Lives in Ruins (14 page)

In spite of the disappointments, the Foshas could not imagine a different life. Rose, in her mid-fifties, now worked for FEMA, the Federal Emergency Management Agency; Mike, four years younger, worked for the state of South Dakota—“I work for the people,” was how he described it. Even on vacation, they find sites to visit, if not excavate.

Late-afternoon light filtered through the windows of the restaurant.
Rose and Mike shared a panini, their heads bowed toward each other, hers blond, his balding on top and combed neatly to below his ears. She had a flowered shawl draped over her shoulders; he wore a tidy vest and collared shirt. Rose said she had wanted to be an archaeologist since fourth grade. “I told my teacher I wanted to dig up—I didn't say dead people, but I wanted to dig up people who were here before the people we give names to.” Her teacher said, sweetly, “Why, you want to be an archaeologist.” Rose was thirty-four years old, the mother of two, before she was able to go to college; she commuted for years to the University of Kansas from her home in Kansas City. Mike was the assistant director of her first field school, where they met. He had a gift, she said, for looking at the landscape and figuring out what it was like eons ago. He knew instinctively where the first shovel should be placed at a site—it's a combination of training, sensitivity to the soil, and knowledge of geomorphology, how landscapes evolve through the ages. Mike called what he did “taking that road trip through time.”

Rose's first husband, the father of her children, visited her near the end of that first field school, on a day when she found a decorated pottery rim. “It was larger than usual, and we had the neck and the rim,” she said. The decoration was crucial, Mike pointed out, because “it showed who made it and when it was made.” “I was just so thrilled,” Rose said. “I still have chills talking about it!” She called out to her husband to come see her great discovery. “And he comes over and he says, ‘Rosie, what are you doing out here in this heat, getting so excited about something broken? You must be crazy.' And I thought, ‘One of us is.'” Divorce was perhaps inevitable, and eight years after the summer of the field school, she and Mike married.

So, how long had they been together now? “Fourteen years,” Rose said without hesitation, and Mike shook his head. “I was afraid you'd ask. I deal in thousands,” he said, laughing.

I envied their ability to see sites and artifacts in the landscape, and told them about the invisible effigy mound in Wisconsin. Mike and Rose laughed and said they knew plenty of people, including archaeologists, who couldn't spot features.

“It's so much better to walk with someone who knows what they're looking at,” I said. “Somebody who can see the mound, or notice a glass bead on the ground.” I was thinking of the blue glass beads of St. Eustatius.

“And ask where this glass bead came from,” Michael said, picking up my image and looking at Rose.

She locked eyes with him and whispered: “Shipwreck.”

“I
'
M THE
empress here,” Kathy Abbass declared when she finally admitted me to her headquarters, a warehouse of a room in a prefab building on the grounds of the Newport Naval Complex. The room was stuffed with plastic milk crates full of maritime history and shelves of iron-encrusted artifacts. I looked around at the neat piles of paper and maps, the yellow plastic kitty-litter bucket filled with tape measures and twine and waterproof clipboards. Empress of what exactly? And then she showed me where her treasures are buried: the harbor where America's biggest fleet of sunken Revolutionary War ships rest in their watery grave.

I settled into the passenger seat of her rumbling van. It suited the marine archaeologist: aging but functional, even jaunty, a seventeen-year-old Pontiac Trans Sport with more than 80,000 miles on the odometer and three lit-up warning lights on the dashboard. Abbass's beautiful square face was framed by flyaway white hair, most of it bundled into a topknot of curls; her eyes were ocean blue and sharp. The driver's seat was pitched back to accommodate a spine damaged by osteoporosis. Abbass warned me that Diva, her Pekingese, who was riding in the back, had recently been cured of fleas but might have them again; Abbass had been bitten by a flea last night. Was she trying to scare me off ? It wouldn't work.

