Lives in Ruins (9 page)

I saw John Shea in verbal combat more than once. One of his tools is sarcasm; in class, he questioned the intelligence of the average archaeologist and university administrator and frequently “dropped the F-bomb”—and when the grad students looked shocked, he laughed them off. At the annual meeting of the Paleoanthropology Society, a brutal two-day dawn-to-dusk series of technical presentations like “Howieson's Poort: New Data from Sibudu Cave,” Shea relished the heated debates in the short question-and-answer sessions and didn't hesitate to puncture presumptions. Woe to the colleague who labeled an ax unfinished (like a would-be scientist who labeled a glass half full): How did he know it was “unfinished”? One dapper archaeologist suggested that the tools found at a site in South Africa were so unusual they deserved a new name, and this drew Shea's objection. “Does the world really need this?” he said bluntly.

The way tools are classified and named in archaeology is bewildering. In a paper for
Evolutionary Anthropology
subtitled “Some Advice from Uncle Screwtape,” Shea took on the conventions of stone-tool classifications. Like C. S. Lewis in the original
Screwtape Letters
, Shea adopted the persona of a demon advising a young person, in this case, about how to make the study of the most durable artifacts irrelevant to human evolution. “Dear Nephew,” wrote Shea, in character, “I am delighted to learn that you have decided to take up the study of stone tools. A wise choice. The talking monkeys
have been dragging these shiny objects back to their caves for millions of years. You will never be at a loss for things to write.” Then he advised: “If you and your colleagues disagree about how to classify particular artifacts, create rival typologies. . . . When you write about stone-tool function, don't waste time doing experiments. . . . Use your intuition and embed your hypotheses about stone tool function in the tool names themselves (for example, scraper, handaxe, chopper).”

How reasonable: conducting experiments with stone tools was a great way to figure out what they were designed to do, and of course one shouldn't label a tool a “scraper” if you didn't know what it did. As for the classifications, Shea told me, “Everyone says it's chaos, even the people who have worked at it a long time.” Why did archaeologists want to give a type of stone tool a new name? Because then, whenever that name was mentioned, the person who thought up the name had to be cited.

After the meeting, Shea shrugged off his verbal sparring as no big deal, though he admitted he did enjoy the bloody intellectual battles at the small paleoanthropology meetings. People were too polite for his taste at the larger archaeology conferences. After watching him in action, I expected him to be sharp-tongued off duty, as well. I visited his wooded backyard one evening and sat in a webbed lawn chair while he and his wife told archaeology stories from the Middle East, where they had both dug. Shea was mild and relaxed under the trees. I told him that I had read Ralph Solecki's
Shanidar: The First Flower People
, Solecki's book for general readers about Neandertals burying their dead with flowers. I imagined we would snicker together: What kind of scientist subtitles his book
The First Flower People
?
^*
But it was a mellower Shea who responded that I should give the old archaeologist a break. “Don't forget, the book is fifty years
old,” he said. In multiple ways, I saw the blunt teacher and provocateur of paleoanthropology be kind and solicitous.
^*

In his backyard, he held out a peanut to a chipmunk edging closer while his wife watched him fondly. “The birds love him, too,” Pat Crawford said.

They met when Shea was a college senior, sitting in on a graduate seminar at MIT. She was older than he and “all she knew of rock 'n roll was the Beatles!” he said in a can-you-believe-it voice. He had taught her about Pink Floyd and Black Flag. She took him to the opera and the theater. “
A Doll's House
—I wanted to scream, ‘Get me out of here!'” Shea recalled, “but we were both happy with Shakespeare.” On their first date, they went to the library. They go to their local public library two or three times a week and read, not surprisingly, voraciously; they were each in the middle of literary novels. Crawford, an adjunct in the archaeology department at Stony Brook, works in a laboratory now. She told me she “pinched pennies like mad,” which was how they could afford the place in Santa Fe. I took in their modest home in Long Island, its original kitchen and bath, the pet rabbit's cage in the dining room—none of it any more decorated than they were. Their lives were completely purposeful.

