Death's Acre

by William M. Bass

  Snake-lovers will be appalled by my take-no-prisoners policy, but it’s important to put it in perspective. First, with the reservoir rising and habitat being lost, there were far too many rattlesnakes for the remaining habitat to support anyhow. Second—and much more important to me—I had been given responsibility for the safety of the anthropology students working with me. All told, I spent fourteen summers excavating in South Dakota, a period that spanned my transition from Ph.D. student in Philadelphia to visiting instructor at the University of Nebraska to tenured professor at the University of Kansas. During that time nearly 150 students worked for me out on the plains. Quite a few prairie rattlers died from close encounters of the interspecies kind during those years. Not one of my students did.

  Sadly, other students did die.

  The prairie is notorious for the suddenness and violence of its weather changes, and that’s especially true in summer. All that grass gives off a tremendous amount of moisture. As the sun beats down, the water vapor rises until it condenses, sometimes as puffy, cotton-candy clouds, and sometimes as black thunderheads towering four miles high.

  Four students on an archaeologist’s crew were returning from a remote village site by boat when a storm caught them. They had seen it coming and tried to outrun it, but a prairie storm can strike as swiftly and as mercilessly as an angry rattler. Lashed by gale-force winds and ocean-size waves, their boat capsized and all four drowned. Their boat was carrying life preservers, but—being young and feeling immortal—nobody was wearing one. Once the boat flipped, it was too late.

  Sometimes students grimaced at my safety-consciousness, but I’ve always believed in caution, and it’s always paid off: I’ve never been seriously hurt, and none of my students has been, either.

  WE HAD RETURNED to the second terrace of the Missouri River in the summer of 1958 and excavated several dozen Arikara graves. By some archaeological standards, that would be considered highly productive. And at a site where we could return again and again for years, it would be. But at the Sully site—and every other site in the Missouri basin for 225 miles upriver—we knew we had very little time. The gates of Oahe Dam had just closed, and the waters began to rise. We had to work faster.

  Ten years earlier, when I was an undergraduate student in college, I had spent my summers working in my stepdad’s rock quarry, driving bulldozers and dump trucks. It was a great summer job, like being a really big kid playing with huge Tonka toys.

  I’ve never been particularly interested in speed—fast cars hold little appeal for me—but power, well, that’s another thing altogether. Give me a truck with a big diesel and a fat granny gear, and I’m a happy man.

  Summers at the quarry, I took some flak because I was the boss’s son. Some of it was good-natured; some of it wasn’t. There was one fellow in particular—a skinny, mean guy in his forties—who seemed to go out of his way to give me a hard time. One day, as I was driving down a narrow lane between two buildings, I met him head-on, coming the other way in a flatbed.

  The rules of the road at a quarry are quite specific about encounters like this: The loaded truck always has the right-of-way. My truck was carrying fifteen tons of rock; his flatbed was empty. There was no room to pass, and no room to turn around. He would have to back up.

  But he didn’t. I waited, and he sat there grinning at me. I honked my horn; he just grinned more widely.

  I’d tried all summer to be nice to this guy, but clearly it wasn’t doing any good. Something finally snapped. I jammed the gearshift into first and eased out the clutch. As the bumper of my truck kissed the front of the flatbed, his eyes got big. But he still didn’t back up. So I mashed down on the gas pedal, and the big dump truck lurched forward, shoving the flatbed back.

  What I didn’t realize at first is that the bumper of the dump truck was nearly a foot higher than the bumper of the flatbed. This soon became evident, though, when the grill of his truck collapsed, the radiator burst, and geysers of steam shot out the front end. Oh, damn, I thought, but the damage was already done, so I figured I might as well keep going until I’d pushed him out of my way.

  I caught a tongue-lashing from my stepdad later, but from then on, the older men at the quarry treated me with respect—and that mean son of a bitch stayed out of my way. Ever since, I’ve valued power above speed.

