Death's Acre: Inside The Legendary Forensic Lab The Body Farm by Bill Bass (essential books to read txt) 📕

a huge Arikara cemetery. Judging by the dozens of graves we found in our strips of test squares, we knew there must be hundreds of burials.

But we’d run out of time. Excavating them would have to wait until the following summer.

I WAS, and am still, grateful to the industrious ants of South Dakota.

Not so, the writhing rattlesnakes. In fact, if there was one thing I was dreading as the summer of 1959 approached, it was the prospect of all those damn rattlesnakes.

The prairie is an ideal habitat for snakes. It abounds in mice, rabbits, birds, and other small prey. Like the ants, the snakes find the soil easy to tunnel into. So the population density of prairie rattlers is unsettlingly high to start with. Then came the added pressure of dwindling habitat: In 1957, Oahe Lake began to fill, and the lowlands along the river began to disappear beneath the water. So, guess what? The rattlesnakes wriggled up to higher ground—the terraces where a bunch of absentminded anthropologists were crawling through the grass, leaning into graves, reaching blindly out of pits to grope for a trowel or a brush.

Prairie rattlers are fairly small, as rattlesnakes go. Unlike diamondbacks, which can grow to six feet or more, with bodies as thick as a grave-digger’s wrist, prairie rattlers rarely exceed three feet in length. But they’re cantankerous, aggressive little devils, with a tendency to strike first and ask questions later. I decided that was a pretty good policy for us as well.

As a scientist, I understand that rattlesnakes fill an important ecological niche: They’re a vital link in the food chain, the single most important predator keeping the prairie from being overrun by mice and other rodents. I grasp this thoroughly on an intellectual level. On an instinctual, emotional level, though, I’m terrified of the durned things. I probably shouldn’t admit this, but I’ve always believed that the only good rattlesnake is a dead rattlesnake. When I’m confronted by a live one, my position tends to be, “This prairie isn’t big enough for the two of us.” Soon I developed a reputation as the fastest shovel in the West.

One of the morning rituals for an anthropology crew is to sharpen its shovels. A sharp shovel bites through soil a lot quicker than a dull one. It bites through snake a lot quicker too. Every morning we’d pass around a file and sharpen our shovels, smoothing out any nicks left by rocks, then honing the edge to razor keenness. The test of a truly sharp shovel is this: Will it shave the hair off your forearm? I didn’t always take the time to lather up and shave my face, but every single morning my forearm was as bare and smooth as a baby’s bottom. If I’d put a notch into the handle of my shovel for every prairie rattler it dispatched, eventually I’d have had all notch and no handle.

Snake-lovers will be appalled by my take-no-prisoners policy, but it’s important to put it in perspective. First, with the reservoir rising and habitat being lost, there were far too many rattlesnakes for the remaining habitat to support anyhow. Second—and much more important to me—I had been given responsibility for the safety of the anthropology students working with me. All told, I spent fourteen summers excavating in South Dakota, a period that spanned my transition from Ph.D. student in Philadelphia to visiting instructor at the University of Nebraska to tenured professor at the University of Kansas. During that time nearly 150 students worked for me out on the plains. Quite a few prairie rattlers died from close encounters of the interspecies kind during those years. Not one of my students did.

Sadly, other students did die.

The prairie is notorious for the suddenness and violence of its weather changes, and that’s especially true in summer. All that grass gives off a tremendous amount of moisture. As the sun beats down, the water vapor rises until it condenses, sometimes as puffy, cotton-candy clouds, and sometimes as black thunderheads towering four miles high.

Four students on an archaeologist’s crew were returning from a remote village site by boat when a storm caught them. They had seen it coming and tried to outrun it, but a prairie storm can strike as swiftly and as mercilessly as an angry rattler. Lashed by gale-force winds and ocean-size waves, their boat capsized and all four drowned. Their boat was carrying life preservers, but—being young and feeling immortal—nobody was wearing one. Once the boat flipped, it was too late.

Sometimes students grimaced at my safety-consciousness, but I’ve always believed in caution, and it’s always paid off: I’ve never been seriously hurt, and none of my students has been, either.

WE HAD RETURNED to the second terrace of the Missouri River in the summer of 1958 and excavated several dozen Arikara graves. By some archaeological standards, that would be considered highly productive. And at a site where we could return again and again for years, it would be. But at the Sully site—and every other site in the Missouri basin for 225 miles upriver—we knew we had very little time. The gates of Oahe Dam had just closed, and the waters began to rise. We had to work faster.

Ten years earlier, when I was an undergraduate student in college, I had spent my summers working in my stepdad’s rock quarry, driving bulldozers and dump trucks. It was a great summer job, like being a really big kid playing with huge Tonka toys.

I’ve never been particularly interested in speed—fast cars hold little appeal for me—but power, well, that’s another thing altogether. Give me a truck with a big diesel and a fat granny gear, and I’m a happy man.

Summers at the quarry, I took some flak because I was the boss’s son. Some of it was good-natured; some of it wasn’t. There was one fellow in particular—a skinny, mean guy in his forties—who seemed to go out of his way to give me a hard time. One day, as