Murder for the Ph.D.

I like a good breeze, if you turn into it, it’ll keep all the bugs from around your face.  It pushes your hair back and, if it’s cool enough, it’ll make you feel clean – kind of.  One reminder that I hadn’t showered in a week and a half was my hair blowing in clumps because the dirt and wind had weaved it into something similar to a nomadic Indian throw rug.  I looked up to the bluffs where I’d never dig and then down to the tarp-covered pits the crew had dug.  Rain tonight.  As I headed to my tent, the wind carried the sounds of my drunk crew.  I was too tired to join them.  God, it would feel so good to get in that cot.  The wind came up again and blew my pants like a wind sock at the airport.  They were crinkly with dry sweat and dust.
I layed down on my cot and picked up my book on the Davenport Conspiracy.  Before I started reading I set my travel alarm just in case.  A week left at the site and we had only found 14 projectile points and some Weaver sherds.  We had been camping here for five weeks and were running out of grant money.  The students grumbled during the day but at night me and Dr. Genertrek shut ‘em up with beer.  Actually, they were a lot louder but their distraction let us work on the recording of the meager finds.  The professor hadn’t talked much these last two weeks.  She had sworn up and down to the department that this was a mastodon kill site and we could prove it.  It didn’t matter to her that no one had found anything in this state before, or that our neighbor state Illinois seemed to grow kill sites like dandelions.  She wanted to dig here.  She must have been pretty convincing because she got the funding and Lucas had to teach summer sections of freshman-level classes.  This was the first time she had received funding over Lucas, the chair of the department, and if we didn’t get anything good, her reputation in the region would be legendary – for a phony.  Oh and one other small matter, she’s up for tenure.
Early Saturday morning I took pity on a couple of hung over undergrads and sent them about 40 yards out for a surface survey.  At about 9:30 they came back and asked if they could do a test hole.  “Sure, go for it,” I told them.  I thought they were just going to take a nap and why not?  I couldn’t, they might as well.
At 10:30 the prof took the Jeep and went into town to pick up mail and a few supplies.  She’d have them sent back because she had to go to a big deal fundraiser at her alma mater.
At noon the test pit crew started yelling and dancing.  I thought, “Oh lord, they probably think they’ve found something.”  One mistake a lot of amateur archaeologists and students make that gets everyone all riled and excited is mistaking animal remains for human.  Actually, pig teeth do look a lot like human teeth, how’s that for irony?  I went to my tent and got my Marshall Town trowel.  At least I wanted to look the part of a real archaeologist.  I walked slowly and felt every muscle stretch and pull as I moved.  Even though I had slept well, my body was tired.  You can never really get rested up on a dig.  Only by sleeping in a bed with crisp sheets and showering every day for a week can you feel good again, so that your skin stops crawling in the night and you don’t have to decide whether it’s the dirt sloughing off or a bug crawling up. 
When I got to the semicircle of students they stopped chattering.  They were smiling at me as if I’d just told them that having sex wasn’t a sin.  “Jesus, look at you.  All right, what ‘cha find?”  I said as I looked down into the pit.  Myheart gave a big whollap.  It took me another second or two before I could move again.  I knelt down in the damp dirt and very slowly moved my hands toward the unearthed artifact.  I didn’t breathe until my hand lay on the protruding ball joint of a mastodon femur.  My God, my God!  Genertrek is saved.  I thought about what her face would look like when I phoned her.  I dreamed that she would fly home, even though I knew she couldn’t.  Maybe she could somehow influence the other professors so I wouldn’t have to defend my dissertation.  During this little vacation to tangent land my mind frequently takes, I had been brushing away the dirt with a paint brush.  I stopped.  Why was this femur so close to the top?  This wasn’t a plow zone – what the hell was it doing so close to the top?  I stood up.  “It’s a plant,” I said.
“What?” said Linda and her smiling face shattered, the pieces rearranging themselves into a frown of grievous proportions.  She was beginning grad school in the fall and was our crew supervisor. 
