Archaeology of Death: Encounter with a Dowser

"There are four of them here––the whole family," he said. "Here are the two parents, see? Here’s the father… and the mother… and here are two children, smaller graves, can you see it?" And indeed the wires swung wide and then crossed and swung wide again. The landowner leaned over me and said to her son, "Should I tell him about the garage?" The physicist rolled his eyes. "I don’t think he’d hear you, Mom."

The bulldozer operator looked at me expectantly; I shrugged my shoulders and flapped my hand in the direction indicated by the dowser. As the operator began, the dowser took his hat back from me.

"Sorry, must run, I’m due back at city hall," he said. He pulled his cape over his shoulders. I thanked him as politely as I could, and he left.

The bulldozer jerked forward and back, stripping off layer by layer until a foot and half of soil was removed from the surface. And there, exposed in the grey afternoon, was… the brick and cement foundation walls of a garage, certainly built in the mid-twentieth century or later. The cement was confined to the edges, and when we lifted the brick floor we found the pure yellow loess of untouched prairie soils. No amount of digging there or anywhere on the farmstead that afternoon was to reveal any human burials, in fact, we found nothing else at all.

At the end of the day, as the bulldozer headed his vehicle out into the late afternoon traffic, infuriating the semitrailer drivers, the landowner walked to the big old pine tree stump in the front yard, right on the brink of a drainage ditch. I followed and heard her say, "But Grandmother was so sure." I pointed to the road and said, "She could have been right. The road is already far wider than it was in the 1850s, and I can assure you there were no ditches."

"Yes," she said, slowly and regretfully. "I remember when they dug those ditches back in the 1960s. I didn't even think about it then."

There’s not a lot that’s certain in archaeology. Twenty years ago when I first started in archaeology, I wanted a little voice to whisper in my ear the "truth" about a site—any site—I was working on. Even if the voice only said, "Yes, Kris, you’re on the right track," or "No, you goof, this is an Archaic site." Or, like a character in a science fiction story, that I could psychically absorb information about the potter from an old potsherd. Or that somebody would wave his magic wand and say, "Here! Here’s where they’re buried."

One thing I’ve learned: There are no magic wands. You have to do archaeology the hard way, you have to do the best you can and sometimes—more often than we’d like to admit—you have to say, "I don’t know."

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