Digging Archeology
John was perfectly happy living in Turrialba. He was five years old and where he lived was inconsequential to his daily activities and state of mind. He had lived his whole life, except a year in Santa Monica, in and around the equator. As a kid, he just made the best of whatever his circumstances. Perhaps if he had known that Turrialba was a remote and unknown tropical valley, two hours due east of San Jose, Costa Rica, he might have been more concerned. Chances are, even more than that, when he found out there was no TV, and thus no Saturday cartoons, and no ice cream, for want of meaningful refrigeration, he might be less than thrilled. His mother anticipated that and had a plan.
She had three concerns about her son John. She wanted a manly influence for him to substitute for his absentee father. She wanted something to occupy his spare time that was more productive than chasing snakes and spiders like the other local kids his age preferred. She wanted to share her interest in anthropology with John. Ever since her days as a student at Cornell, her hero had been Margaret Mead, an anthropologist that was barely known to the world until a few years later. It was unlikely that she could figure out a way to interest a five-year-old in comparative cultures, so she came up with an alternate plan.
One of John’s mother’s colleagues was married to a German who was something of an amateur archeologist. Kurt was in his mid-thirties and he and his wife had no children. He was a trailing spouse stuck in a small tropical valley with nothing better to do than become a “big brother” to John. And so it began. A trip was planned to the coastal town of Limon. Kurt and John boarded the national rail service train and spent the better part of the day wending their way around the verdant mountains of eastern Costa Rica. The train was very slow and stopped often for water to cool the very old steam locomotive. The scene onboard was pretty gritty with string bags of produce and butchered chickens. This was very much a local form of transportation. The eco-tourism that characterizes Costa Rica today was nowhere in evidence in 1959. But it was all interesting to five-year-old John, who spent the day hearing from Kurt about what they were going to do.
There was a site just outside Limon that Kurt had heard about from one of the wandering peddlers who would come through the banana plantation and onto the Institute grounds, going house to house selling artifacts they had unearthed. The site was an old Chibchan burial ground and despite looking pretty well-excavated, as soon as Kurt put his shovel into the earth, he came back with a spade full of pottery and obvious fragments from the grave booty. John was immediately mesmerized. He wanted to keep each piece of pottery from each shovel. Kurt had to explain to him that the stuff near the surface was not worth keeping. After going down about three feet, Kurt jumped down in the hole and gently brushed away soil and pulled out several pottery dishes with bulging legs that raised them a few inches off the deck. Kurt seemed impressed by these, but what made John’s eyes go saucer-wide was a small stone head about the size of a baseball that was crudely carved. Kurt tossed it at a John and he caught it up against his chest. That was the same instant John caught the archeology bug.
Kurt and John spent the night at some fleabag hotel in Limon. Kurt went out for the evening, but gave John a book on pre-Colombian art that was chock-a-block with pictures. John could read a bit, but the pictures were the attraction that kept John busy while Kurt did whatever one did at night for fun in Limon. On the train ride back to Turrialba, while talking with John, Kurt was surprised at how much John had absorbed from the book. By the time John got home, he told his mother that he wanted to be an archeologist.
John and his family lived at the Institute for another year while his mother applied for graduate school back in the States. During that year, he and Kurt went out to local sites just north of town in Turrialba. John gathered quite a collection, mostly of pottery, but also several pumice sculptures since the sites were at the base of the Turrialba Volcano. In addition, seeing John’s interest, when she was at home and one of the artifact peddlers would come to the door, she would call John and ask him to pick out one or two pieces he liked. The peddlers were usually very poor itinerants and they would open their old rags to reveal their treasures. It became easy to tell the real from the fake. The dirtier the peddler, the more likely the artifacts were to be real. John always chose the pumice pieces, mostly because he could relate to unearthing similar ones and carefully washing them off. He just liked the way they felt…always lighter than they looked. Before the family moved to Wisconsin, John lovingly wrapped each piece and put them in two large cardboard boxes. Those were the days when Costa Rica had no laws prohibiting removing artifacts from the country.
For the next four years through four Wisconsin winters, four TV seasons, four summers of reruns, a masters, Ph.D. and post-doctoral work, those two boxes sat in the basement untouched. Then the family moved to Maine for John’s mother to set up the first women’s Job Corps program under Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society program. The boxes sat in that damp basement for another three years. Then the family moved to Rome, Italy and despite growing a bit flimsy due to too many years in the damp, they travelled with the family’s belongings to Rome.
John was in high school by this time. When asked about his hobbies, he always included archeology. He needed hobbies again because he was back in the land of no-TV to speak of. When his mother’s ex-military predecessor had them over to dinner and heard the word archeology, she immediately asked if John had heard about Testaccio Hill. He had not. She explained that it was on the banks of the Tiber and was where all the no-deposit, no-return amphorae we’re dumped when ships from Greece and Phoenicia and parts elsewhere were unloaded.
John was bored in Rome, so the next day he wandered to Testaccio Hill with a small military folding shovel he picked up at the Porta Portese flea market. He walked up the grassy hill noticing pottery shards sticking out of the ground here and there. When he settled on a spot, it took one shovelful to unearth amphorae handles with markings and one complete amphorae neck. It was amazing. It all came rushing back to him, his days with Kurt, digging and laughing about all the great artifacts to choose from. Like Costa Rica in 1959, Rome in 1968 allowed full access to a treasure-trove like Testaccio Hill. John carted home a load of amphorae artifacts and put them in….another cardboard box. Soon thereafter, John discovered scooters and motorcycles and those boxes of antiquities just got buried in the back hall of their apartment.
John went about his life from high school to college and grad school and then into the working world. One day, about ten years into his career, he got an assignment that involved travel to Latin America. It all got John thinking and those thoughts gravitated to the old decrepit boxes sitting now in the basement of his suburban home. As he unwrapped all the artifacts, several had clearly not done well over the decades, but most were exactly as he remembered them. He suddenly rediscovered his long lost hobby of archeology. He researched both pre-Colombian art and Roman amphorae. He learned that the sites north of Turrialba were now Guayabo de Turrialba archeological site. And Testaccio Hill had been made a national heritage protected site in 1970. As it turns out, John had collected very valuable and historically meaningful artifacts.
After years wrapped in old newspaper and being kept in old cardboard boxes, the artifacts were carefully laid out in a special glass dining room table he designed to hold the artifacts in a base of black sand. Now, John sits on Sunday mornings reading the New York Times and remembering his dreams of archeological conquest.