When Shea and Crawford dug together in Roman ruins in Jordan, “We used to sit in the old Bronze Age Temple mound up above our excavation. The sun would go down. We'd have a drink, and we'd watch the kids playing musical tents, sneaking in and out. It was Jane Goodall and the chimps. The alpha male is going to the beta female . . .” He laughed. “I love my job.” He talked about the dig in Ethiopia where everything went wrong. “We had cattle raids, we had brush fires, we put the car into the river. You name the disaster,
we had it.” His students' response? “Let's do it again next year!” The students who became passionate about archaeology were especially rewarding, but all seemed to amuse him and Crawford. “You want to have comic relief, bring a bunch of twenty-year-olds on an expedition.”

THE MORNING OF
the goat roast was brilliant, an April sky bright blue with streaky white clouds and just enough of a chill for a sweatshirt. I drove around Long Island looking for the wilderness site and finally found it, at the intersection of yesterday and nowhere. The location felt like a Scout camp with a circular road for school buses, and a field alongside it with wooden stocks. Yes, stocks, those public tools of shaming from colonial times. The site was a destination for school groups studying American history. Shea had found that rare spot with few rules or regulations or insurance anxieties where students could play with fire and sharp knives and projectile weapons without anybody freaking out about liability. He bustled around in a bright-red shirt, supervising the digging of a coffin-sized pit behind the red outbuildings where the students would pile sticks and build a fire. Fire! When Shea talked about fire in class, he grunt-laughed like Beavis (or was it Butt-head?). “Fire! Hunh hunh. Fire is cool! Hunh hunh hunh.”

I had told everybody I was going to a goat roast; bragging was more like it—I had milked this goat roast. But it turned out the supplier was fresh out of goat. So we stood around the fire pit, drank coffee from a Dunkin' Donuts Box O' Joe, watched Shea unpack his flintknapping kit, and waited for the car of grad students who would deliver . . . a lamb. I dropped my head to scrawl my disappointment in a notebook.
I butchered a goat
seemed so cool, semibarbarous, but
I butchered a lamb
? No. Even the way it sounded—the brutish hard
g
and hard
t
of “goat”—was preferable to the soft baby mewls in “lamb.” Shea avoided calling it a
lamb
, I noticed. “They've got the dead animal and are en route,” he reported.

At last the rusty transport vehicle arrived and the grad students dragged out a plastic sack with a pitiful, dead lamb inside. It didn't look like nearly enough to feed the thirty or so people gathered—grads, undergrads, and even two of Shea's fellow professors, but Shea was unconcerned. Perhaps he suspected that, after the butchering lesson, some would lose their appetites. The bloody sack waited while a group of us assembled in the shade in front of the sandbox and Shea shook out bloodstained mats and laid out hammerstones, a bag of low-grade obsidian, and a first-aid kit. He draped a piece of leather over one of his thighs for a safe work area. “You
will
get cut doing this,” he said gravely.

The obsidian came from a dealer in Texas who “supplies thousands of us,” according to Shea. The dealer got the volcanic rock from Washington state, “and it's sharp enough to shave with.” With that, Shea passed me a hunk of obsidian and a striker, and I looked at these objects. But what was I looking for? I breathed in and, trying to imitate him, brought the striker down forcefully on the obsidian. Instantly, a chip of the glassy rock flew into Shea's cheek. Bloody hell—I could have put out his eye. “No, that's okay,” he said, wiping his face. He put on safety glasses for the rest of the lesson.

Then he took my lump of obsidian, my
core
, in flintknap-speak, and, rotating it, looked for a good angle for me. Somehow, with intensive coaching, I managed to flake off a few thin, triangular points. With the first point, I abraded the side of one piece to dull it so I could hold the thing without slicing my hand, and shaped it—and there was my knife. Then I made two more, crude but sharp. “You are now a cavewoman,” Shea told me.

