I keep my personal collection of artifacts in a mug that I use to burn incense in. Fingering through these relics now is a reminder of days spent cloaked in mud and sweat. The euphoric feeling of a cold shower after digging a trench on mornings so humid, my sunburns blistered. Tan lines that ended mid-calf from wearing duck boots, and the sweet satisfaction of sharpening the blade of my trowel. Most of what I’ve collected is from the topsoil of my second dig: a chunk of red pottery, turtle teeth, coral, half a femur from a small mammal, wampum, and a parrot fish mandible (my favorite).
I knew I wanted to be an archaeologist when I saw The Royal Tenenbaums with my mother at the age of twelve. The character Etheline Tenenbaum was an archaeologist, and embodied the kind of woman I wanted to become with her effortless blend of cool and academic. It didn’t occur to me that archaeology was something I could actually pursue until I took my first anthropology course during my sophomore year in college, upon the suggestion of a friend. At the time I was a psychology major in the midst of boredom, and anthropology was the answer to this underwhelmed 20-year-old’s prayers. I fell in love with the subject right away, and filled next semester’s schedule with anthropology and archaeology courses.
Before my first dig, I didn’t expect archaeology to be such a bizarre, periodically unethical profession. To me it was rugged and exciting; I would help uncover history with my bare hands. Archaeology as we know it today integrates an element of sensitivity into ongoing projects by working alongside landowners. Yet listening to some of the war stories of my classmates and instructors — such as, “We had the kids pose next to the burials for tourists” — hinted at an underbelly I was less sure of.
Still, I wanted stories of my own. The field taught me how to dig a perfect test pit and document stratigraphy. It taught me that touching charcoal ruins everything, and that if you’re digging in the States, uncovering human remains is a big no-no. As of 1990, excavating human remains in the United States was strictly prohibited under NAGPRA, the National Association of Graves Protection and Repatriation Act, which asked that all human remains and culturally significant items stored in various American museums be returned to their federally recognized tribes. This meant enormous collections were emptied from museums, sparking tension among academics fighting for artifact preservation as well as within tribes that did not want federal recognition but would like their ancestors’ remains returned, please.
NAGPRA rightfully shone a spotlight on the bleak history of American archaeology. Presently, finding human remains (even by chance) can bring an ongoing excavation to a grinding halt, which could potentially result in losing years of research. Should your project uncover a burial during an excavation, the associated tribe must be contacted immediately and the project cannot continue in that area.
My first dig took place in Mystic, Connecticut, where I spent six weeks immersed in battlefield archaeology. I, along with six other students, participated in identifying the perimeters of a 17th-century battlefield. Because most of Mystic is residential neighborhoods, most of the digging took place in landscaped backyards. Centuries of farming and general land use sliced through Connecticut’s natural landscape. We trained our eyes to look for fragments of artifacts, some no bigger than the tip of my pinky.
One humid June morning, a classmate and I were digging a test pit together (a 50x50cm square-shaped pit) in five-centimeter intervals. Our instructions were to dig until we reached a third change in soil color, then document the stratigraphy. We had only dug a few centimeters when my classmate picked up a dirt-clotted white chip, too sharp to be a pebble and too dense to be plastic. Maybe part of a clay kaolin pipe? Using her nails to scrape the artifact clean, horror struck as we identified what was, unquestionably, a tooth.
NAGPRA.
Shit.
Call the professor.
1700 seconds later, our professor crouched down, picked up the white fragment and, with a casualness that mocked our anxiety, said “cow tooth.” He then flicked the newly confirmed non-human tooth into the brush nearby. His words may have been “cow tooth,” but his cadence said, “girl, chill.”
I decided then that I’d go abroad for my next dig. If I wanted to gain any experience differentiating cow stuff from people stuff, I knew I’d have to leave the U.S. I spent the following summer digging on the tiny Caribbean island of Carriacou, tracing the migratory pathways of the Lesser Antilles with fifteen students from the Southern states and fifteen Londoners. For those who do not know where Carriacou is or have never heard of it, you fall in line with much of the rest of the world. Until I applied to the program, I hadn’t heard of it either. It was brought to my attention at Customs in San Juan that other Caribbeans also haven’t heard of Carriacou.
Where are you going?
To Carriacou.
Well, I don’t know where that is.
I don’t know what to tell you.
