Lives in Ruins

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Lives in Ruins Page 27

by Marilyn Johnson


  smallpox, 156, 157

  smelly things, 30, 46, 47, 176, 184

  smugglers and smuggling, 33

  snakes, 32, 126, 127

  Society for American Archaeology (SAA), 59, 77, 85

  soldiers: cultural training, 191, 197, 198, 201, 202–3, 207–9, 213–15; Revolutionary War, 155–57, 166–67, 168, 171–74

  Solecki, Ralph, 52, 54, 55, 61–62

  Solecki, Rose, 52, 54

  sonar, 112

  South America, 45n, 71. See also Peru

  South Dakota, 9–11, 95–100

  spears, 57, 60, 66

  spiders and insects. See insects and spiders

  Staffordshire Hoard, 91

  stairs, ancient, 136, 142, 226

  Star Wars, 150

  State University of New York at Stony Brook, 37–39, 41–54, 62–67

  statuary, 48, 75, 198

  Sterlingville, New York, 208–9

  Stewart, Al, 185n

  stone: dating of, 40; trumps dirt in archaeological destinations, 222

  stone circles, 210–11

  stone images. See geoglyphs; petroglyphs

  stone tools, 39, 44, 50, 187; axes, 37, 38–39, 40–41; butchery with, 63–66; channel flakes from, 205; classification and naming of, 60–61; debris, 210. See also flintknapping

  stone weapons, 47, 50, 66

  Stony Brook University. See State University of New York at Stony Brook

  Stringer, Chris, 58

  stuffed animals (taxidermy), 131–32

  submarines, 104

  sugar industry, 17, 20–21, 23, 27, 34

  sunken ships. See ships: sunken

  SUNY Stony Brook. See State University of New York at Stony Brook

  Sussex County Community College, New Jersey, 169

  swimming, 135, 145

  synagogues, 25–26

  tarantulas, 34

  Tattersall, Ian, 58

  Taylor, W. W., 104

  taxidermy. See stuffed animals (taxidermy)

  teeth, 28, 46–47; of goats, 44; of infants, 162, 175–76

  television, 126, 127, 131, 139, 145, 179, 215

  tells (mounds), 46

  temples: ancient Greece, 124, 134; China, 75, 80, 82; Iraq, 194, 199; Jordan, 62

  “test pits,” 23–25, 30–31, 169

  Texas, 45n

  theater, 62, 143

  theft, 146–47. See also looting and looted artifacts

  Thieves of Baghdad (Bogdanos), 192

  Thompson, Dorothy Burr, 133

  tobacco pipes, 19, 27, 33, 187

  Tollund Man, 6, 232

  tombs. See graves and burial grounds

  tools, ancient, 203; made of bone, 98; made of coral, 29–30. See also axes, ancient; stone tools

  tourists and tourism, 26, Deadwood, 96; Newport, 111; Peru, 220, 223, 225, 230, 231, 234, 238

  travel writing, 221

  treasure hunters, 215

  Trimble, Sonny, 87n

  “trophy heads,” Nasca, 229

  trophy rooms, 131–32

  tuition for field schools, 15, 143n

  Turkey, 69

  typology. See classification and naming

  Ulrich, Roger, 213

  Uncorking the Past: The Quest for Wine, Beer, and Other Alcoholic Beverages (McGovern), 71–72

  underwater archaeology, 101–19

  unemployment, 85, 90–92. See also employment prospects

  UNESCO Cultural Heritage Protection Act, 127

  UNESCO World Heritage sites, 8–9, 219, 220n, 228, 231, 232; Libya, 193; Malta, 233–34; Peru, 226–27, 230