The Band-Aids came out several times as nicks appeared in the students' fingers. When a dozen or so of us had made our tools, Shea wrestled the lamb out of the plastic and, with help, hung it upside down from a corner of the sandbox's wood frame and placed a big sheet of plastic on the ground. The lamb's head had already been removed.
As Shea explained, “The head is complex. Good meat, lots of structure, but it takes time to extract, and working around the teeth is dangerous.” Ice Age people had to practice speed butchery while looking over their shoulders for lions; they would have carried the head home rather than try to field-dress it. Holding one of his stone blades lightly, Shea knelt down and sliced and peeled back the lamb's skin, then ripped it back so that it hung below the neck cavity like a fluttering cape. The sacrificial carcass, rib bones visible and little lamb feet dangling in front of the cape, managed to look both vulnerable and intimidating.

Shea washed his hands after handling the skin, the dirtiest part of the animal, then lifted the foreleg, “the easiest to take off—the bone floats right there. And I haven't made a single cut mark on the bone yet,” he said pointedly. Cut marks were one way archaeologists registered ancient human activity, and the literature is full of dissertations and papers comparing natural breaks on bone with deliberate cut marks made by one sort of tool or another. Shea continued his careful butchery, using an ax to cut the ribs off—“Don't grab near the severed bones” (too sharp)—then he took off the long back steaks. “There's great sinew here, excellent for bowstrings or sewing up wounds, and it's pretty. Anyone want to render it out?” He cut along the throat, then wiped the blade on his jeans to get off the gummy fat. The smell of raw lamb, almost the same as the smell of cooked lamb, permeated the air.

Shea divided us into butchering teams to separate the ribs and cut up the steaks on a clean tarp. “Scrape it,” he suggested. “Some of the best meat is on the bone and on the underside of the vertebrae. Don't worry about the flies,” he said. “They're there to tell you the food is still edible.” I tried to get into the spirit of the enterprise, and not think about fly-borne illnesses, or the goop on fly legs.

I sliced dutifully with my stone knife, which worked better than some of the cutlery in my kitchen, but because the knife was small, I got lamb blood all over me. Then I washed my hands in the clean
restroom and watched little bits of lamb go down the drain. I wandered to the pit where the students were laying the ribs and sliced meat on grills and setting them in the fire. They were talking about the crazy stuff they had eaten in their travels—Bavarian wild boar, mare's milk, eyeballs.

“Were you here last year when we played football with the head?” one asked. (I bet it was a goat head.) I ate some grilled lamb steak on a round pat of homemade pita, delicious and disgusting at the same time, and stood with Shea, who grinned as he gnawed on a leg bone with still-bloody hands. “Not bad,” he said, and I recalled that “not bad” was what he told me when I got all but one of the quiz questions right. “Not bad” was good.

Then he rounded up a group for a lesson in atlatl throwing and ran down to the field with a handful of spears. Not an unusual weekend for the archaeologists and the archaeology grad students: have a barbecue; throw projectile weapons.

Shea's wilderness and flintknapping experience had shaped his work, and he wanted his students, too, to benefit from such practical knowledge. Encouraging us to get familiar with fire, stone tools, and butchery and engage in experimental archaeology was really just uniformitarianism in action. “I want you to expand the range of experience about which you can make observations about the past,” he said. Shea occasionally offered a class called Primitive Technologies, where, a mile from the Long Island thoroughfare of big-box stores and fast-food joints, he taught suburban students to flintknap, throw spears, and make fire. He doesn't want the current crop of
Homo sapiens
to forget what we can do.

Shea's motto, he told me, was “Never effing quit. My students were out there making fire in the snow one year, ‘Eww, it's cold. It's wet. Can we go inside?' ‘No, if you make fire now, you'll be able to make fire anytime. This is the perfect opportunity. You should thank the Great Spirit for this opportunity. So shut the ef up and make that goddamn fire.' And it got to be where a couple
of them couldn't do it, so students who could have gone in stayed out to make sure every single member of that class finished. Cooperation among big groups of strangers is another derived human characteristic—you can't get chimps to stay on the same topic for more than a few minutes—and these students were systematically finding different ways of making fire to bring everybody in. I was so proud of them. I told them, ‘Now you are human beings.'”