Marilyn Johnson is a writer with a terrific capacity for learning. She’s endlessly curious and she also has a wonderful gift for turning her curiosity into writing that’s engaging and approachable. Her enthusiasm is infectious as evidenced in her first two books, which were about the subcultures of obituary writers and librarians respectively. Now she turns her attention to the mysterious world of archaeologists. Lives in Ruins: Archeologists and the Seductive Lure of Human Rubble has already been tabbed by Publisher’s Weekly as one of the 100 best books of the year.
Alex: Your first book was about people who write obituaries and your second was about librarians. This is your third book. What led you to archaeologists?
Marilyn Johnson: Well, for starters I thought it would be fun to go on a dig.
Alex: And was it?
MJ: It is! It totally is. To start with, I feel a kinship with each of these professions. I wrote obituary tributes for several years for magazines, and wanted to know how real obit writers who worked on daily deadlines managed to breathe so much life into their work. I worked as a page for my public library as a teenager, and I might have gone on to library science school, except when the board wouldn’t raise my rate from 95 cents an hour to $1, I quit out of pride. That ended my library career, but I still hang out with librarian. They’re my people.
Alex: And you still read obits all the time.
MJ: Are you kidding? I get most of my ideas from the obits. I read an obituary of Lewis Binford, for instance, who helped spark a revolution in the archaeology field in the U.S., and who was married six times, often to fellow archaeologists. I wondered who else was making a mark in archaeology in these tumultuous times, and how obsessed they had to be.
Alex: Did you ever want to be an archaeologist when you were a kid?
MJ: Oh, sure. When I was young, I loved to dig and find and collect fossils. I was mad about archaeology. Who wasn’t? But I jumped off the science track early, and took only one class in anthropology in college. I guess you’d call archaeology my fantasy profession, and though I have no gift for the work, I do share archaeologists’ curiosity, passion for the past, and their stubborn independence and perverse streak. Archaeologists, librarians, and obit writers each work passionately and for little personal reward to save bits of our cultural history. They all connect us to the people and objects and stories of our past.
Alex: The first time I ever heard about archaeology was in the fifth grade when we learned about Richard Leaky. Is he the big cultural touchstone?
MJ: Definitely. The Leakeys—Richard, his parents, Louis and Mary, and his wife Maeve and daughter Louise, are an archaeological dynasty. Richard, Maeve, and Louise are all affiliated with Stony Brook University, and John Shea, the Ice Age expert in the book, teaches down the hall and has been on site with them in Africa.
Alex: And while we’re talking pop culture, let’s talk about Indiana Jones. What do archaeologists think of him?
MJ: Most archaeologists talked about Indiana Jones with affection. He has given that profession a swagger that, let’s face it, few other professions have. He still, more than 30 years after Raiders of the Lost Ark, brings people into the field, and Harrison Ford himself has been a sport—he served on the Archeological Institute of America’s board for years. But the character is a cartoon, a plunderer, a throwback to an acquisition-oriented era as opposed to the current era of cultural heritage management and repatriation of artifacts, and no archaeologist with any standing is going to talk seriously about crystal skulls and aliens and haunted artifacts. They know it’s nonsense, but they appreciate the publicity
Alex: And so what makes an archaeologist in real life?
MJ: Resourcefulness. Curiosity. Physical sturdiness, mental toughness, and endurance. Patience. The ability—and the desire—to kneel all day in the sun inside a big hole, which might be a grave or a privy, while clouds of mosquitoes feast on you. They do have an uncanny ability to empathize with the time period and the people they’re studying, however, and they seem untethered from the modern age when it comes to cell phones and timely responses to emails. They have one foot in, say, the contemporary Caribbean sun with underbrush spreading in front of their eyes and bulldozers hovering, and one foot in the 18th century plantation.
Alex: And yet it’s such a physically demanding job.
MJ: Oh, it’s terribly hard on the body and some of the archaeologists reminded me of pirates: scarred, limping, sun-damaged, sweating under their rakish bandannas—and they do have a kind of pirate’s swagger. But how is it they never lose that hunger to turn over the next shovel of dirt? That amazes me. It is the quest for the unknown. Once you have had the privilege of unearthing something that humans haven’t seen or touched for centuries, I think you get a kind of archaeological fever. I got infected.