  uniformitarianism, 45

  United Kingdom. See Great Britain

  United Nations, 193, 225

  University of Charleston, 94

  University of Michigan, 77, 79

  University of Pennsylvania, 69, 70

  U.S. Air Force, 104, 169, 191

  U.S. Army, 191, 194, 199–216; Tenth Mountain Division, 206

  U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, 87, 161n

  U.S. Army Quartermaster Museum, 171

  U.S. Committee of the Blue Shield, 192–94

  U.S. Department of Defense (DoD), 193, 196, 200, 202, 212

  U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency, 195

  U.S. government funding. See federal funding

  Valletta, Malta, 233–34

  Van Wyck Homestead, Fishkill, New York, 156, 157, 165, 168, 173

  vans, cars, etc. See motor vehicles

  Varonos-Pavlopoulos, Talia, 136, 143, 144, 145

  venomous snakes, 127

  “Venus figures,” 48, 55

  Virginia, 8, 104, 118, 188

  Vitelli, Giovanni, 87

  volcanoes, 18, 20, 29. See also Pompeii

  wartime protection of cultural property, 190–99, 201, 202–3, 207–8, 209, 212. See also Hague Convention for the Protection of Cultural Property in the Event of Armed Conflict

  War of 1812, 167, 215

  Washington, D.C., 175, 186–88

  Washington, George, 156, 157, 167

  Washington State, 64, 160–61n

  weapons, 91. See also stone weapons

  Wegener, Corine, 192–98

  whales and whale parts, 131, 132

  Wiese, Richard, 131, 139

  Willem, Willem J. H., 220

  Windeby Girl, 6

  wine-beer mixtures, 68, 69–70

  Wing Tsue Emporium, Deadwood, South Dakota, 96, 97–98

  Wisconsin, 7–8

  Wolf, Judy, 171

  Wong, Fee Lee, 96, 97

  World Heritage sites. See UNESCO World Heritage sites

  World Trade Center, New York City, 175–77, 178, 189

  World War I submarines, 104

  World War II, 114, 164, 191, 198, 206

  Wreaths Across America, 168

  Yale University, 235

  Yellen, John, 88

  Yeronisos (island), 124, 126–27, 131, 134–54

  Yoda (fictional character), 150

  Young, Eric, 181, 184, 185, 186

  ziggurats, 194, 201

  About the Author

  Photo by Rob Fleder

  MARILYN JOHNSON is the author of The Dead Beat: Lost Souls, Lucky Stiffs, and the Perverse Pleasures of Obituaries and This Book Is Overdue!: How Librarians and Cybrarians Can Save Us All. She has worked as a magazine editor and writer, notably at Esquire and Life, and lives in New York’s Hudson Valley with her husband, Rob Fleder.

  Visit her website at marilynjohnson.net.

  Discover great authors, exclusive offers, and more at hc.com.

  Also by Marilyn Johnson

  The Dead Beat:

  Lost Souls, Lucky Stiffs, and the Perverse Pleasures of Obituaries

  This Book Is Overdue!:

  How Librarians and Cybrarians Can Save Us All

  Credits

  Cover design by Milan Bozic

  Cover photographs © by Tamara Staples

  Copyright

  LIVES IN RUINS. Copyright © 2014 by Marilyn Johnson. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.

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  * Other counts differ, but the bodies number in the hundreds. Gill-Frerking’s count for the international exhibit was as of 2012.

  * From an exhibit at the Maxwell Museum of Anthropology, Albuquerque, New Mexico.

  * SECAR moved in early 2013 to less gritty quarters in Oranjestad.

  * As reporter Michael Balter quotes Shea in a profile in Science February 8, 2013.

  * As for the spelling, the official museum in the Neander Valley in Germany still uses Neanderthal (pronounced Neandertal), and the journal Evolutionary Anthropology still spells it the old way, but I spell it the way my teacher does.

  * Older sites like the Monte Verde site in Chile (which dates back about 14,800 years) and the Buttermilk Creek Complex in Texas (which dates to approximately 15,500 years ago) have been controversial, but are increasingly accepted by the archaeological community. Older human sites in the Americas are still disputed.

  * This laboratory also analyzed the DNA from the little finger that was used to identify another branch of the Homo genus, Denisova.