“Well, it’s either a plant or the hand of God plucked it up from 10 meters below where it should be.”  I was trying to remain calm but a lump had formed in my throat and as I looked at the faces of my crew another thought occurred to me.  In my mind I saw Linda putting the femur in the ground.  She had access to the lab.  No, she wouldn’t do it.  After all she nearly cried when those sherds were lost. 
“Well, dig it out, poke around some more and bring me whatever’s left okay?  Don’t worry about context, someone’s already fucked with it.  I’ll be in the tent.”
They knew I was pissed and I didn’t care.  This was more than a “how I spent my summer vacation” story to me and Genertrek.  This was our reputation.  As I walked away I heard someone say “it’s not like we put it here.”
I sat reading my book and it seemed I felt a little more for Gass than I had before.  During the 19th century when amateur archaeology was very popular, a fraud was perpetrated by planting fake prehistoric effigy pipes and tablets on the Cook farm.  It was one of the best frauds ever perpetrated on the scientific community and it happened right here.  I heard them coming, Jen was saying, “Be careful Linda, don’t walk so fast,” and someone else was shushing her.  I yawned and wiped half my face with my dry, rough hand, put down the book and yelled “Come in,” before they could say my name.  They brought in the femur and placed it on my cot.  “Pick it up and shake it,” Jen said.  I wasn’t in the mood for any games.  “What the hell’s going on now?”  Linda’s eyes, which tended to bulge, mimicked a character from the Muppets.  I was so tired that I almost let the laughter sneeze out.
She said, “There’s something inside.  I looked and I think I know what it is but I didn’t take it out.  I was hoping you’d want to.”
I shook it around a bit trying to free the rattling contents out.  “Okay, give me my pinchers from over on that crate there.”  Linda handled the oversize tweezers with such care you’d think we were operating on a living thing.
It took me a while but I finally grabbed the thing and pulled it out and onto the bed.  Jen was the first to say anything.  “Gawd, is it?”
“Jesus,” I said, “no doubt about it.”
“What do’ya’ think?” whispered Linda biting into her lower lip.
“Yep, the reburial act.  If this is a Native American baby jaw, we might as well pack up.  This stuff could stall us for months.”
“What’ll we do?” asked Linda.  Of everyone on the dig, she probably understood just what this might mean to the careers of Genertrek and me.  This would mean a job transition and not just to a museum gig.  Anyone guilty of this amounted to a grave robber in most other professionals’ eyes.  We’d probably have to switch to armchair studies like history in the best case scenario.
“But just in case, I’ll have Stan at the lab take a look at it.  Linda, get the crew to work on the regular stuff, don’t say anything about this and keep everyone away from that test hole.”
Goddamnsonofabitch, I thought.  But it didn’t work, the tears still came.  This could destroy us.  If this was a burial, the Native American Repatriation Act would have been violated, by us.  As trained, professional archaeologists we would be expected to have done our homework and not violate the place that in all likelihood could have been a sacred site.  We would be hard pressed to prove our innocence.  We would face fines and possibly jail time let alone public ridicule.  How in the hell had this happened.  I tried to recall the mountain of evidence Genertrek had so enthusiastically gone over with me the night before her pitch to the department for funding.  If there were holes in her arguments, why would they let her go?  I took a cloth, wet it from my water bottle and tried to clean my face.  No use crying yet.  I had the car ride to town to pretend nothing happened.  At least I could get a shower when I got there.
I hopped into the crew van and headed out.  The bones rattled a bit but soon settled into the motion of the van.

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I took the bones to Stan, a forensic osteoarchaeologist in Des Moines.  He worked for the state pathologist’s office but loved archaeology.  He’d often do freebies for us if he wasn’t too busy-which he never was.  He had the results for me by the next day.