  In South Dakota, though, it was speed we needed if we were to have any hope of outrunning the rising waters of the Missouri. As I fretted over the problem for the next two summers, a possible answer finally came to me: Maybe the key to speed was power.

  On a cool morning in June 1960, a truck hauling a flatbed trailer bounced and lurched its way up to the Sully site, carrying a bulldozer and a road grader. I’d asked the National Science Foundation for a grant to rent power equipment to excavate, and—clearly with mixed feelings—they’d agreed to let me try it as an experiment.

  I was banking on a particular property of the soil: The disturbed earth of an Arikara grave was darker and fluffier-looking than the denser, undisturbed loess around it, making the grave’s circular outline easy for the trained eye to see. At least, that’s how things worked when the top layer of soil was carefully removed by hand. Would that hold true if we used earthmoving equipment to scrape away the upper foot of topsoil? Would we still be able to spot the burials’ wood coverings and distinctive circular outlines—or would the blades and wheels of heavy machinery churn everything into one big mass of dirt and bone shards? If it did, it would be an ironic comeuppance for me, since one reason I’d come to South Dakota had been to protect the bones, not crush them.

  We started in an area where the ants and our excavations had told us we’d be likely to find burials. The driver made a straight pass, eighty feet long but just two inches deep. Nothing but sod and that fine-grained loess.

  Several more passes; still nothing. I was just about to call a halt, convinced that it had been a harebrained idea, when I saw it: In the wake of the scraper and the bulldozer—at that magic depth of twelve inches—was a distinct circle of darker, looser soil. I let out a whoop that would have done an Arikara warrior proud.

  That summer, with the help of the power equipment, we excavated more than three hundred Arikara graves—ten times the number we’d excavated by hand the year before.

  By this time, we were a regular summer colony in South Dakota. Initially we’d camped in tents at the site, but after the first couple of years we began renting a house for the crew, plus another for the Bass family, which by now included me, Ann, Charlie, and a new addition, William M. Bass IV—Billy. My crew always consisted of ten students plus one cook, who labored mightily to keep us all fed (sometimes seemingly on nothing but government-surplus peanut butter, a food I still can’t eat to this day, four decades later).

  The houses were sparsely furnished. Everybody slept on Army cots, slings of green or tan canvas stretched over rickety wooden frames. Early on, I noticed a problem with the cots: They kept breaking. Now, if millions of soldiers can sleep on Army cots without breaking them, a handful of students should be able to also. The problem, it soon surfaced, was sex: Two bodies in motion just put too much strain on the cots’ flimsy joints. So I passed a rule, the first of my two cardinal rules for summer crews: No sex on the Army cots. The breakage stopped.

  Rule number two was equally simple and much more serious: Don’t get arrested—not for speeding, drinking, fighting, disturbing the peace, or so much as spitting on the sidewalk; if you do, you’re out. We were under so much pressure already, from the rising waters of the river, we couldn’t afford to complicate our task by antagonizing the locals. I only had to enforce rule number two one time, and I never, thank goodness, walked in on a violation of rule number one.

  Even with the addition of earthmoving equipment, the work of excavation remained exhausting. We were covering a lot more ground now, but we were still moving a lot of dirt by hand. To keep the crews moti
vated, I’d stage games and contests—pointing out the crotch of a tree that was about to be submerged, for instance, and seeing who could hit it with the most shovelfuls of dirt. It might sound silly, but it kept morale high. The summers were hard and hot, but they were fun.

  They were a scientific revelation too. As the number of graves we’d excavated mounted into the hundreds, a remarkable picture began to emerge from the prairie earth. For the first time in the history of Great Plains archaeology, we had large, documented samples of an entire tribe’s skeletal remains, from birth through old age. For the Arikara, we realized, life was harsh, violent, and often very brief. We found an astonishing number of small graves containing the remains of infants and children. Tallying the statistics, we found that almost half the population died before age two; by age six, the mortality rate reached 55 percent. Then, interestingly, it plateaued: Very few deaths occurred between ages six and twelve; apparently, if you survived early childhood, you were likely to make it to puberty. Then, starting at around age sixteen, life got perilous again. The females began having babies, and the males began hunting buffalo and waging war. It was a violent, hazardous way of life.