I’m glad Carriacou is a well-kept secret. The island is only fourteen square miles, with lush green mountains, gorgeous ocean views, and hardly any tourists. The island had but one hotel, and I believe the combination of students and instructors brought said hotel to its full capacity. Having so many of us stay all at once was no doubt unusual, because our kitchen accessories were limited to three or four items per room. If I wanted to toast my bread, I’d have to knock on the room opposite mine and use their toaster. If I needed a big spoon to stir pasta, I’d head for the room down the hall. My roommate and I had the big spaghetti pot and an enormous mixing bowl, perfect for frying eggs or toasting bread. Now that time has passed, I can look back on this shared kitchen romantically, as if sharing a set of spoons brought me closer to my classmates.
Being on this dig was the closest I have ever come to a reality television show experience. I was bunkered in with thirty classmates I didn’t know. Kinship developed instantly because most of us arrived friendless. After one week, it did feel as if I’d known my classmates for years, yet I took comfort in the fact that I would return home the following month and probably never see them again.
There was something about working in the field that stripped a layer of conscientiousness in the way we interacted with one another. I think working alongside my professor and instructors barefoot in a mud trench for hours set the tone for a non-traditional classroom setting. Take our clothing, for example. Professors don’t wear khakis and sweaters on digs — they’re in hiking pants and raggedy t-shirts, getting sunburned with the rest of us. The element of leisure in archaeology might have also had a role in dismantling a professional wall. Digging gradually opened up room for talking, and I still remember bits and pieces of my conversations with each one of my crewmates and instructors.
But in the spirit of feeling more like pals than students, sometimes good sense went out the window. My professor’s “Welcome” speech, for example, was a less than ideal way to commence the trip. Most of us arrived on the island on Thursday, and on the following evening, my professor gave us an overview of Monday’s schedule as well as a few general “guidelines” to island life, including:
Smoking weed is illegal here. If you do smoke weed, I can’t bail you out, and believe me, you do not want to go to jail here. The most I can do is contact the Prime Minister.
Don’t sleep with the locals. There’s a lot of AIDS on this island. If you sleep with a local or if you bring them back to your room, you risk expulsion.
Ladies, please do not travel alone. It’s a status thing to sleep with European and American women. Do not walk around in your swimsuits, and if anyone tells you they’re “randy,” they’re not introducing themselves.
Unfortunately, these awful nails-on-a-chalkboard statements were not unusual.
The bay where the excavation took place was eroding at a rate of about 3m per year, spilling chunks of pottery, bones and other artifacts onto the beach. Our objective was to collect as much as possible in our five-week time slot. It was this beach where I learned how to excavate a burial site, how a human bone felt in my hands, and that, to my eyes, it is indistinguishable from turtle bone. If it weren’t for the supervision of my professor, I would have mismarked dozens of artifact bags. Perhaps I did.
That was a very real issue on digs. Mismarking or not labeling happened all the time, and enormous Ziploc bags filled with pottery chunks and charcoal became unusable. In archaeology, analysis cannot occur without context. I recall one instructor holding a filled freezer bag above his head. Does anyone know what quadrant this came from?
Silence.
Awesome.
We were inexperienced. Washing peoples’ bones was also difficult because the remains from the burial sites we extracted were so delicate, separating them from soil required a dental kit. If handled too roughly, the bones could very easily fall apart, which made washing them very tricky. Human bone could not be submerged in water, I learned, but instead must be lightly brushed with wetted soft-bristle toothbrushes. One afternoon, my classmate and I were chatting while washing bone. She was holding a femur in her hand when she sneezed, and the force snapped the femur into several pieces. Another one bit the dust — the human dust.
Archaeology is part of my past now, but I remain keenly interested in it. Recently I visited the Museum of Natural History in New York, and as I walked through the Human Origins exhibit, looking at the skulls, the femurs, the incomplete and complete skeletons on display, I was reminded of the people I knew in the dirt. And to hold in my sneezes.
Tags: archaeology, becky brown, education, ghosts, work
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Mismarking or not labeling happened all the time, and enormous Ziploc bags filled with pottery chunks and charcoal became unusable.
[deleted expletive]
Nothing — nothing — in my archaeology classes and (very modest) field experience exasperates me as much as this. As you say, the job isn’t digging stuff out of the ground; the job is contextualizing the stuff and analyzing it given that context. Anyone who can’t grasp that isn’t practicing archaeology; they’re just digging up stuff.
And that logic extends to lab work and cataloging, too. I can’t tell you how many students I’ve seen break the painstakingly clear protocol by pulling more than one specimen or sample at a time, setting them together on a tabletop without label or reference number, then getting muddled: which one came from where, anyhow? YOU FUCKERS ARE DESTROYING HARD-FOUND EVIDENCE. It’s irreplaceable information; treat it with respect and care. My fellow students (well, just the ones who got sloppy) thought I was a despot about protocol, and I am fine with that.
