Lives in Ruins Read Online Free PDF Page B

Yes, the student said earnestly, he found three postholes in a circle. We acted impressed, though I, too, found ivory combs, glass bottles, and other eighteenth-century artifacts vastly more interesting than dark, moist earth; imagine digging for weeks to find three postholes! As for Gilmore, I had the feeling that his japes and barbs were the language he spoke to keep his spirits up. It could be lonely on this island.
    Gilmore seemed energized by the Dutch crew—Corinne Hofman and her husband Menno Hoogland and their students—who were in Statia for a few weeks to survey the land where the new oil tanks would go. The relatively small numbers of Caribbean archaeologists could breed rivalries, but these people collaborated, on digs and on monitoring the larger political climate. Statia had been part of the Netherlands Antilles, which was dissolved in 2010; now it was a Dutch municipality, subject to Dutch laws and treaties. Part of Gilmore’s job, as he saw it, was to team up with Hoogland to lobby the Netherlands to preserve archaeological resources here—time-consuming political work that would pave the way for all their archaeological work. Gilmore, Hofman, and Hoogland also functioned as old-fashioned rural neighbors, pitchingin to help when needed. “There’s so much development, we do a lot of ‘rescue’ archaeology,” Hofman said. “We go everywhere. Last month we all went to [the island of] Saba when a developer ran into skeletons that needed excavating.”
    That neighborly coexistence flourished in late afternoons, when, overheated from a day in the field, we hung out together at SECAR’s headquarters and did the other work of archaeology, washing and recording our finds. Hofman, an expert on pre-Columbian populations of the Caribbean, held court at the picnic table in the backyard. Two of her Ph.D. students and I cleaned artifacts with old toothbrushes, scrubbing dirt and grime from fractured pottery and goats’ teeth. Chickens pecked under the clothesline and lizards (brown, striped, and green with blue heads) scurried over the broken porch and around the bucket where an old anchor, another artifact, soaked. Hofman, in her early fifties, was tan and languid in shorts and a low-cut T, ball cap pulled over dark hair, gold earrings flashing—a dead ringer for Ali MacGraw. Her students call her the god (her husband was the demigod , their son, the semigod ). One told me, “Picture her with everyone gathered around, awaiting her instructions. The question is, who gets to wave the fan?”
    I asked Hofman if she ever had to work with organic remains, and she said no, but her husband, Menno, was digging some graves from the 1820s in the Netherlands recently and “he had to deal with facial hair and eyeballs .” Eyeballs! She grimaced and I shuddered, but the two lovely Ph.D. candidates on the picnic bench didn’t flinch; one was an expert on teeth and the other on the cranial modification of infant skulls. Cranial modification apparently occurred all over the ancient world, with parents clamping and flattening and binding their babies’ skulls to grow into—“Not points!” I interrupted—but, yes, some of them did what was necessary to make pointy-headed children. Others preferred their children’s skulls to bulge at the top, like Megamind. I could see how this could make an irresistible thesis topic.
    Suddenly, Hofman slapped her hand on the picnic table andannounced, “I have a wonderful idea. We will go on an Indiana Jones expedition—how about that? Grant? Can we all go out Friday looking for prehistoric sites?” At this, Gilmore emerged from the cluttered gloom of SECAR, where he and a group of students and volunteers had been entering data for the 3-D computer map of the island. He agreed. We would consult the maps left by their colleague, an archaeologist on St. Maarten, who had walked across the island in