I stood in his lab as he retrieved the remains that were now washed clean.  Stan’s lab wasn’t like what you’d expect.  Of course it was clean, but there were no vials or bottles containing anything gruesome.  In fact, it looked like they had just moved in and were awaiting the arrival of corpses and pieces of people.  Of course maybe this was just their VIP room and behind curtain number three was the real center of operations.
“Well Stan, what’s up?”
“It’s definitely Native American, see the scooping on the back of the teeth?” he said picking up an incisor.  “Europeans don’t have that, nope.  Just Native Americans and Inuit and some Asians.  You say you found this inside a femur?”
“Yep, a mastodon femur.”
“Shit, that’s weird.  I’ve never heard of burials like that.  Didn’t they used to use scaffolds?”
“Hell, yes.  Why do ya’ think I drove into town so fast?”
“Because you were hoping I would tell you it was a Caucasian so you wouldn’t get in trouble?”  Direct as always. 
He sat at the table, fingering the jaw and part of the skull he had pulled out of the femur.  He picked up the femur.
“This is weird, look, see?  The femur is scraped up but the markings correspond to the cutting implements used then.  See all these rodent marks all over it?  It was probably buried near a rodent home or something.  Now look at the hole in the femur where the baby bones were inserted.  That’s certainly big enough for a rodent but,” he picked up the jaw, “See?  No chewing on this bone.  Why? This is too weird.  When are you gonna’ be in town again?”
“Next Tuesday.”
“Okay, I’m sending these over to Bill in the coroner’s office.”
“What!”
“Take it easy, we attended some conference the FBI put on together a few years back.  He’s the best bones guy in the state.  I just want to see what he thinks about it.  I’ll have him give you a call on your machine if anything turns up okay?”  He patted me on the back and said, “Have you made the calls yet?”
“Oh god!  No.  Damn it.”  As part of the reburials act if any human remains are found that could be of Native American origin, the archaeologist is supposed to stop work and call both the state archaeologist and the Indian Affairs chairperson at the same time.  Next to impossible?  Yes, but it’s the only agreement that could be reached.  When American archaeology was young, just about 100 years ago, so much Native American culture and history was lost that the government could never hope atone for, let alone the damage done to the living Native Americans over the life of our country.
“Listen, you call Joe at the OSA and I’ll call Mary Blackbear.”
I practically ran to the phone, luckily Joe was in.  After I told him everything he said, “And you didn’t find anything else right?”
“Yep, and Stan’s getting a second opinion.”
“Okay, I’ll try to head this off so you won’t get in too much trouble.  You’ve only got one more week at the site don’t you?  Well, you might as well pack it up and send the crew home, there’s no way we’ll straighten this out in a week.”
It was Wednesday and I was lying on my bed, watching the breeze twist a cobweb in the ceiling corner.  I hadn’t checked my messages or answered the phone.  I needed time to adjust to normal life before I dealt with this bullshit.  I hadn’t even called Genertrek.  How could I tell her we finally found a mastodon but now couldn’t go near the spot where we found it?  Finally accepting my fate, I rose, crossed the room to my desk and I pushed the flashing button and waited.  There were the usual beseechments to call 800 numbers, probably the late bills, and two hang ups.  Then I heard, “Ah, Susan, um.  This is, ah, Stan’s friend Bill from the coroner’s office?  Yeah, I ah, think you better call me as soon as you get back okay?  I really think you should call me.”
I picked up the phone and called the coroner’s office, it was after five so I didn’t think anyone would be there.
“Hello, Coroner’s Office.”
“Hi, this is Susan Fortin, can I please speak to…” God I must sound stupid-I didn’t even know his last name. “Bill?”
“Yeah, this is me.  Listen, this kid you brought me, I got to tell you something.”
“Well, go ahead.”
“Okay, well, she’s not very old.”
“I know, she looked about two or three-years-old.”
“Yeah, yeah, but what I mean is um, she was born in this century.”
I was a bit confused, a baby born in this century in a mastodon femur?  It didn’t make any sense.  “When in this century?”
“I’d say about nine years ago.”