“Tut: Boy King or Warrior?”, “How Women Saved thePrehistoric Southwest”, “Neanderthal Homicide”, “Korean Mummies”.  These are some of the articles in “Archaeology”, the magazine that arrives at our house every two months.  I read each issue cover to cover, including the ads and notices for digs and expeditions, dreaming of the past.  The famous sites:  Egypt of the Pharaohs, Incan Peru, Mayan Mexico, Chinese and Indian empires, bustling Rome; and places I’d never heard of before, like Kush in Africa with its lost gold, or the former estate in New Jersey owned by Napoleon Bonaparte’s brother, Joseph. It’s a matter of constantly shifting perspectives about humans and their history.  Each discovery and its interpretation reveals ways that humans have lived on this planet. Art, forensics, stories of individuals and groups, unraveling of mysteries, who can resist?

I am not alone in this zeal for the past. There are plenty of amateur archaeologists, and programs of study, both for enrolled students or paying participants.  Digs in places all over the world: hot, arid deserts or humid, bug-infested jungles or high, remote mountains. I noticed pretty early on that many of them were in distant, sometimes abandoned places without too many of the creature comforts nearby.  Maybe those places declined for a reason, and maybe climate change was part of it. 

On the other hand, there are places closer to home, excavations in places not normally thought of as rich in archeological history. These include prehistoric sites in the mid-west, home of the Mound Builders, whose architectural and sacred landscapes were razed or built around with little notice during American expansion. Or, on the coastline, searches for pirates’ lairs and treasures.  In the middle of Missouri, a researcher is digging the scorched earth site of an entire town destroyed during the Civil War.

Right here in New England, an organization called NEARA investigates rock formations and stone chambers that were previously thought to be byproducts of colonial farmers clearing their land or marking property.  While this may be true in part, some NEARA members think these formations mark sacred and astronomical sites of the prehistoric Native Americans.  Having grown up wandering the woods in rural Connecticut, I know those rocks well, and have wondered about them.  According to some NEARA research, and a book called Manitou written by Mavor and Dix, these places were overlooked by archaeologists because of their lack of bones or tools or other evidence of human habitation.  Instead, they say, these are solar observatories, marking solstices and other seasonal events, or even places set apart for vision quests, deliberately away from human habitation.  So, in a flash, old stones may be interpreted quite differently, and the whole world I inhabit daily is another place.Others, however, would beg to differ, such as traditional archeologists who consider these observations to be mere pseudo archeology.

There’s the rub, why I won’t be sending in my application for a Ph.D. in Archeology anytime soon. Because archeologists are so territorial; they fight, too much, and in ugly ways.  The underbelly of this enterprise, looking for the truth, is that people who spend so much time proving theories that cannot ever be absolutely proved have a lot at stake –their life’s work.  Faithful reader that I am, I’ve become aware of some of the heated controversies in the world of archeology, and the ways that some researchers will put down or undermine others, if their theories conflict.  The origins of the Anasazi, whether the script of the Indus Valley is a written language, whether or not the Norsemen or other Europeans discovered America before Columbus.  Funny thing, long ago when I was reading Joe Hillerman’s Navaho mysteries, I thought some of his "pot hunters" were a little overblown, merely for the sake of fiction. Come to find, some of that is true.