  * Once you master the variations of human, you can go for extra credit and study the archaeological version of “cultures,” in which people are named based on the style of artifacts they left. Another reason the Neandertals might be popular is they all have the same culture: Mousterian. (The names are based on where the artifacts are first identified.) Homo sapiens have zillions of cultures, for example, Acheulian, Chalcolithic, Natufian, Clovis, Folsom, Oldowan, Jomon. . . .

  * Jean Auel has trademarked the phrase “Earth’s Children.”

  * Auel pronounces it Neandertal and spells it Neanderthal, so I defer to her spelling in the written quote.

  * Daryl Hannah starred in the disastrous film based on the first book. Auel was so dismayed she bought back the rights, and no one has made a film about Ayla since.

  * There is a profusion of explicit rolling-around-on-furs in the books, though no one, Neandertal or Homo sapiens, can figure out how pregnancy begins. “Will you share my furs tonight?” is how the respectful Homo sapiens men initiate sex, which is fundamentally about the Mother’s Gift of Pleasure—particularly female pleasures—to her people. Sexual relationships are open. Men and women mate and “share a hearth,” but they are free to screw around, especially at festivals and summer meetings. Men introduce their mates’ children as “the children of my hearth.” If a child happens to look like them, they say this is “the child of my spirit,” but the child’s creation is magic concocted by the great earth mother, not any doing of theirs. Neandertal men, by contrast, are . . . well, a little Neandertal. They make a gesture to “relieve their needs” and a woman is expected to drop to her knees and present herself, baboon style. It is unthinkable for a Neandertal woman to refuse a man’s request. Finally, one person makes the connection between sex and procreation. Ayla!

  * The managers of the Archaeological Society of New Jersey’s discussion board advise members to avoid jargon, though they mean words like “cryoturbation” and “selectionism,” not Pleistocene.

  * It was published in London, more sensibly, as Shanidar: The Humanity of Neanderthal Man (Allen Lane, 1972).

  * He was especially kind in dealing with my ignorance. From the transcript of our first interview: “Shea: You’ve heard of Omo Kibish? Me: That’s the oldest something, right?”

  * Since this lecture, Dogfish Head has debuted the following archaeology-inspired brews: Birra Etrusca Bronze from ingredients including pomegranates and Ethiopian myrrh, based on 2,800-year-old residue found in Etruscan tombs; and Sah’tea, a rye-based drink from ninth-century Finland; Nordicthern Europe, with bog myrtle and bog cranberries, a mid–fourth century B.C. concoction; and Kvasir, from a 3,500-year-old Danish drinking vessel.

  * According to archaeologist and scholar Miriam T. Stark, Sarah Milledge Nelson wrote the first key English-language text on archaeology in Korea, and one of four key texts in English on Chinese archaeology. She also taught archaeology at the University of Denver for thirty years (and won its teaching prize).

  * In Nelson’s Gender in Archaeology, she credits archaeologist Alfred Kidder with the dichotomy of hairiness.

  * This was Sonny Trimble, who is trying to get funding for military veterans to help sort and preserve these materials.

  * Gilmore’s Twitter handle is @Dig_or_Die.

  * The Public Record Office in London is now known as the National Archives.

  * According to the Captain Cook Society website, Cook was not eaten by Hawaiians, only boiled to retrieve his bones.

  * Connelly also appeared as an expert in the History Channel’s Star Wars: The Legacy Revealed, as well as in Secrets of the Parthenon, from Nova and PBS.

  * The dig team’s computers and databases are kept on shore in Agios Georgios.

  * As with most field schools that students can take for college credit, most of the cost goes toward tuition, in this case, about $5,000 for NYU credits and about $2,000 for room and board.

  * Among its extensive holdings in Cyprus, the Orthodox Church owns the land on which the apotheke sits; the Cyprus Department of Antiquities owns the building.

  * The Hudson River was then known as the North River.

