A Thousand Stories Deep

 

Not the author

I mentioned last time that my wife and I are archaeology buffs.  This led to us spending part of April on the island of Crete, our second tour of Greece.  And that trip got me thinking about stories.  No surprise, right?

I wrote one story on the trip (a little piece of flash fiction) and came up with two ideas for other tales which may or may not get finished.  But what I really want to talk about is the relationship between storytelling and archaeology.

Someone in the field once told me "an archaeologist is someone who can dig a square hole and tell a story about it." The second part is important because the contents of the hole do not speak for themselves.  Whatever you find needs to be interpreted, or "read."

An Evans rebuild.

Of course, the relationship is more complex than that.  Many people enter the field because of their fascination with certain stories. Crete provides excellent examples.

No doubt you are familiar with the story of Theseus fighting the Minotaur in a labyrinth.  That story is set in Knossos, the capital of ancient Crete, but  it is not a Cretan story.  Theseus is the hero of Athens and that is where the story comes from.

But it led Sir Arthur Evans, a British archaeologist, to go to the island in hopes of exploring the legendary site of Knossos. He bought the land and spent more than three decades digging up the Minoan palace there.

Evans called them "Horns of Consecration"

I should actually say "Minoan" "palace."  Our guide put air quotes around those words every time he used them.  

You see, Evans called the civilization of which Knossos is an example Minoan because King Minos was supposedly the king who was stepdaddy to the Minotaur.  We have no idea what the people actually called themselves.

And as for palace, well, a palace is a big building where royalty live.  What Evans found at Knossos appears to have been an administrative complex with large meeting rooms and storage chambers (for food supplies?), and no sign of residential space.  As our guide said, "Nobody lives at city hall." The same holds true for the other large Minoan sites on the island.  

Evans recreates a doorway

But Evans had a story to tell and tell it he did.  He decided he knew what the "palace" looked like and he reconstructed parts of it, right there on the ruins.  Today even suggesting doing this would get you kicked out of the archaeology biz.  The pictures you see here are Evans' guesses as to what the place looked like 3500 years ago. 

Now let's move to another Minoan palace (please assume I put in the quote marks) at Phaistos.  The diggers there were careful not to rebuild it according to their dreams.  In fact, where they had to make repairs they put dates on their work to avoid confusion.

Phaistos Disc, Heraklion Museum.

Nevertheless we have a very strange story there.  Italian archaeologist Luigi Pernier was managing the site in 1908.  Here is the story the way my guide (an archaeologist) tells it.  Wikipedia has a different version.

Pernier suffered from an archaeologist's nightmare scenario: He left the site for a few hours.  When he came back his workers showed him a box they found while unsupervised, containing an assortment of objects whose origin covered more than a thousand years, from the Minoan era to the Romans.  One item was like nothing that anyone had seen before: the so-called Phaistos Disc.  It is a piece of fired clay about six inches in diameter, embossed on both sides with symbols.  No one knows what they mean.  

And notice one symbol that appears on the disc exactly once.  Tell me that doesn't look like a flying saucer!

Is the disc real?  Is it a forgery?  (And if so, a modern one or possibly dating all the way back to the Romans?)  Opinions vary. Think of all the stories you can write about that mess...

And here's one more object begging to be explained.  This kouros (boy) statue was found in a site called Palaikastro.  It's another unicorn - meaning nothing else like it has been found, but no one denies that it is authentic.  The context and condition convinces the scientists that someone grabbed it by the legs and smashed it against a stone.  In the name of the gods, why?  You could get a whole book of stories out of that.

One final thought: If this sort of thing interests you I recommend you read Riddle of the Labyrinth by Margalit Fox.  It tells the true story of the three scholars who, over a forty year struggle, deciphered Linear B, a script of the Mycenean age that was first found on Crete.  Imagine translating a text when you have never before seen the symbols it is written in, and have no idea what language is being transcribed.

Now that's what I call a mystery. 

The North Forty

With any luck, my husband and I just got back from a much-needed vacation, so here's an update from my friend Linda Thompson. She wrote this letter to a mutual friend of ours who lives in New York City, who likes to keep informed about life in Laskin, South Dakota... 
...Every summer as you know, a friend of mine goes on a dig with a group of archaeologists.  I've suggested that he could find really interesting things by staying in town and excavating my garden, but he just laughs.  He has no idea what can get buried in a small town.  Remember when Mary Olson killed her husband?  That asparagus bed's still pretty lush...  (I know, I know, it was never proven he was ever buried there, but you can re-read all about that here in "The Asparagus Bed".)

But the truth of the matter is, my friend only interested in dinosaurs.



Of course, America's been dinosaur-happy for a long time.  I was, too, once, but I got over it when I learned that birds were direct descendants of dinosaurs, which sounds sillier in a book than it does watching a flock of pelicans.  Pelicans are 30 million years old.  Pelicans are sharks with wings.  In flight they look like large albino pterodactyls, and I'll bet they'd whip the pants off of any leather-winged pterosaur stupid enough to not be extinct.  On the water, they patrol the lake with the same carefree approach of prison search-lights on a moonless night with bloodhounds baying in the background.  If I were a fish, they'd give me a heart attack.  As it is, they just give me the willies.



Of course, once you start observing things like that, you can't stop.  At least, I can't.  I started watching the crows and flickers stalking my yard, head cocked, one eye staring cold and unblinking down at the ground until they spot their prey.  Maybe I saw "The Birds" too young, along with "Psycho" and "Marlin Perkins' Wild America", but I believe birds spook more people than me:  why else would carry-out fried chicken be available in every convenience store in America?  It's our way of reassuring ourselves of our place on the food chain.