My arch. lab experience changed me in one unexpected way. I always thought I was clumsy, my whole life. Then I realized: in the arch. lab, I never dropped a sample, never bumped a table full of pottery shards, never knocked over a flotation vessel. I’m not clumsy; I’d just been careless except where it was absolutely vital not to be.
Oh, and also: this gave me chills.
He then flicked the newly confirmed non-human tooth into the brush nearby.
I mean, maybe it’s innocuous; I’m not really experienced enough in field work to know, and of course I wasn’t there. but my professors* were devoted to collecting evvvvvvverything found on-site and deciding in the lab whether it was relevant to the site or delivered there through some random process (dropped, dragged, bioturbation, whatevs).
A dig leader who discards something that could be (mistaken for?) human — and makes sure his team can’t retrieve it by flicking it into bushes – makes me very, very suspicious, but perhaps that’s my inexperience speaking up.
*not all of whom led digs within the US and therefore subject to NAGPRA; they all at least gave what seemed like earnest lip service to both the legal and moral importance of following NAGPRA to the letter.
Me, too! All my alarm bells started ringing at that line. I spent a tiny fraction of time in the field, but so much of my particular work focused on using the evidence brought back from the field and analyzing it in useful ways, it just made me cringe to think of that tiny, tiny piece of evidence being gone. Even if all it pointed to or said was, “Hey look! Somebody here had a cow!”
I’ve been working in cultural resource management for years now. If any of us techs have a question as to the identity of a bone fragment we ask our crew chief or field supervisor. They’ll be pretty quick to know whether it’s cow or human or rodent. That stuff is second nature after working out in the field so much. In CRM we wouldn’t collect that cow tooth. Now, if an animal bone shows evidence of human involvement such as clean cuts from a knife or charred bone then we will collect it and visit it later in the lab.
Yeah, I’m pretty sure that tone actually said “cow tooth. This is a cow. tooth. You can all go about your business.”
I was not aware that porcine molars look distressingly like human molars until I had a very similar experience! We were digging out what was probably an animal enclosure, going by the packed layers of organic matter, and suddenly under my trowel there was a gleam of white, and all I could do was say, in tones of rising alarm, “Teeth. TEETH!”
The nerdiest thing we found at that site was a kaolin pipe frag under the remains of some floorboards, and I still regret that I didn’t find out what the gauge was; you can use the diameter of the hole in pipe stem to date the pipe within a very narrow period of years. Well, I hope it lies around in a lab for 50 years or so and then some young whippersnapper finds it fascinating. Metarchaeology.
[ETA: I tried out archaeology because my father had a subscription to Biblical Archaeology Review, and one year their cover for the annual field school issue showed a student in a bikini top smiling cheerfully and holding up an…urn or something. The ensuing shitstorm of letters from pearl-clutching, knicker-knotted semi-academics went on for months, so she became my role model. I went to the wrong part of the world for it, but I never quite lost the yearning to match that woman in how much vituperative spleen she generated from the Good Christian Readers.]
Did you see that study from six months ago about sexual harassment on scientific field trips? (http://news.sciencemag.org/scientific-community/2014/07/sexual-harassment-common-scientific-fieldwork) I don’t know what your own experience was, but as an undergrad on a biology field trip in Central America I certainly experienced (and saw) my share of it. I never thought of it as something widespread or systematic until I read about the study. Your professor may have had some experience underlying their insensitive/awful statements, although often the harassment comes from authority figures or peers at the site, not the locals.
In my day, people wanted to become archaeologists because of Indiana Jones, NOT BECAUSE OF A FILM THAT CAME OUT WHEN I WAS IN MY TWENTIES.
:grumbles, goes back to lurking:
OH MY GOD this is making me miss archaeology so much. I’ve tried to make it in the office world, but I’d just so much rather be digging. I think I need to go back to it. Archaeology is the absolute BEST and it’s a shame it’s almost unsustainable as a long-term job, at least in the UK.
Any UK archaeology people out there have Time Team-related stories? How does it fit in with the whole scene? Does it employ lots of people? Is it regarded with scorn?
I have never wielded a trowel, but I am endlessly fascinated by the whole thing.
I had friends at uni studying archaeology and I know that scorn was definitely the operative word regarding Time Team.
On the other hand, I never studied archeology but if anything would have promted me into it, it would have been that programme! I’m sure there must be lots of UK archaeologists that chose the career after watching it though, so always seemed churlish to me that academics were so dismissive of it.
