There was no question in their minds they made the right decision. They were glad to move on, even into difficulties, and I realized that, in spite of everything, they were cheerful. Even when Jo said, “It’s like this every day,” about the meltdown, she was smiling, and Grant—where was that self-mocking almost bitter tone that underlaid everything he had said in Statia? He was bitter-free. The upside of not working, they freely acknowledged, was that they got to spend this time with their children. And Statia had simply become untenable. A friend who escaped the island to live in the Netherlands had decided, on retirement, to return to it, and Grant was mournful recounting this. “You know that Dutch phrase, dat is verkeerd?—that is just wrong? Well, I told her, dat is zo verkeerd.”
He shook his head, then began to outline a big idea he and Jo wanted to float past the International Committee on Archaeological Heritage Management (ICAHM): a registry of archaeological sites and monuments on Google Maps. Anyone could list a site via iPad. An archaeological directory for the world!
In 2013, almost a year after my trip to Lichfield, Joanna posted on Facebook, “My hero of the day is Grant Gilmore, for never giving up.” Grant found work in a bike shop for a while, and reported that he was getting in shape. Later in 2013, two years after he left Statia, he won a six-month teaching position in the Department of Archaeology at the University of Sheffield. That signaled the beginning of the end of his professional limbo. The Encyclopedia of Caribbean Archaeology that he coedited was published in early 2014, and soon after, he landed a plum job in Charleston, South Carolina, another cradle of historical archaeology, as director of the Program in Historic Preservation and Community Planning at the College of Charleston. His mission: to introduce more archaeology into the curriculum. “Yes, we have had champagne,” he told me at last after the thirty-month test of his commitment and character. “We cannot believe this is happening—I think over three hundred job applications has resulted in the perfect job.”
ROAD TRIP THROUGH TIME
Our partner, heartbreak
Much important history has been lost forever. I thought of that line from one of Grant Gilmore’s reports as I went out in my dusty gray-and-brown trail shoes, a copy of Ethnic Oasis: The Chinese in the Black Hills in hand. Spurred by the book’s coauthor, archaeologist Rose Estep Fosha, I was looking for the last piece of the Chinatown of Deadwood, South Dakota. The town was hardly big enough to have a separate section with town in its name, but during the gold rush years of the late 1800s, hundreds of Chinese had lived and worked around lower Main Street. The street was mud and muck in those days; now it was quaint brick, restored to a pretty period of history, not quite to its ugly roots. I walked down Main Street, past the Masonic lodge and the Franklin Hotel with benches along its broad porch and Charlie Utter’s place and Kevin Costner’s joint and the open doors of T-shirt shops and casinos, pop music and ka-ching, ka-ching, the music of money falling into local pockets, at least some of it marked for preservation. The desire to rescue its crumbling buildings was what brought the gaming industry to Deadwood.
The weather had been unseasonably warm for September, and all day long the ozone had been building up as clouds stacked above the hills. Late afternoon, a broody, purplish sky hung over the historic and half-historic buildings, tourists snapping one another’s pictures or milling around slot parlors. I reached the newer, rawer part of town dominated by the innocuous Hampton Inn and the Tin Lizzie casino on one side of the street and a series of shallow-graveled parking lots backed by eroded ravine walls on the other. I could see exposed tree roots and the occasional crumbling foundation in the walls. Signs strung on chains broke the parking lots into sections: FOUR ACES CASINO & HAMPTON INN PARKING; VALET PARKING; GUEST PARKING ONLY. A trashcan sat next to a large interpretive sign about Deadwood’s Chinese population, not far from a blue Dumpster parked by an old retaining wall. This was all that was left of the city’s Chinatown.