Alex: I was impressed by how many young and old people are in the profession. You’d think it’d require a young person’s stamina but that’s not the case.
MJ: Sarah Nelson is in her eighties, and she would go dig in China this minute if she could get grant money. She is a great role model and absolutely representative of the archaeologists I met in their indomitable drive. Nothing will stop her from figuring out novel and creative ways to apply her tremendous knowledge, satisfy her insatiable curiosity, and get her hands on unfiltered history.
Alex: You write about women as well as men. Even though the field was traditionally male dominated and women had to fight stereotyping, it’s clear that some of the brightest and most prominent archaeologists are women. Did you consciously try to include a mix of men and women or did your nose just lead you to the most interesting and/or cooperative subjects?
MJ: Of course I tried to get a mix of archaeologists in all ways: men and women; ancient, classic, post-Colombian, and contemporary; academic, independent, and contract archaeologists. I included archaeologists in their twenties, several in their late thirties and early forties, a bunch in their fifties and sixties, one almost seventy, and one archaeologist in her eighties. But my nose ruled. I was looking for characters, originals, people who could articulate what they were doing in colorful ways.
Alex: Also, about women, Nelson told you, “My archaeological writings presume that what women did in the past is recoverable and interesting.” And you add: “And interesting. That she felt the need to add that phrase was telling. To some extent, archaeologists find what they’re looking for, and if you never look for evidence of powerful women, even if the hills and valleys are full of queens and warriors, they’ll be invisible.” This brings up one of the book’s central themes. That archaeology is subjective. That it’s not comprehensive. History is written by the winners. But it seems to be as if archaeology is, in some sense, about honoring the losers’ story, too, right?
MJ: This is one of the most subtle and touching aspects of the profession. Archaeology is about paying attention to things that might be undetectable or invisible to others. As Joan Connelly said, “Good archaeology fills in the blanks of history. It tells the losers’ stories. It teases out the history that falls between the cracks.” That, to me, is beautiful.
Alex: Do you think, by nature, archaeologists are drawn to the losers’ stories?
MJ: I’m not sure if archaeologists are naturally drawn to “losers”—or can we call them overlooked people?
Alex: Yeah, that’s better because it doesn’t imply any kind of judgment. It’s about being neglected, overlooked.
MJ: That’s right. I’m, drawn to such people, I gravitate to those who are overlooked, too. That’s probably obvious from the subjects of my previous books—obituary writers and librarians/archivists. Certainly the most interesting stories to me are the ones that have not yet been told. How did children live 2000 years ago? Where are the women of ancient Greece? How did ordinary soldiers manage in a war? I was fascinated by Grant Gilmore, for instance, who was uncovering new stories about slave plantations on the Caribbean island of St. Eustatius. By the way, Gilmore doesn’t like the word slaves; he prefers the term, enslaved people, which of course is much more human.
Alex: And what role does technology play in all of this?
MJ: The field is exploding, but only partly because of technology—wars, climate change, and economic development are doing their part to reveal our buried history. As for technology, the use of satellite remote sensing by pioneers like Sarah Parcak and Douglas Comer has been revealing sites we never knew were there, and tracking the erosion and degradation of other sites. Increasingly sophisticated geophysical, chemical, and biological tests have also helped advance the field— not to mention the crazy cases where archaeologists have been able to extract and analyze DNA material from ancient bones. But none of this is as magical as it sounds: the hard work of excavation and analysis still requires human interpretation, “ground proof,” they call it. I agree with most of the archaeologists in Lives in Ruins: There’s no substitute for a trained field worker with a sharp eye and a simple trowel.
Alex: Speaking of your murder victim, the pig, I found the section of the book on forensic archaeology fascinating.
MJ: The forensic archaeologist I dug with, Kimberlee Sue Moran, is attractive, young—she’s in her thirties—and perfectly at ease unearthing a murder victim crawling with maggots. She likes to emphasize that forensic archaeology is simply archaeology that can stand up in court: anything excavated or recovered has to be handled with gloves, uncontaminated, logged, identified, and accounted for at all times. You don’t bag something and leave it by the trench while you go back to the truck for your lunch. I like to emphasize that forensic archaeology smells worse than classical or prehistoric archaeology.
