careen through the streets revealed a city still very much alive even at this late hour. I remember blurs of light, the rattling of the taxi and its various loose parts, the incessant horn honking, and the Egyptian music on the radio. Tha
nks to a couple of quick swerves, we avoided a donkey cart full of garbage while another dilapidated speeding car swung into our lane with only inches to spare. Eventually we arrived at the Garden City House, my eyes wide and my knees shaking.
Pronounce it like the Egyptians, “Garden See-tee House,” I had been instructed by my friend Janet, who’d been in Egypt with Dr. W the year before. The Garden City House is located on the third and fourth floors of an aging building near the Nile. Its truly convenient location and its simple, inexpensive rooms have attracted many a scholar by word of mouth for years. Tired from my travels, I checked in, found my room, and attempted to sleep.
The first day’s agenda was obvious. It had to be the famed Pyramids of Giza, including the Great Pyramid of Cheops and its two colossal neighbors, as well as the famous Sphinx along with fields of ancient cemeteries, all located just on the outskirts of the sprawling city. But before I began my adventure, I stepped outside the hotel and walked a short distance to gain my first glimpse of the legendary Nile River.
“Egypt is the gift of the Nile,” stated the Greek historian Herodotus. That little quote appears in nearly every book ever written about Egypt, so there is no reason to break tradition and leave it out of this one. But it’s true. The Nile is the undisputed life source for the country. In ancient times its annual flooding renewed the soil and produced an agricultural paradise that formed the foundation for the Egyptian civilization. It also served as a natural highway and easily facilitated the movement of people and their goods.
Beneath the Sands of Egypt Page 4