Caution: Archaeologist at Work

I knew all this blogging would come in handy for work someday. I am writing a journal article about some extensive collections a guy made west of Phoenix in the 1940s when he noticed that several large Hohokam sites were going to be damaged by irrigation and hydroelectric (I think) work along the Gila River. Almost all of the stuff--buckets and bucket and buckets of stuff, mind-boggling in both sheer numbers and the superhuman quality of workmanship--is from mortuary contexts, cremations to be exact, and while a few people have dipped into the collection over the years to write dissertations and master's theses, it's never been comprehensively presented to the public.

So that's my job, at least for the arrowheads, and until this afternoon I had no real idea what to say beyond holy shit will you look at all these amazing things. A lot of the arrow points that were included as offerings in various cremations are stunningly well made, on the order of 10 cm long and yet no more than 2 or 3 millimeters thick, but there's an equal number of offertory points that were clearly intended to be of the same design as the big showpieces, but whose workmanship falls far short. Even accounting for the warping and twisting incurred in the intense heat of the crematory fire, they are asymmetrical, unevenly serrated, thick in the middle. Why? What social mechanism was at work here?

I don't know for sure. Nobody does. But! This afternoon, as I was thinking about mortuary rituals and grave furnishings, I remembered the field trip I took last summer to a tiny cemetery in the limestone country of southwestern Indiana, which I wrote about here. These completely unrelated cultural settings provide my favorite kinds of analogies, the sorts of parallels I best like to draw between in attempting to understand the human forces behind the extinct technology I study for a living because the initial apparent absurdity strips somehow strips away the superfluous and lays intrinsic processes bare (ask me sometime about 17th-century European gunflint industries and arrowhead manufacture in the US Southwest circa A.D. 900). Cultural parallels between central Arizona in the year 1000 and southwestern Indiana in the year 1880 are pretty much nonexistent, but in both places and times people had to deal with the deaths of friends and family, and had to send them off with the requisite ritual and grave furnishings.

The dead needed certain things, and then as now the survivors were constrained somewhat by their ability to pay for the really good stuff, the highly visible status items. In Gila Bend, they wanted chalcedony arrowpoints with long, serrated blades, side notches, square shoulders, and deep basal concavities. In Needmore, they wanted a limestone grave marker inscribed with a name and dates, ideally with a bit of scripture and a decorative motif. Those who had the resources to acquire these things from a master craftsman got the long thin arrowheads, the headstones inscribed with a lengthy bible verse and topped with intricate scrolls, ferns, and flowers. Those who didn't were left to make their own uneven points with mismatched serrations and awkward humps, left to scratch names into unadorned slabs with an unsteady hand, letters backwards and dates squeezed together, scrollwork passed over in favor of a stick-figure sun.

Or maybe not. It makes a good story, though, the thread of common humanity weaving possibilities across hundreds of miles and years.

Cognitive Dissonance, Part Two Million

There are parts of Indiana I absolutely love, places my heart goes back to over and over again: South Bend, where I spent the majority of my adolescence, and McCormick's Creek, a state park near Bloomington where I spent some of the best individual weeks of my life.

Indiana, the nice part.

You can keep the rest of the state.

Opponents of same-sex marriage said today that they would try again to amend Indiana’s constitution to prohibit gay unions, this time with a re-worded amendment they hope will answer critics’ concerns.

In previous legislative sessions, the proposed amendment stated: “Marriage in Indiana consists only of the union of one man and one woman. This constitution or any other Indiana law may not be construed to require that the marital status or the legal incidents of marriage be conferred upon unmarried couples or groups.

Turner said that the changed language is meant to be clearer. It would not bar domestic partnerships, he said, but would bar civil unions.

It is uncertain whether the measure will make it out of the legislature and onto the ballot, since several key legislators--unlike their colleagues in Arizona--understand that marriage equality is already banned by statute, making an amendment redundant. The proposed amendment's biggest obstacle is one Patrick Bauer, D-South Bend, the speaker of the Indiana House. I went to school at various times with two different guys named Patrick Bauer, but I don't think either is this guy. In any event, I'm at least gratified to see a South Bend Democrat stand up for what's right.

I am not the least bit gratified to hear Tony Perkins shilling for the amendment on behalf of the Indiana Family Research Institute, as reported over on the Blend. This is the organization, remember, that had Tony Dungy shilling for contributions at a protect-marriage-dinner shortly after the Colts won the Super Bowl, and which is repeating the lie that the amendment is only about sacred holy fucking matrimony, not not not civil unions. Despite both of the amendment's sponsors in the state legislature clearly stating that civil unions are in their sights as well.

Side note: fundamentalist Christian apologists argue that the commandment forbidding false witness is not, after all, an injunction against lying in general, but specifically directed at witnesses giving false testimony in legal proceedings against other Hebrews. So modern Christians are free to lie, lie, lie their pants off when it's convenient for stomping on gay folks, a giant get out of jail free card, immunity in the big Jesus elimination challenge they're more than happy to nominate us for.