Alex: You were certainly challenged by your level of sea-readiness a few times during the reporting of this book weren’t you?
MJ: The gross stuff was incredibly gross. I learned some things I can never unlearn about organic decomposition and human bone. And now that you mention it, I also got seasick, and had altitude sickness, and had to be rescued a few times. But the killer bees that gave chase one day didn’t get me!
Alex: Earlier on you mentioned how secretive archaeologists are. Was it hard to get close to them?
MJ: But archaeologists are much harder to reach and much harder to get close to. I mean, think about it: obituary writers’ names are in the newspaper almost every day; librarians can be found in the library. Some of them wearing big CAN I HELP YOU? buttons. Where are archaeologists? They’re scattered all over the world, anywhere humans have left their mark. They dislike cell phones and they are, for various practical reasons, somewhat secretive.
None of these archaeologists wanted to do drive-by interviews. I didn’t want that, either. I didn’t want a few quotes from an underwater archaeologist; I wanted to see Newport, R.I., and its sunken fleets through the archaeologist’s eyes. I didn’t want to write a neat profile of the forensic archaeologist; I wanted to tromp around the Pine Barrens with her and excavate murder victims—or rather, the 400 pound pig that stood in for our murder victim. It took years of groundwork to get next to some of them, and as I say in the book, “I’ve lost count of the archaeologists I’ve chased who got away. They are an elusive bunch, in motion or in the thrall of another time. Even the ones who alight on a terraced ledge long enough to have a conversation would, before I knew it, shimmer like the good witch Glinda before evaporating into thin air.”
Alex: What about Ruth Shady? Was she like your Bobby Fischer, your white whale?
MJ: Ha! Ruth Shady isn’t my anything; she is her own, completely original force in archaeology. I don’t blame her for not talking to me; Shady had no reason to trust American authors, and in fact, none of the archaeologists in this book knew what I was going to do with the information and interviews. Shady is important because she uncovered the oldest city in this hemisphere in Peru, and fought a very public feud with a couple of American archaeologists, and I’m not sure how many people outside the field know about this fascinating character. I went all the way to Peru to hear her speak. I was hunkered down in my seat in the Municipalidad del Cuzco and thrilled—my heart was beating so fast!—and then … no Shady. She didn’t show up! Of course I was frustrated, but writers deal with disappointment all the time, as do archaeologists. And I think it ended up being a funny way to tell her story. This is who she is, an archaeologist who snubs an conference of international archaeologists because she is too busy digging.
On the other hand, I interviewed Joan Connelly in the hopes I could go on her dig in Cyprus the following year, and she said why wait? Come in 10 days! And I leapt. And I was so amused by John Shea, the Ice Age expert, that I impulsively asked to take a class with him (though it meant a 160 mile commute twice a week one winter)—and he said sure, here’s a list of textbooks, see you next week.
Alex: Yeah, one thing that John Shea said struck me, “Narratives close off the complexity of reality.” Then you go on to observe that we study archaeology “to gather authentic fragments of our human past, but the further back we go, the more we see what an incomplete picture we have of human history.” There is so much mystery involved. How do archaeologists wrap an empirical mind around capturing history?
MJ: We’re conditioned by narrative to expect some resolution, answers to those questions, solutions to the mysteries, and a neat wrap-up to the story, but in fact there are many things we don’t understand and might never understand. Why were some people of the Iron Age tortured and their bodies thrown in bogs? How did the Inca get giant blocks of stone up mountains 500 years ago without the use of wheels? Why did people build mounds? I liked the archaeologist in the book who said, “Our most exciting days are the days we discover we were wrong.” The past is a wilderness that we’ve just begun to explore.
Alex: Are archaeologists in a rush or are they zenlike in taking all the time they need?
MJ: It depends on the archaeologist and the circumstances, but I think they would all take their sweet time if they could. All are trying to balance doing things in a timely fashion (and, if they’re contract archaeologists, on the clock and on deadline) with doing things correctly, so as much information as possible is preserved, and other archaeologists coming behind them can conduct their own investigations of the site, in a few years or decades or eons. History is going to judge them, so they want to get it right.
This interview first appeared at the Daily Beast.
[Photo c/o Marilyn Johnson]