On a dig in Spain in about 2000, we watched Time Team tapes at night and made fun of them together
I love that.
Man I completely get that, popular version of this really difficult thing we do, scorn is natural. But I am so with you! If I lived in England/had a completely different life, I guess, but was still the same person, Time Team would definitely have made me desperately want to learn archaeology!
I had a very different experience with human remains digging in the Peruvian desert. We were looking for artifacts from about 1500 years ago but about 700 years ago, the site had been used as a graveyard, so we were casually avoiding graves because we didn’t want to have to catalog them. I was sitting in the sand with one of the other girls waiting–there is a lot of waiting on digs–and chatting and casually sifting sand through my fingers, when I realized that a larger piece of sand was the tip of someone’s pinky.
Oh man, former archaeologists unite! I still remember the field school I attended in England as the most content I have ever been in my life, and that was 8 hours of hard labor six days a week and living in a tent. I went on to get a master’s in forensic archaeology, but unfortunately didn’t realize that it’s a field where experience counts a lot more than education so I was never able to find a job. Now it’s just something I say with a wry smile when people ask me what my graduate work was in. (Though I think I’ll still get the datum symbol tattooed some day..)
I had 2, a larger american style, the handle of which I painted with red nail polish and the Fendi logo, and a smaller european one which I painted with blue nail polish and the Prada logo.
Everyone was always super jealous, and I never misplaced or had someone "accidentally switch" either.
It’s the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act, please. NAGPRA is a federal law; in the absence of federal funding, federal land, or federal involvement, NAGPRA doesn’t apply. In which case state law might apply, and in some states (California, for instance) the state law is even more comprehensive.
I would argue that collections weren’t emptied; but the law rightfully gave the descendants of native peoples the chance to decide what is done with their ancestors’ remains. Sometimes that means leaving the collection in the museum, but with stricter controls on how it is handled. Sometimes that means repatriating the collection and reburying it. The point is that, as much as possible, it’s up to the tribes to make the decision, and not the scientists.
NAGPRA is civil rights legislation, and it’s disheartening to see it referred to here only in the context of how difficult it made your life as an archaeologist.
Word. Given the origins of archaeology and anthropology (looking for skulls to justify categorical and universal racism and white supremacy, anyone?), framing NAGPRA as an inconvenience for academia as opposed to civil rights for Natives is pretty gross.
After my senior year of college, I worked on a dig/field school for a summer in the middle of nowhere, USA. I learned so much, including the fact that while I loved doing archaeology, it wasn’t what I wanted to do professionally. (Doing linguistics is just as much fun, and there’s a much smaller risk of having to touch worms…)
One of my friends was digging in a separate midden pit next to ours one day, and she had gotten down to a really interesting layer where there was a turtle shell, so she’s going slow, clearing layer by layer around the shell. When it was clear enough, she tipped it over to bag it, and we just heard her go “shit,” really quietly. It wasn’t a turtle shell at all, it was the top of a (human) skull. So we had to put a bucket over it, and call the county coroner (because apparently it could have been a recent murder victim? Buried a thousand years deep in undisturbed soil?).
The field school ended that week, so I never found out if the whole dig got shut down for NAGPRA reasons or not. The culture we were looking at wasn’t definitively claimed as ancestors by any of the local tribes, but that probably shouldn’t have made a difference…
My daughter is my hero. Well done BB. Keep storming the castle!
Word. Given the origins of archaeology and anthropology (looking for skulls to justify categorical and universal racism and white supremacy, anyone?), framing NAGPRA as an inconvenience for academia as opposed to civil rights for Natives is pretty gross.
This describes so many undergrad field experiences that it's 100% possible that you did the exact same program at the same university as me, and also 100% possible that our experiences were separated by two decades.
CARRIACOU! Audre Lorde!
Oh, that memory made me smile.
If you’re curious, read her book Zami: A New Spelling of My Name. Or just Google “Audre Lorde” and “Carriacou.”
CARRIACOU! Audre Lorde!
Oh, that memory made me smile.
If you're curious, read her book Zami: A New Spelling of My Name. Or just Google "Audre Lorde" and "Carriacou."
Just to add to the misrepresentation of NAGPRA here, the tension between Native American tribes and the law is not an issue of them rejecting their federal recognition. Recognition is petitioned for and is a long and difficult process. Due to the qualifications needed, many groups do not receive recognition meaning they are not able to access resources or rights granted to recognized groups, including many rights under NAGPRA. Very few groups (I have only heard of some Hawaiians) receive recognition and reject it.
nice post great one