People of the Nightland (North America's Forgotten Past) (2 page)

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Authors: W. Michael Gear,Kathleen O'Neal Gear

BOOK: People of the Nightland (North America's Forgotten Past)
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T
he site covered a low, rocky hillock overlooking a white frame farmhouse with accompanying silo. Puffy white clouds rose in the Canadian sky.
Two vehicles, a defiant red Dodge 2500 and a white Chevrolet Suburban, were parked beside the white canvas awning that sheltered tables, racks of paper sacks, boxes of ziplocks, and several plastic coolers.
The hilltop had been covered with a grid of yellow strings tied to one-by-two stakes driven into the rocky ground. Little squares had been dug past the black root zone and into rocky soil. In these, young people dressed in T-shirts and jeans shoveled, troweled, and finally screened the dirt they hauled up in buckets.
The door on the Dodge pickup was open, the radio talk show chattering on mindlessly about global warming.
Global warming,
Dr. Maureen Cole thought as she stood up and stretched her tired back. For a student of prehistory, it was nothing new.
She studied the jumbled scatter of human bones revealed in the excavation unit at her feet. Six skulls—four male, two female—between the ages of twelve and thirty lay in pieces across the pit floor. Fragments of two femora, one articulated to a tibia, or shinbone, were
mixed in with the skulls. Part of a shattered pelvis was partially uncovered from its bed of sandy gravel.
The eerie thing was that the bone was battered, showing signs of severe blunt-force trauma. She would have to take specimens back to the lab to be sure, but to her practiced eye, the injuries appeared to have been incurred perimortally—or at the time of death—when the bone was still “green” or living.
As one of the world’s leading forensic anthropologists, she had spent her professional career identifying the dead and determining the cause of death.
To Maureen, the remains at her feet reminded her of victims recovered from a crashed airplane. But, not having airplanes, how did prehistoric peoples wind up looking like this?
Part of what she suspected was a human humerus, or arm bone, was sticking up like a stake, its shaft broken and splintered.
Her mind knotted on the problem, she pulled the canteen from her belt and took a long drink of water. Though she was thirty-nine, today she felt twenty. The excitement of the rare archaeological find, and the constant adrenaline high that accompanied it, had been keeping her awake for five nights straight. If they kept uncovering more and more bones, by the end of the week, she’d be stumbling around the excavation, ready to fall flat on her face.
She used her sleeve to mop sweat from her tanned brow. Tall for a woman, she had traditional Iroquoian features. Her mother, a full-blooded Seneca, had given her wide cheekbones, dark eyes, and long jet-black hair. The firm chin and straight nose came from her father. She wore a tan pair of chinos and a pale yellow T-shirt splotched with dirt. Moccasins, handmade in the American Southwest, clad her feet. She had discovered that in her work as a physical anthropologist the soft leather did less damage to the fragile archaeological sites she was called in to examine.
Maureen heaved a sigh and looked around at the ten excavation units filled with archaeologists. A soft murmur filled the air. Every voice held a reverence, as though they were excavating an ancient church, rather than a massive bone bed of partially disarticulated human skeletons.
She started walking around the site perimeter, looking into each unit to see what had been revealed in the past two hours while she’d been excavating the skulls.
A cool breeze blew through the forest, fluttering the tree leaves and lessening the July heat. She studied the nearby maple, ash, red cedar, and sumac as she walked. The many shades of green looked magical against the cloud-strewn blue sky.
As she approached the ramada they’d set up as a workstation—the place where people labeled and sorted the bags that held bones, artifacts, pollen, and charcoal samples—she saw Dusty Stewart break away from a conversation he’d been having with Jim Miller, the geomorphologist, and hurry toward her.
Tall and blond, with broad shoulders and blue eyes, he had one of those perfect male faces that drew women’s gazes from half a block away. But only when he was clean—which he certainly wasn’t today. Streaks of dirt and sweat stains mottled his white T-shirt emblazoned with the words, “Eat More Buffalo! Fifty Million Indians Can’t Be Wrong!” Blue-tinted sunglasses rode low on his nose.
He strode up to her and blurted, “We just got back the first radiocarbon dates.”
Almost breathless, she said, “And?”
A faint smile curled his lips. It must be good. He hesitated just long enough to madden her, before he said, “Eleven thousand two hundred radiocarbon years, plus or minus three hundred.”
“My God,” she whispered, “that means … around thirteen thousand actual years after calibration. Dusty, we’re excavating a thirteen-
thousand
-year-old site!”
Most people thought that radiocarbon years—that is, the carbon 14 dates—gave an accurate age for a site. But that wasn’t entirely true. Since the amount of carbon 14 that reached the Earth had varied over time, all such dates had to be calibrated, or adjusted to ascertain the actual number of calendar years. So, if the C 14 date came back at around 10,000 years before present, the real age of the site was around 11,700 years. If it came back at 11,000 C 14 years before present, the site was, in reality, around 13,000 years old.
He nodded, let out a breath, and turned serious eyes on her. “Yeah, interesting, huh?” He scanned the blue shimmering expanse of the Ottawa River to the north. Birds circled over the water’s surface.
She gave him her narrow-eyed disdainful glare. “That has to be the understatement of the year. We’ve uncovered at least twenty-two bodies—so far—and you call it ‘interesting’? This is the largest and oldest Paleo burial ground ever found and you—”
“Don’t say ‘burial ground.’” He waved a dirty finger at her. “We don’t have any evidence to suggest these people were buried. I’ve excavated a lot of burials. These don’t look right.”