The day before, I had hiked up the steep hill to Mount Moriah Cemetery, where Wild Bill Hickok and Calamity Jane were famously buried. The altar where the Chinese laid their burial feast offerings had recently been rebuilt, using bricks salvaged from the last piece of Chinatown, the Wing Tsue Emporium of Fee Lee Wong. In the early decades of the twentieth century, he had been the most prominent Chinese merchant in Deadwood, the link between the white and Asian populations. Like a bright-white miniature temple, the altar rested on the side of the hill over the old and crooked tombs, just up the path from Bill and Jane, the wild and the calamitous, and the stark white cross over the Civil War tombstones worn almost smooth, and the Jewish section where piles of stones commemorated the ancestors. Brand new tombstones nearby memorialized the Infant of Fee Lee Wong, born Deadwood, died January 30, 1895, and the Child of Fee Lee Wong, born Deadwood, died March 20, 1899.
The story of the Chinese in Deadwood was a story of resourcefulness; chased off the potentially lucrative claims for gold, they became merchants, launderers, and restaurant owners in Deadwood and catered to the daily needs of the miners. Even when the claims yielded nothing, the miners needed food and clean clothes. Few of the Chinese had emigrated with their wives; after the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 banned further immigration, the mostly male population dwindled. Fee Lee Wong had had the good fortune to bring his wife, and though two of their children died, eight survived.
His descendants had met in 2004 and gathered on lower Main Street in front of the establishment that their great-grandfather and great-great-grandfather had built. A memorable photo was taken. Then, before they left town, the descendants of Fee Lee Wong visited the mayor and lobbied to save the building. Everyone wants to save the building, the mayor assured them. The owner had been specifically instructed to preserve the building when he got permission to demolish the unstable structures on either side. But somehow, on Christmas Eve 2005, the owner and his sons began the demolition, and when it was over, the Wing Tsue Emporium—the final architectural vestige of Deadwood’s Chinatown—lay in rubble on the street.
Archaeologist Rose Estep Fosha’s voice was tight with emotion, recounting the story of the demolition. “I couldn’t talk about it for eighteen months without tears. It was a wonderful piece of the history of Deadwood.” When she and her husband, archaeologist Michael Fosha, told me about the Deadwood dig, they struggled to keep their composure.
The story of the demolition wasn’t the only sad thing I heard from them, or from other archaeologists, for that matter. The sites that get written about and become heritage destinations and tourist sites often incorporate a story of loss and destruction; think of the Parthenon, or Pompeii. But how many sites get destroyed altogether through carelessness or venal intent, whose treasures get plowed under or sold on eBay? Rose Fosha had been focused for years on the dwindling and threatened remnants of this particular part of Deadwood; she had supervised digs into the foundations of Chinatown, and after endless polite requests, had finally persuaded the owner of Wing Tsue to let her make a record of the interior of the building, if only for an hour. That was a request modest enough to entertain; the owner let her in, and for an hour she snapped and snapped and snapped pictures—just one floor, no more, one hour, no longer. “I have a presentation I give on it that is . . . I don’t know that I could do it without tears, still,” she said.
Mike Fosha listened intently to his wife in the back room of Botticelli Ristorante in Rapid City, an hour from the empty lot in Deadwood. His passion was tracking down mammoth sites, looking for places where humans had cut and flaked mammoth bone into tools. “Fresh mammoth bone works just like stone, only better,” he said. Looking for evidence of human culture in North America that was older than 13,500 years ago—pre-Clovis, the archaeologists call it—he thought it was a good bet it would come from a mammoth butchering site in the West. “Pushing back human entry into the New World is fun because it is hotly disputed,” he said. He found a site in Brookings, South Dakota, that would have passed the stringent requirements for an undisturbed si
te, and sent the broken mammoth bone samples from it to two labs for dating. “There’s only one critter that can break up mammoth bone and that’s a human.” The labs dated the bone to roughly 14,500 years ago, a thousand years earlier than the oldest Clovis points. But before he and his volunteers could finish excavating and recording the layers, a county highway crew destroyed part of the site. It was a mix-up, or maybe it was a turf issue. There was no poetry in the story, and no sense either, for the likes of me. “All you can do is laugh about it,” he said.
In spite of the disappointments, the Foshas could not imagine a different life. Rose, in her mid-fifties, now worked for FEMA, the Federal Emergency Management Agency; Mike, four years younger, worked for the state of South Dakota—“I work for the people,” was how he described it. Even on vacation, they find sites to visit, if not excavate.
