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

They were a scientific revelation too. As the number of graves we’d excavated mounted into the hundreds, a remarkable picture began to emerge from the prairie earth. For the first time in the history of Great Plains archaeology, we had large, documented samples of an entire tribe’s skeletal remains, from birth through old age. For the Arikara, we realized, life was harsh, violent, and often very brief. We found an astonishing number of small graves containing the remains of infants and children. Tallying the statistics, we found that almost half the population died before age two; by age six, the mortality rate reached 55 percent. Then, interestingly, it plateaued: Very few deaths occurred between ages six and twelve; apparently, if you survived early childhood, you were likely to make it to puberty. Then, starting at around age sixteen, life got perilous again. The females began having babies, and the males began hunting buffalo and waging war. It was a violent, hazardous way of life.

The Arikara themselves were sedentary, but their neighbors and frequent enemies, the Sioux, were not, and often attacked. Many of the male skeletons bore deep scars from arrow wounds, especially in the pelvis and chest. We found many arrowheads embedded deep within bones. Often these wounds were fatal, but sometimes the bone healed around the flinty point, telling us that this particular warrior had lived for years with a Sioux arrowhead inside him.

Some skulls, both male and female, were crushed, reflecting the brutal efficiency of stone war clubs. And then there were the skulls bearing cut marks, usually most prominent at the hairline on the forehead, where the initial incision was made to detach the scalp. Some of these scalping victims still had flecks of flint in the skull. In a few chilling instances there was evidence of healing to the cranium: a scalping victim who had lived to tell the harrowing tale.

One thing we did not find at Sully was bullets. The village was abandoned for the last time around 1750. The whites and their weapons remained little more than a distant curiosity at that time. But in the short space of fifty years, that would change dramatically and, for the Arikara, tragically.

The Sully site was the largest of the Arikara villages. But the Leavenworth site, two hundred miles upriver, was the most poignant. It was there that the Arikara gathered, around the year 1800, to make their last stand against the Sioux, the whites, and deadly enemies they could not even see. Twelve separate Arikara bands converged, seeking safety in numbers. At a site just south of the present-day border of North Dakota, they built a pair of villages a few hundred yards apart on the first terrace of the Missouri, separated by a pleasant little stream.

It was there that Lewis and Clark encountered and scrapped with the Arikara. It was there that unscrupulous agents of fur companies waged biological warfare on them, bringing blankets from Saint Louis—blankets deliberately contaminated with smallpox, to which the Indians’ unsuspecting immune systems fell easy prey. And it was there, on August 9, 1823, that Colonel Henry Leavenworth and a force of nearly three hundred U.S. Army soldiers, Missouri militiamen, and Sioux warriors attacked the villages with rifles, bows, clubs, and gunboats. During the night of August 14, the remaining Arikara slipped away from their battered villages.

BY THE SUMMER OF 1965, the water level in Lake Oahe had risen to nearly 1,525 feet above sea level—more than 100 feet above the river’s natural level—and the two Arikara villages at Leavenworth had disappeared beneath the water. Fortunately for us, the two main cemeteries lay one terrace above the villages, nearly 50 feet higher. So we still had time to excavate, though the pressure was relentless.

In July of 1966, however, the water was obviously catching up with us, filling some of the burial pits even as we were excavating them (giving new meaning to the phrase watery grave). By that time, we had found and excavated nearly three hundred Arikara graves at the Leavenworth site. We kept working, moving uphill just ahead of the water. But then the finds ceased. We cut long swaths with the power equipment, ranging farther and farther from the main cemetery areas; we even resorted to the old-fashioned technique, digging by hand. But we found nothing more. On July 18, 1966, we abandoned the Leavenworth site to the river, just as the Arikara had done 143 years before.

Years later an Indian activist would refer to me in a newspaper interview as “Indian grave-robber number one,” and I suppose it’s true. Over the course of fourteen summers, I excavated somewhere between four and five thousand Indian burials on the Great Plains; as far as I know, that’s more than anyone else in the world.

And yet, I never had a single clash with Native Americans during those fourteen years. There are two explanations for that. First, my wife, Ann, a nutrition scientist, spent her summers working to improve nutrition among the Sioux Indians on South Dakota’s Standing Rock Reservation. Ann wrote her Ph.D. dissertation on the high rate of diabetes among the Sioux and was regarded by them as a friend. As Ann’s husband, I got the benefit of the doubt. Second, I was helping the modern Sioux settle their score with the ancient Arikara: helping them “count final coup,” as they call it.

But as the 1960s drew to a close, it was clear that change was coming. Lake Oahe was filling up, and the Smithsonian River Basin Surveys were winding down. Of the hundreds of archaeological sites identified before the reservoir began filling, only a small percentage was ever excavated. There wasn’t enough time, money, or manpower to do more.

But we weren’t just racing the rising waters; we were also swimming against a powerful new cultural current. By the late 1960s—the era of civil rights, Vietnam, and broad social upheaval—Native Americans began reasserting their claim to their culture, their heritage, and their relics. A major clash