Archaeology of Death, Part II

It was a wickedly cold day, the day I stood next to the landowner, a short, blunt woman in her 60s, and her tall narrow son, a physicist at the university, and watched the dowser at work.

The project was for a proposed highway construction, one that will turn an overly semitrailer-laden two lane road into a divided four lane highway, so the trucks may go faster still. The road is an old one, by local standards; originally laid out in the 1830s by the military, it followed an old Indian trail through the uplands above the Mississippi river and its tributaries. Partly because of its age, the road has developed a mythology all its own. The people who live along its length today are fourth and fifth generations descended from the first Euro-Americans who settled there when it was still a frontier. The people still tell stories of one-room cabins and terrible winters, cholera epidemics and political scandals, underground railroad escapes and the tar-and-feathering of horse thieves and claim jumpers, all grown wilder with time.

In this case, the story concerned a long-forgotten cemetery. It’s a story you hear a lot, working as an archaeologist in the American middle west. "When I was a girl," the landowner said to me on the phone, "my grandmother told me that there were two little children buried in the front yard of our house, next to the road and under that old pine tree. Nobody knows the names of the children, because their parents were squatters."

Squatters, in the language of the settler-descendants, were people who stayed briefly in an area without a legal claim. There are no records pertaining to squatters, their names appear in no county histories; but they are nameless and rife in the oral histories of the settler-descendants. Even among the early permanent residents, epidemics were… epidemic. The rate of infant mortality in 19th century US was very high, with causes of death listed as diarrhea, flu, ague, ‘the fever,’ measles. It was at least ten or twelve years after initial European settlement before formal cemeteries were introduced, and before that it was quite common for people to bury their loved ones on the "back forty" of farming homesteads. And so it was that, after a couple of months of fruitless rounds of interviews and searches of the historical record, I could find no proof that such a burying ground did or did not exist along the Military Road. But this road would pass right over the farmstead, and two separate individuals had told me the story, although the original source--the long-dead grandmother--was the same.

There are several ways archaeologists look for subsurface disturbances within an area; soil resistivity, ground penetrating radar, magnetometer survey; even, if the disturbance is close enough to the surface, changes in vegetation. But, no matter what the GIS folks tell you, the only sure way to tell if there are historic burials in an area, or not, is to strip off the top foot or so of soil and look for grave shafts. Nature, left alone, creates a pristine layer cake of soil textures and colors. In the short grass upland prairies of the mid-country, the top foot or so of earth is often a brown-black loamy soil, created by the deaths of grasses and other plants; abruptly below that is a yellow silty soil which extends another few feet or so downward. Digging a hole 6 x 2 ft by 4 ft deep into the earth interrupts this layer cake, and the soil, once so neatly separated, becomes mixed and blotchy when it is filled back in. Grave shafts are thus recognizable as rectangular blotchy areas in an otherwise smooth yellow soil layer.

On a rainy October morning, we gathered at the now-abandoned farmstead, me and my crew and the landowner and her son. The dowser was a local politician, who had heard of the project and offered his services, unrefusably, to us. He arrived late in the morning, after the bulldozing had begun, dressed in (I’m not making this up) an old-fashioned top hat and a black cape with a red satin lining. He’d been performing a magic show at the local middle school, he explained. He handed his hat to me, and swirled his cape into the arms of the landowner. The physicist just smiled.

The dowser quickly dismissed the area around the stump of the pine tree, reported by the landowner as having been the burial site. We’d already scraped it down and found nothing; he said we’d wasted our time. Authoritatively he walked to the north end of the house. "Here," he said, gently. "Here’s where I found them." He’d been at the site in the previous week, so he said, and used his ‘rods’ all over the farmstead. He reached into his bag and pulled out two ornately carved wooden dowels, and inserted two wires into the slots open for them at the ends. Striding over an area of about 20 feet square, he annotated the swings of the rods for us.

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