Late-afternoon light filtered through the windows of the restaurant. Rose and Mike shared a panini, their heads bowed toward each other, hers blond, his balding on top and combed neatly to below his ears. She had a flowered shawl draped over her shoulders; he wore a tidy vest and collared shirt. Rose said she had wanted to be an archaeologist since fourth grade. “I told my teacher I wanted to dig up—I didn’t say dead people, but I wanted to dig up people who were here before the people we give names to.” Her teacher said, sweetly, “Why, you want to be an archaeologist.” Rose was thirty-four years old, the mother of two, before she was able to go to college; she commuted for years to the University of Kansas from her home in Kansas City. Mike was the assistant director of her first field school, where they met. He had a gift, she said, for looking at the landscape and figuring out what it was like eons ago. He knew instinctively where the first shovel should be placed at a site—it’s a combination of training, sensitivity to the soil, and knowledge of geomorphology, how landscapes evolve through the ages. Mike called what he did “taking that road trip through time.”
Rose’s first husband, the father of her children, visited her near the end of that first field school, on a day when she found a decorated pottery rim. “It was larger than usual, and we had the neck and the rim,” she said. The decoration was crucial, Mike pointed out, because “it showed who made it and when it was made.” “I was just so thrilled,” Rose said. “I still have chills talking about it!” She called out to her husband to come see her great discovery. “And he comes over and he says, ‘Rosie, what are you doing out here in this heat, getting so excited about something broken? You must be crazy.’ And I thought, ‘One of us is.’” Divorce was perhaps inevitable, and eight years after the summer of the field school, she and Mike married.
So, how long had they been together now? “Fourteen years,” Rose said without hesitation, and Mike shook his head. “I was afraid you’d ask. I deal in thousands,” he said, laughing.
I envied their ability to see sites and artifacts in the landscape, and told them about the invisible effigy mound in Wisconsin. Mike and Rose laughed and said they knew plenty of people, including archaeologists, who couldn’t spot features.
“It’s so much better to walk with someone who knows what they’re looking at,” I said. “Somebody who can see the mound, or notice a glass bead on the ground.” I was thinking of the blue glass beads of St. Eustatius.
“And ask where this glass bead came from,” Michael said, picking up my image and looking at Rose.
She locked eyes with him and whispered: “Shipwreck.”
UNDERWATER MYSTERIES
Slow archaeology, deep archaeology
“I’M THE empress here,” Kathy Abbass declared when she finally admitted me to her headquarters, a warehouse of a room in a prefab building on the grounds of the Newport Naval Complex. The room was stuffed with plastic milk crates full of maritime history and shelves of iron-encrusted artifacts. I looked around at the neat piles of paper and maps, the yellow plastic kitty-litter bucket filled with tape measures and twine and waterproof clipboards. Empress of what exactly? And then she showed me where her treasures are buried: the harbor where America’s biggest fleet of sunken Revolutionary War ships rest in their watery grave.
I settled into the passenger seat of her rumbling van. It suited the marine archaeologist: aging but functional, even jaunty, a seventeen-year-old Pontiac Trans Sport with more than 80,000 miles on the odometer and three lit-up warning lights on the dashboard. Abbass’s beautiful square face was framed by flyaway white hair, most of it bundled into a topknot of curls; her eyes were ocean blue and sharp. The driver’s seat was pitched back to accommodate a spine damaged by osteoporosis. Abbass warned me that Diva, her Pekingese, who was riding in the back, had recently been cured of fleas but might have them again; Abbass had been bitten by a flea last night. Was she trying to scare me off ? It wouldn’t work.
