Lives in Ruins Read Online Free PDF

Fortunately, Gilmore was, in the words of a colleague, “that rare thing, a type A personality with the ability to let things roll off his back.” Every day, from early morning to late afternoon, he coped, drove, fetched, strategized, taught, trained, mocked, challenged, and forgave us our lapses. Then he swam off the sliver of a black-sand beach in Oranjestad harbor with Joanna and their four-year-old daughter and two-year-old son and headed home to eat with his family. At night, while the volunteers relaxed and headed for Cool Corners, the bar down the hill that served not-too-bad Chinese food, Gilmore would hole up in his home office, researching until late in the evening, tracking nearby tropical storms and the appearance of looted artifacts on eBay, and piecing together Statia’s colonial past through its history and archaeology, the subject of his writing. He wrote about Honen Dalim—the second-oldest standing synagoguein the Americas, built in 1739, which he had helped to excavate and preserve on Statia. Reading that report, I could sense the urgency that drives his profession, the bulldozers looming on the edge of so many excavations. As Gilmore concluded, “The complete destruction of this amazing structure was narrowly avoided.”
    More often, the archaeological literature of the Caribbean was about what was missing. Gilmore had been a contributor to Preserving Heritage in the Caribbean , a collection of dispatches from the islands that charted the challenges of practicing archaeology in a place where development to stimulate tourism frequently destroyed places that might have attracted tourists. Hurricanes weren’t the only force trying to erase cultural heritage here. In St. Thomas, one owner agreed, after long negotiations, to preserve a former slave village on his land; then he sold the land to a developer who, without warning or notice, destroyed the site. In Barbados, archaeological sites were nominally under the protection of the Preservation of Antiquities Act; but the act was enforced by the Antiquities Advisory Committee, which had no members and had never convened. Noting such illogic, the editor wrote that Samuel Beckett himself should “give the legislators of Barbados a special award.”
    Gilmore’s stories, filtered through his research reports, were full of heartbreak. One man building a house on the island discovered human remains in his yard, so Gilmore and his team went to work. After a few days, the man grew impatient with the pace of archaeological recovery and took a backhoe to the yard. Gilmore wrote that “due to the lack of legislation to protect archaeological remains at the time, little could be done to prevent the wanton destruction of the burial site,” possibly “the first known slave burial ground excavated” on the island, and one of the few in the Caribbean. Gilmore concluded his paper with the mantra of archaeologists everywhere: “Much important history has been lost forever.” This is the most common thread in the archaeological literature, not just in the Caribbean but everywhere, from the bulldozing of a pre-Inca pyramidin Peru by developers to the dynamiting of Afghanistan’s massive Buddhas of Bamiyan by the Taliban.
    GILMORE ’ S SPECIALTY , HISTORICAL archaeology, is the study of the recent past, particularly the last few hundred years; it uses the documentary record alongside the artifacts. He likes to poke fun at the archaeologists who study earlier periods, which is to say, most archaeologists. His sites were full of artifacts like ivory combs, medicine bottles, meerschaum pipes, and the industrial parts that helped turn sugar into rum; what did they get to study, stone tools? When a new student, fresh from a pre-Columbian dig in the Dominican Republic, arrived, Gilmore teased, “Find any postholes?”—these were the dark, moist dirt where wooden posts for dwellings might have once been sunk.