  The Arikara themselves were sedentary, but their neighbors and frequent enemies, the Sioux, were not, and often attacked. Many of the male skeletons bore deep scars from arrow wounds, especially in the pelvis and chest. We found many arrowheads embedded deep within bones. Often these wounds were fatal, but sometimes the bone healed around the flinty point, telling us that this particular warrior had lived for years with a Sioux arrowhead inside him.

  Some skulls, both male and female, were crushed, reflecting the brutal efficiency of stone war clubs. And then there were the skulls bearing cut marks, usually most prominent at the hairline on the forehead, where the initial incision was made to detach the scalp. Some of these scalping victims still had flecks of flint in the skull. In a few chilling instances there was evidence of healing to the cranium: a scalping victim who had lived to tell the harrowing tale.

  One thing we did not find at Sully was bullets. The village was abandoned for the last time around 1750. The whites and their weapons remained little more than a distant curiosity at that time. But in the short space of fifty years, that would change dramatically and, for the Arikara, tragically.

  The Sully site was the largest of the Arikara villages. But the Leavenworth site, two hundred miles upriver, was the most poignant. It was there that the Arikara gathered, around the year 1800, to make their last stand against the Sioux, the whites, and deadly enemies they could not even see. Twelve separate Arikara bands converged, seeking safety in numbers. At a site just south of the present-day border of North Dakota, they built a pair of villages a few hundred yards apart on the first terrace of the Missouri, separated by a pleasant little stream.

  It was there that Lewis and Clark encountered and scrapped with the Arikara. It was there that unscrupulous agents of fur companies waged biological warfare on them, bringing blankets from Saint Louis—blankets deliberately contaminated with smallpox, to which the Indians’ unsuspecting immune systems fell easy prey. And it was there, on August 9, 1823, that Colonel Henry Leavenworth and a force of nearly three hundred U.S. Army soldiers, Missouri militiamen, and Sioux warriors attacked the villages with rifles, bows, clubs, and gunboats. During the night of August 14, the remaining Arikara slipped away from their battered villages.

  BY THE SUMMER OF 1965, the water level in Lake Oahe had risen to nearly 1,525 feet above sea level—more than 100 feet above the river’s natural level—and the two Arikara villages at Leavenworth had disappeared beneath the water. Fortunately for us, the two main cemeteries lay one terrace above the villages, nearly 50 feet higher. So we still had time to excavate, though the pressure was relentless.

  In July of 1966, however, the water was obviously catching up with us, filling some of the burial pits even as we were excavating them (giving new meaning to the phrase watery grave). By that time, we had found and excavated nearly three hundred Arikara graves at the Leavenworth site. We kept working, moving uphill just ahead of the water. But then the finds ceased. We cut long swaths with the power equipment, ranging farther and farther from the main cemetery areas; we even resorted to the old-fashioned technique, digging by hand. But we found nothing more. On July 18, 1966, we abandoned the Leavenworth site to the river, just as the Arikara had done 143 years before.

  Years later an Indian activist would refer to me in a newspaper interview as “Indian grave-robber number one,” and I suppose it’s true. Over the course of fourteen summers, I excavated somewhere between four and five thousand Indian burials on the Great Plains; as far as I know, that’s more than anyone else in the world.

  And yet, I never had a single clash with Native Americans during those fourteen years. There are two explanations for that. First, my wife, Ann, a nutrition scientist, spent her summers working to improve nutrition among the Sioux Indians on South Dakota’s Standing Rock Reservation. Ann wrote her Ph.D. dissertation on the high rate of diabetes among the Sioux and was regarded by them as a friend. As Ann’s husband, I got the benefit of the doubt. Second, I was helping the modern Sioux settle their score with the ancient Arikara: helping them “count final coup,” as they call it.