I had already been bitten by the archaeologist herself, after my initial request for an interview. “I am glad to talk to you about marine archaeology and its difficulties,” she responded, “but it is not possible for you ‘to observe the team from the shore,’ and we will not release our unpublished intellectual property to you.” This was the same person who had posted a notice on Academia.edu, a site that existed for scholars to share their work: “The Rhode Island Marine Archaeology Project and I will post no reports, publications, or data from our research on this website. Anyone else who does so has violated our non-disclosure policy and is at risk of suit for infringement of our intellectual property rights.” She was a pitbull, with a Pekingese sidekick. To ride shotgun, I had had to join her organization ($25, a bargain) and supply her with a personal reference from Grant Gilmore, and because her office was located on a naval base, I also had to send my Social Security number and get security clearance. But I was determined to see her in context. In a profession of loosely affiliated tribes—of academics, government archaeologists, and archaeologists-for-hire—Abbass had, like Gilmore, created an independent archaeology center. She had done this with almost no money and in the shadow of gilded Newport Harbor, with the famed shipwreck explorer Robert Ballard ensconced at the University of Rhode Island. Never mind the crowded pond; she had made news herself and promoted archaeology along the way.
Abbass pressed hard on the pedal, moving us past the offices of the Rhode Island Marine Archaeology Project (RIMAP) on the grounds of the naval base, and out onto the lovely boulevards and vistas of Newport. The empress had another warning: “I bought this van used ten years ago,” she said. “It’s not worth fixing, so when it dies, I’ll leave it by the side of the road.” Duly warned—in addition to the other hazards, we might end up on foot. On an overcast fall day, out we chugged past the armed guards at the gate of the naval station in the possibly flea-ridden, rattletrap van, heading toward the mansions of Newport and the harbor waters that hold the historic fleet.
The treasure of Abbass’s empire consists of thirteen ships, sunk deliberately by the British in 1778 to prevent the French from sailing to the aid of the Continental Navy and relieving Newport. Who knows what would have happened to the course of the war if the French navy had been able to stop the British there? All by itself, this sunken fleet was a historic prize; some of its ships had been used to run weapons and soldiers to fight the rebellious colonies; some held prisoners-of-war. Abbass claimed that one of those ships had a previous life as the Endeavour, also known as the Endeavour Bark, the first vessel to carry the British explorer James Cook around the world. If Cook meant anything to most Americans, he was just one more eighteenth-century adventurer, but to the rest of the world, he was the king of explorers. His voyage on the Endeavour put Australia and New Zealand on the map; the Endeavour was Australia’s Niña, Pinta, and Santa Maria, and maybe its Mayflower, too. Cook’s international reputation was why Abbass had more than the usual dose of archaeologists’ paranoia. “You can’t imagine the number of folks who contact us who only want to pirate our information about the search for Captain Cook’s Endeavour Bark,” she confided. Imagine, a naval archaeologist worried about pirates.
Abbass, now in her late sixties, has spent fifteen years circling Newport Harbor, doing what she could to safeguard these sunken ships while preparing for a clean excavation; but “we’re nowhere near ready,” she told me. “We have a number of years of work yet to do.” So the ships continue to lie submerged in open water, at risk from natural disasters and looters. “There are people anchored out there right now,” Abbass admitted, but she refused to be hurried. Among the things an archaeologist needs in order to perform an underwater excavation the right way, she said, is a place to study and conserve what you find. Everything that came up had to be conserved, an ongoing responsibility that seemed formidable enough if you were talking about changing the water in the jars that held the fragile artifacts and were small enough to fit on a shelf, but multiplied in difficulty when the object to be conserved was a submerged ship, much less a fleet. And whatever you touched, you were going to disturb—in fact, you were going to wreck the site for future archaeologists. So you better be damn sure you know what you’re doing.
THE FUTURE OF archaeology lies underwater. The experts formed a chorus here. “If you want to have an impact as an archaeologist,” one of my sources said, “learn to scuba-dive.” Back in landlocked South Dakota, Mike Fosha had geeked out when our conversation turned to the oceans. “Water has risen three hundred feet since the glaciers melted,” he said. “That landscape under there, that’s going to tell the story of the earliest occupants. That’s where the early sites are.” Although Fosha hadn’t specialized in underwater archaeology, he follows its developments avidly, from excavations of the earliest English settlement in Jamestown, now partially flooded, to the discovery off the coast of England of more than forty submarines from World War I, some with their crews still inside. What looks to the untrained eye like murk and slimy stones and lumps with fluttering seaweed were keys to the deep mystery of our past.
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