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

Virginia didn’t actually have an anthropology department—just one lone professor, Clifford Evans, who was lumped into the sociology department. But Evans was an adventurous field researcher and an inspiring teacher. He had recently returned from excavating a prehistoric village in Brazil, and his slides and stories brought its ancient inhabitants back to life in the classroom. I took every class Evans taught.

In the spring of 1956, as I was finishing my master’s degree in anthropology at the University of Kentucky, I wrote Evans to tell him. I figured I was probably his only student ever to earn a graduate degree in anthropology, and I thought he might be pleased to know. By then he’d left Virginia and taken a job as a curator of archaeology at the Smithsonian.

Evans wrote back immediately. He remembered me well and told me he was glad to hear of my progress. He also told me the Smithsonian was desperate for help analyzing the flood of Native American skeletal material that was pouring in from the Great Plains, and offered to get me the job. It was a golden opportunity at a remarkable time.

The flood of bones had been unleashed by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. The Corps had been created to wage war on flood-prone rivers, and it did so with a vengeance. By the late 1940s its engineers had dammed and diked most of the Mississippi, so they branched out to other rivers. In the 1950s they were working their way up the Missouri.

By the time they reached the center of South Dakota, they were working on a colossal scale. Six miles upstream of Pierre (pronounced “pee-AIR” by the French but “peer” by South Dakotans), they began piling up a ridge of earth nearly 250 feet high and almost two miles long. The Oahe Dam, named for a Sioux council lodge, was the largest earth-fill dam in the United States when it was begun in 1948. It still is.

The reservoir it would create was also going to be enormous. Destined to stretch upriver about 225 miles and spread some 20 miles at its widest point, Lake Oahe would be one of the largest artificial lakes in the United States. It would inundate hundreds of square miles of prairie—and countless Native American archaeological sites.

The Corps of Engineers had earmarked part of the dam’s construction cost for archaeological research and excavation, and contracted with the Smithsonian to do the scientific work. The funding was a tiny share of the dam’s budget—just one-half of one percent—but the dam and its budget were so big that, by typical archaeological standards, the Smithsonian River Basin Surveys (as the overall project was called) was grand of scale and deep of pocket. As the Corps of Engineers began piling up earth to hold back the river, a small army of archaeologists and their indentured servants—undergraduates and grad students—began excavating in the area to be flooded. They began at a major Arikara site just upstream of the dam, since it would be the first to be submerged. It was called the Sully site, simply because that was the name of the county where it was located. On the second terrace of the Missouri—the shelf lying just above the river’s floodplain—the Arikara had built the largest earth-lodge village that has ever been discovered.

The main clue to the site’s archaeological richness was a series of circles, ranging in diameter from eighteen to twenty feet all the way up to sixty feet. These marked the locations of earth lodges; when the lodges burned or collapsed, they left shallow depressions in the prairie, because they had been dug several feet below grade. Rainfall is scant in this area, averaging just fifteen inches a year, so the depressions, which collect runoff and groundwater seepage, became tiny oases of green in the brown prairie. (Another five inches of annual rainfall, and the plains would have become forest instead of grassland.) The smaller green circles represented hundreds of houses, each occupied by as many as fifteen to twenty people; the handful of large ones marked community or ceremonial lodges.

Like many of the Arikara earth-lodge villages, the Sully site had been occupied multiple times, beginning around A.D. 1600. It was abandoned once the nearby trees had all been cut, then resettled after the riverbank had reforested. By dating the artifacts they found, the archaeologists would deduce that the village had been inhabited at least three times before being abandoned permanently around 1750.

From the ground, the earth-lodge depressions were harder to see but easy to feel: Driving across the prairie in a jeep or truck, a farmer or an archaeologist might feel the vehicle drop down into the slight depression, then climb back out again. The Sully site contained so many of these depressions, driving across it was like one big roller-coaster ride.

Because the village was so big, and had been occupied for so long, the archaeologists were unearthing a treasure trove of materials: cooking utensils, farming tools, weapons, jewelry, and bones—thousands upon thousands of bones, far more than the Smithsonian’s handful of physical anthropologists back in Washington could sort and measure.

That’s where I had first entered the picture, walking past that stuffed elephant beneath the rotunda and up into my first summer of bone-cataloging. A lowly graduate student, with no telephone, no pet projects of my own, no journal articles to write or review, and none of the other distractions confronting a loftier scientist, I could analyze bones from dawn till dusk. And so I did, for all of one summer and most of the next. Late in the summer of 1957, the project’s director summoned me to South Dakota.

I had never been west of the Mississippi before, and I had never even flown before, so the trip to South Dakota opened up a vast new world for me. Some lessons awaited me in old bones hidden in the earth. Others were imparted by the young students who toiled in the