I had already been bitten by the archaeologist herself, after my initial request for an interview. “I am glad to talk to you about marine archaeology and its difficulties,” she responded, “but it is not possible for you ‘to observe the team from the shore,' and we will not release our unpublished intellectual property to you.” This was the same person who had posted a notice on Academia.edu, a site that existed for scholars to share their work: “The Rhode Island Marine Archaeology Project and I will post no reports, publications, or data from our research on this website. Anyone else who does so has violated our non-disclosure policy and is at risk of suit for infringement of our intellectual property rights.” She was a pitbull, with a Pekingese sidekick. To ride shotgun, I had had to join her organization ($25, a bargain) and supply her with a personal reference from Grant Gilmore, and because her office was located on a naval base, I also had to send my Social Security number and get security clearance. But I was determined to see her in context. In a profession of loosely affiliated tribes—of academics, government archaeologists, and archaeologists-for-hire—Abbass had, like Gilmore, created an independent archaeology center. She had done this with almost no money and in the shadow of gilded Newport Harbor, with the famed shipwreck explorer Robert Ballard ensconced at the University of Rhode Island. Never mind the crowded pond; she had made news herself and promoted archaeology along the way.

Abbass pressed hard on the pedal, moving us past the offices of the Rhode Island Marine Archaeology Project (RIMAP) on the grounds of the naval base, and out onto the lovely boulevards and vistas of Newport. The empress had another warning: “I bought this van used ten years ago,” she said. “It's not worth fixing, so when it dies, I'll leave it by the side of the road.” Duly warned—in addition to the other hazards, we might end up on foot. On an overcast fall day, out we chugged past the armed guards at the gate of the naval station in the possibly flea-ridden, rattletrap van, heading
toward the mansions of Newport and the harbor waters that hold the historic fleet.

The treasure of Abbass's empire consists of thirteen ships, sunk deliberately by the British in 1778 to prevent the French from sailing to the aid of the Continental Navy and relieving Newport. Who knows what would have happened to the course of the war if the French navy had been able to stop the British there? All by itself, this sunken fleet was a historic prize; some of its ships had been used to run weapons and soldiers to fight the rebellious colonies; some held prisoners-of-war. Abbass claimed that one of those ships had a previous life as the
Endeavour
, also known as the
Endeavour Bark
, the first vessel to carry the British explorer James Cook around the world. If Cook meant anything to most Americans, he was just one more eighteenth-century adventurer, but to the rest of the world, he was the king of explorers. His voyage on the
Endeavour
put Australia and New Zealand on the map; the
Endeavour
was Australia's
Niña
,
Pinta
, and
Santa Maria
, and maybe its
Mayflower
, too. Cook's international reputation was why Abbass had more than the usual dose of archaeologists' paranoia. “You can't imagine the number of folks who contact us who only want to pirate our information about the search for Captain Cook's
Endeavour Bark
,” she confided. Imagine, a naval archaeologist worried about pirates.

Abbass, now in her late sixties, has spent fifteen years circling Newport Harbor, doing what she could to safeguard these sunken ships while preparing for a clean excavation; but “we're nowhere near ready,” she told me. “We have a number of years of work yet to do.” So the ships continue to lie submerged in open water, at risk from natural disasters and looters. “There are people anchored out there right now,” Abbass admitted, but she refused to be hurried. Among the things an archaeologist needs in order to perform an underwater excavation the right way, she said, is a place to study and conserve what you find. Everything that came up had to be conserved, an ongoing
responsibility that seemed formidable enough if you were talking about changing the water in the jars that held the fragile artifacts and were small enough to fit on a shelf, but multiplied in difficulty when the object to be conserved was a submerged ship, much less a fleet. And whatever you touched, you were going to disturb—in fact, you were going to wreck the site for future archaeologists. So you better be damn sure you know what you're doing.

