Death Heads and Cherubs
In the late 1970s, I followed the Gringo Trail through Mexico into Guatemala and Belize. I had visited most of the major Mayan sites, including Tikal and at Pelanque had an opportunity to participate stone carving rubbings with a group of academics. I was captivated by Mayan archaeology and the unlimited potential for discovery and understanding of a lost civilization for which there was evidence throughout the vast Petén jungle – Yucatan to El Salvador. Unfortunately, the professor I hoped to study with was on sabbatical which turned out to be a good thing since we did not hit it off upon his return.
In the meantime, Dr. James Deetz and other renowned archaeologists were my undergraduate advisors. Dr. Deetz coauthored a small paperback book on the symbolic transition from Death Heads to Cherubs as seriation for dating gravemarkers, which he required for one of his classes. The symbolic evolution from Death Heads to Cherubs represents a change in attitude from dreaded death (skull with wings) to hope (a fat little cherub with wings) from the 1700s to 1800s – coinciding with the protestant Great Awakening – and still evident in New England graveyards. Death was ever present with early settlers, such that children were not named until long after they survived infancy.
While a student, I was fortunate to acquire work experience at a U.S. Forest Service research management team as a Statistical Clerk – Management Science Systems was made up of eccentric highly intelligent men and women, who were very stimulating and encouraging – until the Reagan era government downsize. I also had a semester long work study at the Lowie Museum, again under Dr. Deetz tutelage, where I worked on cataloguing pottery sherds brought back from his excavations at Flowerdew One Hundred in Virginia.
Noticing that color, tensile strength, breakage and porosity differed between sherds of varying manufacture – a simple porosity test (although unorthodox) of whether a sherd adhered to my tongue indicated differing firing temperatures and possibly composition. This gave me the idea for my undergraduate thesis. With the assistance of a famous sculptor Peter Voulkos who granted access to his kilns, various graduate students and the Lawrence Livermore Lab for spectral analysis, I created hundreds of pottery “cookies” that were alphanumerically coded by the type of clay – red crude stoneware and raku (open fire) to fine bone china (kaolin at high kiln temperatures) to provide a diagnostic understanding of melting point of various minerals at different temperatures. I worked with course clays all the way up to find china, and I did an analysis of how different kind of firing temperatures will yield different kinds of porosity, and how different kind of admixtures, like potassium or calcium or soda ash, give you different kinds of refined pottery. So I developed a way to look at the pottery and categorize it by different firing conditions and different mixtures of the clay. It was kind of like testing everything that had been done in the historic development of pottery in England. We knew the timing and the history of the pottery development, so I created an example to index the history.
When you find pottery shards in excavating units, you want to date the surrounding features based on the pottery. Once I did my work, you could compare the pottery shards to my index of the different development stages in New England and then say when the shards were made based on the nature of the pottery that they used at the time. When you break the pottery shard, it could be rough textured, or off colored yellow, or have large pores. The fine China was very white and thin, and didn’t have a lot of pores. Once you could examine the broken pottery shard, then you could use my index to date it. So I basically develop my own age dating technique. It is something that can be used today to date pottery in New England. I hoped this study would be used to date pottery remnants found at various sites, form prehistoric to historic industrial revolution improvements in kiln development for high temperatures.
Jumping through yet another window of opportunity, I began working on temporary assignments in the San Francisco Financial District and continued to work in the Bay Area on various projects, from Bank of America’s World Headquarters where I worked for an Executive Vice President to various high profile law firms some of which had corporate clients on the bad side of Environmental health claims. Black Friday stock market crash in 1987, had me once again on the move – but I continued to consult as a transcriptionist on audio tapes of interviewed suspects of some of the most heinous crimes. I’m not at liberty to going to the specifics of some of these cases due to confidentiality and the nature of the proprietary information, but I will give you some idea of the kinds of macabre things that I was typing as a transcriptionist. In terms of heinous crimes, the most gruesome had to do with murders that included dismemberment of the victims’ bodies. Decapitation was the most typical, but there were some cases where all of the limbs were severed and placed in various locations for storage ranging from freezers to automobile trunks. It was not unusual for some member of the body to turn up at the county dump – usually it was the head but occasionally other parts of the body appeared sticking up out of the trash.
In terms of environmental health claims, the types of descriptions that I had to transcribe were perhaps even more morose. Victims typically come into contact with hazardous material primarily by accident rather than on the job incident. Hazardous materials may have be stored in ponds (fenced or unguarded), stored in drums in unguarded or abandoned warehouses, or stored in illegally buried and abandoned drums, and occasionally stored in containers underground that ruptured and began leaking to the surface. One does have to wonder about the kind of person that would wander into a pond of noxious chemicals, or pry open abandoned 55 gallon drum after drum out of curiosity. It always seemed to me that these kind of people are prime candidates for the Darwin Award, but even at that some of the modes of death were excruciatingly gruesome. Skin peeling off of live bodies, blindness, lungs eaten way by acid vapors, and the insides of living people essentially turning into jelly are just a few examples of the kinds of things that I may have encountered during transcription days in San Francisco. Needless to say, even today San Francisco does not have that romantic touristy appeal to me as it does for some people. But I needed money, so I repeatedly dipped back into the Bay Area to earn a bundle to support my graduate education (1992-1999, masters through dissertation completion). I even had the misfortune to be in a skyscraper during the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake – that’s a whole ‘nother story altogether.
I repeatedly attempted to reenter UC Berkeley for graduate studies in archeology but openings were limited and I had no financial support that would assure them of my completion of the degree. Later, I enrolled in extended education courses at UC Berkeley, including a Mayan studies course but once again the professor was not available. I had already taken most of the graduate archaeology courses they had to offer at Berkeley (19-21 units per quarter) during my 1.5 years at their institution. And, they did not offer night classes. I worked my way through college at various temporary jobs that relied on my typing skills, and later would transcribe Navajo-Hopi court recordings for the repatriation of their land in Arizona.
During my migrations back and forth from Northern California for employment and friends to Southern California and Yuma, Arizona where I had family, I considered enrolling in UC Riverside Extension’s new GIS Program. As an undergraduate at Berkeley, for a class project I had researched a site in San Mateo from Indians to vineyard to proposed housing tract. This was my first foray into GIS, but without the “system.” Instead, I used mylars to represent various years showing changing boundaries and features, pealing the mylar sheets back while projecting overhead. By 1990, to make myself more marketable I had mastered the myriad software that were developed and released, various computer platforms and programming language. But by 1990 I was kaput – a physical injury prevented me from working – and this turned out to be the best thing that could happen!
Next Week
Lost graveyards in northern Arizona!