  * From Greenhouse Consultants Inc., Stage1B Archaeological Survey of the Touchdown Development, Town of Fishkill, Dutchess Co., NY, Prepared for Battoglia Lanza Architectural Group. P. C. July, 1998.

  * I was told this by the first archaeologist I interviewed. “Have you heard of NAGPRA?” she said. The Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act was a belated effort to stop archaeologists and museums from collecting and displaying sacred relics, particularly the skeletal remains, of tribal people. “You’ve heard of Kennewick Man?” she said. “That was a nightmare for everyone involved.” The remains of the 9,000-year-old skeleton, found in Washington state, were in legal limbo for nine years, with both scientists and Native Americans suing for its custody. Federal courts ultimately ruled that Kennewick Man was not Native American, but though archaeologists have since studied the remains of one of the oldest skeletons ever found, it was a Pyrrhic victory. The bones are now under the control of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, held away from public view in the Burke Museum of Natural History and Culture, visited by both scientists and Native Americans who have not abandoned their claim.

  * The GSA’s account of the excavations are available at http://www.gsa.gov/portal/ext/html/site/hb/category/25431/actionParameter/exploreByBuilding/buildingId/1084. The New York Preservation Archive Project’s account of it appears at http://www.nypap.org/content/african-burial-ground. That account states: “Although the HCI [Rutsch’s firm] found a 1755 map that showed an African Burial Ground two blocks north of City Hall, archaeologists reasoned that 19th and 20th century development would have destroyed any remains.” This was not Rutsch’s conclusion.

  * Mara Farrell is the local organizer who was involved in early efforts to preserve the site.

  * All provinces, according to Parks Canada, except Ontario and Quebec.

  * Friends of the Fishkill Supply Depot website: http://www.fishkillsupplydepot.org/

  † Press release by Greg Lane, Snook-9 Realty, Inc., May 6, 2013.

  * Forensic Archaeological Recovery (FAR) was organized in response to the WTC attacks. A nonprofit, volunte
er organization, it has dispatched forensic archaeologists in the wake of fires, plane crashes, and hurricanes.

  * Moran said she could not have pulled off this simulation without the help of her colleague Al Stewart, who was instrumental, among other things, in obtaining a bus that could be blown up.

  * One of these acronyms is IMCuRWG, for International Military Cultural Resources Working Group; another, CCHAG, is an acronym for COCOM Cultural Heritage Action Group, in which COCOM is an acronym for COmbatant COMmand.

  † CHAMP removed its embedded acronym in 2014 and became the Cultural Heritage by Archaeology and Military Panel. The parallel group for the Society for American Archaeology, which features some overlap in participants, is called MARS, for Military Archaeological Resources Stewardship.

  * The Marines cared, too; Marine Colonel Matthew Bogdanos, author of Thieves of Baghdad, about the hunt for antiquities after the attack on the National Museum of Iraq, was part of the group, but couldn’t attend this meeting.

  * Bogdanos, who led the Special Forces investigation into the looting, does a fine job of re-creating those days, and dismantling the early press reports, in Thieves of Baghdad. The museum was on the no-strike list, but he points out that in being used as a machine-gun position by the Iraqi Republican Guard, it lost its protected status; and in fact he claims General Tommy Franks used admirable restraint in not demolishing the museum after it became cover for gunfire.

  † Blue Shield’s symbol, a blue triangle atop a blue diamond, is one devised after The Hague Convention, and is used to identify important cultural heritage sites throughout the world.

  * McGuire Gibson is the name of that professor at the University of Chicago’s Oriental Institute.

  * Jaime Pursuit is the partnership and development manager of CyArk, the nonprofit organization working on capturing at-risk cultural heritage sites with laser scans. See their fascinating website at www.cyark.org.

  * Rush’s team also found an eight-thousand-year-old hearth beneath the seventeenth-century trading post.

  * The Afghanistan heritage playing cards are each stamped with the motto “ROE First!” (ROE stands for “rules of engagement,” which state, in short, that a soldier has the right to defend him- or herself.)

 

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