Lately

Dick has an intern, a rising senior majoring in anthropology at Franklin and Marshall, in PA, but a native of New Boston. She and I have been Photoshopping our eyes out, making pictures like



and



into

,

only Lauren is doing mug-shots (ha, ha) of pottery. The lab has been focussed on cataloguing the finds from the very last days of the Neville site, back in 1969.

If you read the Dincauze report, she mentions how she came to write up a site she didn't dig. A Manchester man who had recognized the value of the archaeology turning up in the construction of the Amoskeag bridge had gone to great lengths and many evenings and afternoons to record as much as he and his companions could. Then he found out he had an incurable disease and turned it over to her. I am used to working with the dead, but usually the people who made the artifacts have been gone a very long time and if they have names, they are distant enough to me I don't feel the loss. For some reason I got very sad reading the introduction. I can't figure if it really helped to put his initials (PEM) into the grand unified SCR*P initial list, but there's some kind of commonality in having his initials and mine and everyone else cataloguing show up on cards together.


Earlier this month, Dick and a couple of volunteers met with a policeman and a state Medical Examiner and his intern to check out a grave-robbing. Ann P was walking her dog and found a heap of earth toward the back of a small family cemetery, just before Halloween. We had to wait from last fall to the spring for both the ME and the weather to permit, and went to see, if nothing else, whether fragments the robbers had overlooked might allow more complete remains to be identified (and if someone were caught with them, so they could be specifically charged. At the very least, digging without authorization in a cemetery is a class B felony, whether you disturb anything or not). We gridded out the area around the grave and sifted as much as we could of the back-dirt.



Then we extracted the live toad and a bunch of dead leaves from the hole. As it happened, the 19th-century gravediggers were more assiduous than the vandal. The ME's intern (carefully supervised by about 6 other people) dug out the loose soil. Dick pointed out soil-scientific ways we could tell this was recent disturbance: fresh pine cones and upside-down clay-capped pebbles. After a few buckets, the intern hit more compacted soil, probably the backfill from the original grave. We were reasonably certain the roots and the weather (and possibly the creepiness of the activity) deterred the malefactor. It was an usual occasion when finding nothing was the happiest conclusion. We filled the pit back in and left the lady undisturbed.