THE FUTURE OF
archaeology lies underwater. The experts formed a chorus here. “If you want to have an impact as an archaeologist,” one of my sources said, “learn to scuba-dive.” Back in landlocked South Dakota, Mike Fosha had geeked out when our conversation turned to the oceans. “Water has risen three hundred feet since the glaciers melted,” he said. “That landscape under there, that's going to tell the story of the earliest occupants.
That's
where the early sites are.” Although Fosha hadn't specialized in underwater archaeology, he follows its developments avidly, from excavations of the earliest English settlement in Jamestown, now partially flooded, to the discovery off the coast of England of more than forty submarines from World War I, some with their crews still inside. What looks to the untrained eye like murk and slimy stones and lumps with fluttering seaweed were keys to the deep mystery of our past.

Kathy Abbass didn't start out focused on shipwrecks or flooded archaeological sites. “My particular career path was not traditional,” she said, an understatement. She was an Air Force brat who grew up all over the world and landed at Southern Illinois University. While still in college, she married into “Arab royalty,” the son of a former Iraqi ambassador to the United Nations who was teaching at the university after a coup. She majored in anthropology, figuring she would end up in the Middle East and find work at a museum in Beirut or Baghdad. One of her teachers, the influential archaeologist W. W. Taylor, told his class that there was no room for women in archaeology. “Today, of course, he'd be brought up on
charges,” Abbass said dryly. She learned early to persevere without encouragement.

Abbass didn't know port from starboard when she pursued a fellowship at Harvard; she wanted to figure out how early horses and cattle and pigs were transported to the Americas from Europe. She imitated the professor, a British marine archaeologist who wore a monocle: “‘My dear, that's one of the most important topics that has ever been addressed.'” (The effort! The mechanics! The colonial mind-set!) Wondering how pigs and horses got to America led her, naturally, to ships, which she turned out to have an aptitude for. She left a tenured teaching job at an all-black university in Virginia, took scuba and sailing lessons, and went to work for a ship surveyor in Newport. “I ran away to sea,” she said cheerfully. “I was the first woman in the country to do marine surveying. I'd go into yards where I was set to inspect something and they'd show me the stereo system. I'd say, ‘Open the bilge. I want to see the engine.'” Her grounding in the working mechanics of ships is an advantage that she still wields.

Abbass and her husband divorced amicably (no children, and she kept her married name, which means
God
, and also
grim
, in Arabic). She ran the Museum of Yachting in Newport for a year, then found herself unemployed—too senior for entry-level jobs, not senior enough for the big-time positions, and “not this dewy-eyed little thing that's going to do what I was told.” She had her own goals. She knew she wanted to work on water.

One day, Abbass joined an archaeologist from the Naval War College on a trip to Lake George, where sport divers had discovered a submerged warship from the French and Indian War, a type of boat called a
radeau
. The crew had permission from New York State to investigate as long as an archaeologist supervised their work. But when their archaeologist took off after a day, Abbass leapt into the breach, choreographing the excavation of the oldest warship project in North America.

Abbass was commuting regularly from Newport to Lake George by slow bus to study the
radeau
when the state archaeologist of Rhode Island suggested she do that kind of work for her own state. Rhode Island had tons of wrecks. The state archaeologist was responsible for the preservation of Rhode Island's heritage, but though much of that heritage was on or under the water, he had no staff and no expertise in this field. According to Abbass, “They didn't even have an inventory of what was here in the state. They didn't know what had been lost, what might be found, except for the occasional bits and pieces.” The Rhode Island Marine Archaeology Project was born in 1992, at Abbass's kitchen table. “That's the first thing we did, the inventory,” a database that continued to grow. She trained volunteers to document the marine history of the state and to help survey its underwater sites. She and her colleagues offered museum workers, sailors, teenagers, retired people—almost anyone—courses in history, diving, excavating, and conservation. Many of her students went on to graduate school in the field. RIMAP also provided field experience for the graduates of programs in maritime history and marine archaeology. Most, she had found, “don't know beans about boats.” She wanted to foster a public that understood and appreciated the significance of the historic ships in the sunken fleet, and she also wanted to train a cadre of archaeologists who knew firsthand what they were excavating.