  But as the 1960s drew to a close, it was clear that change was coming. Lake Oahe was filling up, and the Smithsonian River Basin Surveys were winding down. Of the hundreds of archaeological sites identified before the reservoir began filling, only a small percentage was ever excavated. There wasn’t enough time, money, or manpower to do more.

  But we weren’t just racing the rising waters; we were also swimming against a powerful new cultural current. By the late 1960s—the era of civil rights, Vietnam, and broad social upheaval—Native Americans began reasserting their claim to their culture, their heritage, and their relics. A major clash between science and cultural values was clearly brewing. Bob Dylan’s folk anthem for the sixties spoke of changing times and rising waters, and it advised, “You better start swimmin’ or you’ll sink like a stone.” With the muddy waters of the Missouri rising around my ankles, I decided it was time to start swimming.

  And at that pivotal moment, the University of Tennessee came calling. So did forensic anthropology. My career as “Indian grave-robber number one” was over. My true vocation—as a forensic scientist—was about to begin.

  CHAPTER 3

  Bare Bones: Forensics 101

  IN A RELATIONSHIP lasting forty years, you can learn a lot about someone. But everybody takes some secrets to the grave.

  I first met my longtime teaching partner at the beginning of the fall semester back in 1962. I was a freshly minted Ph.D., teaching at the University of Kansas in Lawrence in between my summer excavations in South Dakota; my partner-to-be was a not-so-fresh corpse lately pulled from a roadside near the Missouri River outside Leavenworth. The body, found by three dove hunters and one bird dog, was down in the floodplain—what the locals call “the bottoms”—where the soil, deposited by occasional floods, was soft and sandy. When the murder occurred it was summertime, and the diggin’ was easy.

  As a forensic anthropologist, I tend to see bodies that are long past their prime—bodies that are bloated, blasted, burned, buggy, rotted, sawed, gnawed, liquefied, mummified, or dismembered. Some are even skeletonized, reduced to bare bones—bare, but brimming with data.

  Flesh decays; bone endures. Flesh forgets and forgives ancient injuries; bone heals, but it always remembers: a childhood fall, a barroom brawl; the smash of a pistol butt to the temple, the quick sting of a blade between the ribs. The bones capture such moments, preserve a record of them, and reveal them to anyone with eyes trained to see the rich visual record, to hear the faint whispers rising from the dead.

  I was in the morgue at University of Tennessee Medical Center recently, and laid out on a metal tray there I saw a heartbreaking sight: the skeleton of an infant, just three months ol
d, battered beyond anything I’ve ever seen. An arm and a leg were broken; so was nearly every tiny rib. The most horrifying part was this: In addition to the fresh, perimortem breaks—those occurring around the time of death—there were numerous other fractures in various stages of healing. This poor child was abused almost from the moment he was born, yet his broken little body kept trying to mend itself. Given half a chance, he would have recovered, because the body’s resilience can be incredible. So, too, is the depth of cruelty in some people. It did my heart good, in a sad sort of way, to read that his mother was later charged with murder and is now awaiting trial.

  The adult victim I examined that day back in 1962—the one that would become my teaching partner—was not reduced to bare bones. The examination would have been much more pleasant if that had been the case. The remains arrived in a reeking cardboard box tied with twine to the trunk lid of a black sedan. The two Kansas Bureau of Investigation (KBI) agents who had tied it there didn’t want to stink up their trunk. They didn’t want to stink up their hands, either: “I’m not touching it,” said one of them. “You’ll have to go get it yourself.” So I went out to the parking lot, cut the twine, and carried the box over to the side yard of the university’s Museum of Natural History, which housed my office. Setting the box on the grass, I lifted out a plastic bag, untied its neck, and extracted the remains, piece by rotting piece.