The reason I'm able to make all these observations is that my yard is the neighborhood wildlife sanctuary.  Besides the birds, a tribe of rabbits comes and frolics on my lawn every night.  This isn't because I leave out little nubbins of carrots and pretend that I'm Beatrix Potter.  It's because I have the only chemical-free lawn on my block, full of dandelions, clover, and creeping charlie.  (You can imagine how popular I am with my neighbors.)  The rabbits love it.  They eat and gambol and do all the things that rabbits do.  They must stay up all night doing it, too, because morning always finds a couple of them sprawled out on the grass like limp cats.  Sometimes a cat is sprawled out like a limp rabbit, not five feet away.  Who's imitating whom, I don't know.  All I know is that they're all too tuckered to move.

Now I don't mind the rabbits eating all the clover they can hold.  I'm certainly not going to eat it.  Nor do I mind them fraternizing with cats, although I think it proves the truth of the phrase "hare-brained".  What I mind is this Roman-orgy atmosphere they give the place.  The way some of them look, I expect to see little togas and vine-wreaths lying under the marigolds and zucchini.

And there's the problem.  You see, my garden is in my front yard because it's the only place that gets enough sun to grow anything but moss.  In any major urban center - say 12,000 and up - I would have been run out of town on a rail for plowing up perfectly good sod to grow vegetables.

But here in Laskin, it's a tourist attraction. Every walker in town stops at my chicken-wire fence and comments freely about the condition of my soil.  My neighbors bring their out-of-town visitors over for the afternoon, which tells you something about the entertainment options of Laskin.  I stepped outside one day and found a dozen people, none of whom I knew from Adam's off-ox, standing around wondering why I put the beans there, why my peppers weren't blooming, and what in the world was THAT?  (Eggplant.)

No my North Forty is good clean family fun.  It's also a lot of hard work.  Note to Martha Stewart:  the real key to a perfect garden is to put it in the front yard, where every weed becomes public knowledge.  God knows that after years of this, my character has been thoroughly shredded, and what I should do is just quit, but that would start even more rumors...

I need an excuse, a reason, like an excavation.  I believe there's something under the potato patch.  We just haven't looked properly.  I need professional archaeologists.  After all there are dinosaurs on the property already, and it's not my fault if they've evolved to the point where they have feathers...

Digging Up Old Crimes

by Robert Lopresti

We just got back from San Francisco, which felt like deja vu all over again, since we were there last fall for Bouchercon.   Even stayed at the same hotel.  But this time we were attending a very different conference: the fourteenth annual Biblical Archaeology Fest.

I discussed this event the last time my wife and I attended it.  I won't repeat myself except to explain that this is not a religious event, but a chance for archaeology buffs and wannabees to learn from the experts (who are actually meeting together across town).

And I heard a lot of wonderful lectures on subjects ranging from the horned altar of Gath to misconceptions about second Temple-era Judaism, but I will stick to two lectures that I can reasonably tie to crime.

Dr. Robert R. Cargill's talk was titled "No, No, You Didn't Find That."  He is an archaeologist and since he is willing to face cameras and was for several years working in Los Angeles, he became a go-to person when someone made an outrageous claim about archaeology.  This happens with depressing regularity.  (Does anyone keep track of how many times Noah's Ark has been discovered in the last century?  Or the Ark of the Covenant?)

A pseudoarchaeological claim is generally made by an amateur (who will often argue that the elitists - e.g. those with training - are conspiring against him).  There are a lot of possible motives: money, fame, religious or other ideology.  Cargill offered his "magic formula" for success in pseudoarchaeology:  start with a media blitz (as opposed to attempting publication in a scholarly journal or conference), misinformation dump (forcing critics to go through piles of irrelevant stuff, disproving it all), and attacking the critics.

One fun example: Glenn Beck claiming that the Dead Sea Scrolls were texts being hidden from Emperor Constantine.  What's a difference of three centuries between friends?

Law and Order: Ancient Canaan
Rami Arav has had an interesting career.  With his fresh doctorate in hand he moved back to Israel and began searching for a place to excavate in his native Galigee.  Aware that no on e had determined the site of  Bethsaida (the third most mentioned place in the Gospels).he set out to find it, and in ten days he did.

He duly reported this at a conference in front of an audience of about ten people (the air conditioning had broken down).  One of them happened to be a reporter who wrote that the site of  the miracle of loaves and fishes had been discovered.  Two days later everyone in the world wanted to interview Rami Arav.  The result is 25 years later he is still digging at Bethesda - or more accurately at Geshur, the huge ancient city whose ruins Bethesda was built on.  Arav estmates he has dug up about 4% of the site's 25 acres.

Amazing story, but what does this have to do with crime?  Well, Arav explains that archaeologicists "are like C.S.I.  First we take thousands of pictures.  Then we bring in experts.  Geologists, biologists,  chemists, computer experts, paleozoologists," and so on. (Quotation is approximate.)   He says archaeologists only deal with mute witnesses (texts get passed on to other scholars, but ruins can nonetheless provide remarkable evidence.

For example, one issue about the Geshur era (say, 3.000 years ago) is the question of law and order: was there a reliable system of justice, or something more like anarchy?  Is there anyway to find out without written texts?

Well, one of the things Arav's workers found was a four-meter wide paved road outside the city.  Nobody builds a paved road that wide for pedestrians or people on horseback.  That road was for wheeled wagons.  Now, think about that.  The merchant wouldn't bring a wagon pulled by animals to the city if he wasn't fairly comfortable that it would be there the next time he looked for it, and that someone would take an interest if it disappeared.  So there was law and order in Geshur.  Cool, huh?

I have 19 pages of notes from the conference, but I'll be merciful.  Meanwhile, keep digging.