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Lives in Ruins, Marilyn Johnson

Note: I received an e-galley of this book from the publisher, via Edelweiss, for publicity purposes.

Remember before when I said that academics had sometimes made my life difficult in the past? And that it prevented me from enjoying Dear Committtee Members, or even giving it its due? Well, the group of academics who never made my life difficult was archaeologists, and the opposite force was at work while I read Lives in Ruins, the newest book by the author who immersed us in the world of librarians in This Book Is Overdue! and obituarists in The Dead Beat. Archaeology, as I frequently tell people, boasts as a rule the sweetest, most helpful, least egotistical scholars of any discipline I’ve ever encountered.

While admitting that I bring a bias to the reading of a book about archaeologists, I believe that Lives in Ruins makes a marvelous case for why we should all love archaeologists and bring them cookies. It’s because they started digging up artifacts when they were six years old. It’s because they fight like demons to be given the opportunity to perform an obvious public good, the preservation of humanity’s history. It’s because they work for pennies; it’s because they don’t resent but kind of love Indiana Jones; it’s because they organize protests and petitions to save pieces of land that don’t and never will belong to them.

If the foregoing paragraph sounds slightly hagiographic, it’s because Marilyn Johnson’s book takes an idealistic and affectionate view of the profession she studies. In part she’s making a virtue of necessity: presumably, the archaeologists who are nice would be inclined to permit her to meet them and tag along on their excavations and ask them a million questions, and the archaeologists who are mean would be inclined to ignore her emails and get on with taking credit for their interns’ work and writing scathing articles about those idiots who ever believed in Homo heidelbergensis.* But if you’re hoping for some critique of the job and its practitioners (criticism of colonialism and its early and continuing influence on the practice of cultural resource management, for instance), look elsewhere: Johnson’s criticisms of her subjects are few, and gentle. Her admiration for them shines through.

Fine by me! I already liked archaeologists anyway, and confirmation bias means I’m more likely to believe what Marilyn Johnson says than some writer who thinks archaeologists are jerks. And Johnson has a good helping of praise to heap on the folks she spends time with:

What was archaeology to him? It was the opposite of killing things. It was trying to will life back into stuff that had been forgotten and buried for thousands or millions of years. It was not about shards and pieces of bone or treasure; it was about kneeling down in the elements, paying very close attention and trying to locate a spark of the human life that had once touched the spot there.

Readers on the prowl for information about the day-to-day lives of the archaeologists you picture when someone says “archaeologists” — the ones who go out on digs that require them to spend weeks in the desert scraping dirt out of two-foot-wide square holes —  will be delighted with this book. (I thought I was in this category.) Readers who never knew there were so many different ways of being an archaeologist — those struggling to get funding to conduct digs on underwater sites that are rich sources of knowledge but are not sexy to the viewing audience; those who work with the military to protect important sites during conflicts around the world; those who contract with governments and corporations to check if it is okay to build on some tract of land or if actually that tract of land maybe used to be a War of 1812 graveyard — will be delighted with it too. (I was actually in this category.) Recommended!

And okay, okay! Since you asked! I will just tell you quickly about the archaeologists who partner with the military. In Johnson’s telling (but see above re: her not being very critical of her subjects), archaeologists went to the military and offered to tell them where not to bomb in order to avoid destroying crucial historical sites, and the military said, “THANK GOD YOU ARE HERE! Everyone gets so mad at us when we accidentally bomb crucial historical sites, but we do not really know what they look like!” And that was the beginning of a beautiful friendship in which the archaeologists say “Here are 232 places not to bomb in Libya,” and the military says, “Thank you; we will avoid those places,” and then they do.

(If you think it would be better for them not to bomb any places, I am with you. But that is not within the power of archaeologists to control; or me, either, except by voting and writing stern letters to my representatives.)

*Ha! See? I know stuff! Homo heidelbergensis was an ancestor of ours that I learned about in my anthropology class in college, and now they are saying there is NO SUCH THING. Oh well! I wasn’t that attached anyway! Whereas I’ll be well sad if Neandertals prove to be untrue. (They won’t.) (They are pretty well-established by the fossil record, or such is my understanding.) Homo heidelbergensis and St. Christopher and narwhals are all, like, out at a bar commiserating about how they never actually existed.