Lives in Ruins Read Online Free PDF Page A

workers, where would I sleep, cook, drop my trash, bury my dead? Most archaeologists would measure out the square for their test pits, one meter long on each side, then stretch string between the corners to give it boundaries, but Gilmore has tripped over too many strings, so we made do with only the nails marking the corners; tied with a piece of red plastic, they gave the corners a jaunty look. We split into pairs, women and dudes, and measured the ground. We used shovels to bite neat edges around the sides, being careful to keep the perimeter square and straight. Then we pulled up the foliage on top of our test pits and started lifting off the uppermost layer of sediment.
    I used a shovel to scoop out some soil and brought it to the screen, a rectangle of mesh in a wooden frame, a simple and ingenious thing with two wooden legs on one side; Kelly held up the other side, balancing the screen, wheelbarrow-style, at her hips, while I dumped dirt. Then she gave the screen several aggressive shakes, rocking it back and forth on its hinged legs. Each shake sent loose soil sifting through the screen to the ground, and soon a “spoil” pile accumulated at her feet. After a few shakes, what was left on the screen was the flotsam too big to sift. Rocks? Treasure? Or lumps of dirt? We eagerly brought our heads in and picked through the debris. Our task was to pluck out anything made or possibly used by humans—pottery, nails, bits of glass and bone, shells, the fun stuff. We squashed the lumps of dirt and rubbed the rocks. Nothing. Then Kelly gave an expert flip of the screen, and the unwanted bits of rock and soil flew off to the side. Gilmore left us with the mission to dig down through the topsoil to the gray layer several inches below the surface, and fill a plastic bag with meaningful shards—the story of the people who worked this sugar plantation hundreds of years ago and who spoke to us now through their trash.
    The work was repetitive and might have been boring had we not had the suspense of the hunt for artifacts. And there we were in that sublime setting, on a faraway island, a tropical storm brewing in the Atlantic, surrounded by toxic trees.
    While we battled poisonous undergrowth and sifted dirt in the hot sun, Gilmore was crisscrossing the island, doing everything from manual labor—he scavenged a load of heavy stones from an old site and heaved them over the fence of the museum for use in the blacksmith shop—to negotiating for a private pilot to fly a consulting geologist and his bulky ground-penetrating radar equipment off the island. Now our leader had returned. He squatted where I had filled a bag with possible pottery chips and fragments of brick, poured them into his hand, and without breaking stride,tossed them over his shoulder, into the creeping vines. “Next!” My first morning as a shovelbum, and already I was a failure.
    The Dutch guys had better luck, or sharper eyes. The test pit they dug a few feet away had yielded more promising artifacts—a couple of rust-crusted nails and what might be a piece of Afro-Caribbean pottery, crude and red. “You find one of these with markings on it, I’ll buy you a case of anything, beer, rum, Ting [Jamaican grapefruit soda],” Gilmore announced. “There are maybe a hundred good, marked pieces of Afro-Caribbean pottery in the world, and SECAR has a quarter of them.”
    BACK AT THE center, we wrote up our field notes, recording the day’s yield of nails and pieces of pottery. Gilmore told us a cautionary tale about a student who was entering site records on a laptop in the field; instead of creating a new file to record the finds from each test pit, she would type in a fresh set of data over the old set and hit “save.” What should have been the records of sixty pits ended up being the record of only one. This was the risk of using volunteers and students on excavations: mistakes would be made.