Too much Top Chef, Boltgirl? Possibly.

Whatevs. The callus is too thick for these things to sting much any more. McCormick's Creek and the Grotto at Notre Dame still call my heart. My head, meanwhile, says meh, you still live in Arizona.

Memento Mori, in Stone

And so the threatened photodump from my summer vacation begins.

Maybe ten years ago I happened on Scott Sanders' In Limestone Country in the "midwest" section of Bookman's. Hmmm, nifty. Over the years the book metamorphosed from an interesting read to a pilgrimage guidebook on my trips back to southern Indiana, which happens to be underlain by the finest building stone the planet has to offer. Indiana limestone built the Empire State Building, the National Cathedral, and several statehouses across the country. The book talks about the history of quarrying in two counties southwest of Indianapolis, but, best of all, also describes quirky places and monuments you might miss if you weren't looking for them.

So I've been looking for them.

Past trips have taken me to the Empire Hole between Oolitic and Needmore, where, if you took the Empire State Building apart and laid it back in, block by block, you could fill the hole back up to ground level. The edges of the great hole are lined with trees, and the walls stairstep starkly down to the green water that's filled most of the yawning opening in the intervening decades since the rock was cut out. All the old quarries have similarly been converted by time and rainfall to overgrown swimming pools, deserted except for the birds and weeds, and everywhere, everywhere, stacks of extra or rejected stone piled up like so many giant babies' building blocks.

Generations of men spent their lives in the quarries working the stone. When they died they were buried in shallow graves right on top of it, with a limestone monument placed above them, sandwiched for the rest of forever between layers of gray stone. The past trips also led me through tiny Oolitic, with its limestone statue of Joe Palooka downtown, to Bedford, the seat of Lawrence County and the absolute center of the Indiana quarrying industry now. Specifically, I went to the cemetery in the middle of town to see its amazing hand-carved gravestones from the late 1800s and early 1900s, when the cutters were honored with monuments of limestone rather than the modern granite, obelisks and tablets but also lifelike tree trunks covered with carved vines and ferns so detailed as to be identifiable to species. Doves perched on bouquets of stone flowers. A full-sized golfer standing with his bag of clubs. A carver's workbench covered with tools, all preserved in stone by the man's grieving workmates, a stone snapshot of his bench on the day he died.

Those were past trips. This time around I was with a bigger group that had been promised a geode hunt, but the flooded creeks and my inability to remember exactly where we found the good ones a long time ago made that a bust. We still made it to a Limestone Country landmark I hadn't found before, Hopkins Cemetery, a tiny burying ground perched on a peninsula of unstripped land surrounded on three sides by steep quarry walls, south of Needmore, where old Indiana 37 has been chopped in half by a quarry, directly north of the Empire Hole. Graves at the northern edge have begun tumbling over the side.

It's still an active cemetery, but it's old. We walked around quietly looking at the stones. It didn't take long to notice that a lot of families lost a lot of kids at very young ages, or that even this small community had stark disparities in wealth. (if you'd like to see details, all images can be embiggened with a click)






















A finely worked scroll and a verse for Joseph Massey.


















A lamb for Zella.























A bouquet and an unconscious dove for Hershel.























An obelisk for a newborn.

But this one is the one that got me, a simple uneven tablet that was carved with an unpracticed but loving hand, for Kenneth Dale Moffatt, dead at nine. Click to enlarge the photo and you can make out, in the upper right, "Asleep in Jesus," with the J carved backwards, the dates of the boy's too-short life awkwardly squeezed at the bottom under his name, and in the top left corner, in what my stupid sentimental mother's heart sees as a gesture of love and hope, and perhaps a memory of happier times, a sun rendered like a child's drawing.

A stone for Kenneth Moffatt.

It wasn't sadness that quieted our steps as we wended through the gravestones raised by the families of the rich and the poor so long ago so much as the contemplation you can't escape when you come to a place like this. Must've been a hell of a life, my brother said softly as he examined the row of stones set by a family that had lost five children before the age of two. So many kids, so many women dying young, so many men who barely made it past fifty before silicosis or blocks unexpectedly breaking free of their lines caught up with them. But they kept on. And they poured their regard for each other into the stone they carved to set up in memory.

Many of the inscriptions have been rendered unreadable now by decades of rain and wind; limestone's softness makes it excellent for carving but not so great when it comes to permanent memorials. But it's that failing that makes it the best medium, I suppose, for carving out initials to mark peoples' brief stay here, the eyeblink of their lives above the stone. The grass gets mowed and the weeds get pulled and flowers get left even as the names fade from the faces of the monuments, toppled obelisks are carefully propped back up, and the graves sliding out of the north end of the cemetery are, I hope, occasionally grabbed back from the precipice.