“How’s that?”
“The bones are too random.”
“Maybe they were processed that way for mortuary reasons?”
He made a face. “Like for secondary bundle burials? There would be cut marks on the bones where the tendons and sinew were severed. And the long bones we’ve found so far all have lateral and greenstick fractures, like they were snapped and crushed.”
“Airplane crash,” she muttered under her breath.
Dusty gave her a disgusted look. “Back to why it’s not a burial: When you look at the soils around the bone, there’s no change in coloration or texture. Burials are generally intrusive. That means you disturb the dirt when you dig a hole, drop in a body, and backfill it.”
“Maybe they were just left on the surface?”
He grinned. “You need to spend more time with a trowel, lady.” He pointed at a fragment of human rib sticking up from the closest pit. “Burials are orderly affairs. Bodies are laid out with prescribed ritual behaviors. The bone we’ve found so far is oriented every which way. Up, down, there’s no method to it. This just looks … well, random.”
Maureen blinked. “But artifacts surround the remains. Surely they’re grave goods.”
Dusty thoughtfully smoothed his blond beard with his hand. “I don’t think so.”
“Okay. Enlighten me.”
“In burials, people tend to keep the same bones with the individual.”
“You don’t know much about Iroquoian culture do you? We have a rather spectacular ceremonial called the Feast of the Dead.”
“And you’re saying … ?”
She folded her arms and scowled at him. He was an American archaeologist who worked primarily in the Four Corners region of Colorado, Utah, New Mexico, and Arizona. There was no reason he ought to have heard of the Feast of the Dead. It’s just that she always expected more of him than she did other archaeologists—most of whom knew a great deal about tiny bits of 10,000-year-old fire-cracked rock, and next to nothing about historical aboriginal cultures.
“All right, listen,” she explained. “The Feast of the Dead was by far the most important ceremony for the Huron tribe. At the feast, the
bodies of all those who had not died violent deaths were removed from temporary raised tombs and interred in a common grave. The mingling of the bones was believed to release the souls of the dead and allow them to travel westward to the Village of Souls. Basically, Feast of the Dead graves are big bone pits.” She extended a hand to their site.
Dusty kept his gaze fixed on her face. “Any evidence of it being practiced prehistorically?”
“Absolutely. At the Fairty ossuary near the Robb site just outside of Toronto, there were five hundred bodies and they …” Her voice faded.
He cocked his head, a blond eyebrow rising in amusement. “Have a problem with that, do you?”
“I just remembered that there were almost no artifacts found at the Fairty ossuary. Just one stone scraper and one shell bead, if I recall correctly. Offerings really aren’t found in Iroquoian burials until the historic period.”
“You lab rats are all alike. If the Huron did it historically, of course it had to be the same thirteen
thousand
years ago. Maureen, we’re talking about the end of the Pleistocene! You talk about global warming? Wow! Look around. Everything you see was different. This was the edge of the ice … or close to it. These people we’re uncovering were hunter-gatherers, not sedentary corn farmers like the Huron. That’s like comparing squash and kiwis.”
She gave him the disdainful glare again. It was an old competition between them: his expertise and hers.
He frowned out at the site. “Come here. Let me show you something we just uncovered. Maybe you can make sense of it.”
She followed him through the patchwork of excavation units to a two-by-two-meter unit and crouched on the lip next to Dusty.
“Hey, guys,” Dusty said to the archaeologists, students from McGill University, “why don’t you take a break. Maureen and I have some serious confabbing to do.”
“Oh, jeez, do we have to?” Brandon O’Neal, an olive-skinned youth with brown hair said. He’d proven to be especially talented at excavation, wielding the trowel like a surgeon’s scalpel. Someday, if he stuck with it, he’d make a great archaeologist.
“Yeah,” Dusty ordered, “I don’t want you to hear Maureen correcting me. Get out of here.”
Brandon grinned. He and his friend, Richard, climbed out of the
pit and headed for the ramada, where ice chests filled with cold drinks sat in the shade.
Dusty pointed. “Do you see the sediment in the northern half of the unit? That’s what we call an unsorted deposit.”
Maureen nodded. “When water moves it carries different-sized sand, grit, and stone, based on the hydraulic carrying capacity.”
“Right. As the water slows, the heaviest pieces fall out. Floods move boulders; slow-moving water only carries fine silt and clay.”
“So, this is a river channel?” She looked around. “Up here on this high spot?”
“Nope. I said this is
unsorted.
Rocks, gravels, and sands are all mixed up. Just like these battered bones. Jim Miller, the geomorphologist, arrived this morning. He said that around 11,000 BC this was the edge of the Laurentide Ice Sheet. It ran right through our site.” He pointed at the low hills. “All of this was terminal moraine.You see those giant boulders over by the trees?”
She turned her eyes to huge rounded rocks surrounded by sumac.
“Those,” Dusty told her, “were dropped by the ice. The rest of the deposit here is mixed, the soil overlying it was formed over the last thirteen thousand years as weather and plants broke down the rock.”
She studied the jumble of sand and gravel. The rounded side of a boulder stuck out of the far corner of the unit. “I don’t get it. That means our people were living practically on top of the ice.”
He pulled his sunglasses down and stared at her over the rims. “Or maybe
in
the ice.”
“What are you talking about?”
He made an airy gesture with his hand. “Well, historically, arctic and subarctic peoples used whatever natural shelter they could find. Keep in mind, thirteen thousand years ago, one lobe of the Champlain Sea came all the way inland to about where Ottawa sits today.” He pointed to the east. “Another lobe ran across what is now Lake Ontario all the way to Hamilton, and still a third lobe of the sea ran down to the south of Burlington, Vermont. If you—”

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