Lives in Ruins (11 page)

The Goddess Temple had been Sarah Nelson's site to dig. She was the first foreign archaeologist allowed to visit it in 1987, and won two American grants to excavate there, and though she squeezed the grants to last over seven years of frugal summer trips, the permit from the Chinese to break ground didn't come through until after her funding ran out. What does an archaeologist without a permit do? On one visit, she did ground-penetrating radar with a handful of students; on another, she measured the temple's alignment with the sun, the stars, and the planets, studying the site's archaeoastronomy. Recently, she applied for another grant to excavate the Goddess Temple but was turned down, she suspected because of her age. Here was something I hadn't considered: that an archaeologist could focus on a
site for years and never get to break ground. Besides endurance, stubbornness, and hard work, it seemed that an archaeologist also needed luck. And I had not imagined that the desire to dig might still be burning into one's ninth decade.

I sat next to this woman, thwarted in her attempt to do hard physical labor in remote China, but still serene as she listened to the tributes made to colleagues who succeeded in acting on their visions: the man who received the gold medal for notable contributions to archaeology; the woman who won the teaching prize that three of her students had already won—an act of tribute to the ancestor that seemed fitting and possibly overdue. And, in my ignorance, I felt sorry for Nelson.

We traded business cards and went our separate ways, and I found myself caught up with an assortment of other archaeologists, but Nelson stayed on my mind. She might have been disappointed in her efforts to excavate the Goddess Temple, but it turned out she was a recognized authority in the archaeology of Asia, particularly of the remote places and cultures beyond the Great Wall, in the region once known as Manchuria. “Those of us who have had the opportunity to work in Asian archaeology,” one American scholar wrote, “are constantly impressed by the amount and intensity of research undertaken in the region, and by how little of that work is visible in the western-language literature.” The scholar pegged Nelson as a key figure in interpreting Asia, particularly China and Korea, to Western archaeologists.
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The more I read about Nelson, the more I got the message: I had picked up a pioneer.

In addition to her work in Asian archaeology, Nelson has also written and edited a whole shelf of books on gender; she is an outspoken voice for women in their efforts to join the boys' club that is
archaeology, and to study not just the men and objects of the past but the women, too. How do you do groundbreaking archaeology when almost everything conspires against it? By the time I caught up with Nelson a few months after we met, at the Society for American Archaeology's annual meeting in Memphis, and once again we sat with our wine in a sea of beer drinkers, I needed to hear her story.

Nelson set the stage for me. She graduated from Wellesley in 1953 with a degree in biblical archaeology, and married a Harvard man. She spent some years in Germany where her husband, Hal, a doctor for the Army, was stationed. By 1961, they had three sons. They moved often, but Nelson didn't mind as long as they lived in stimulating places like Europe or San Francisco, but postings in small towns in the southern U.S. were stifling. “At one point,” she said, “I was so desperate for something meaningful to do that I convinced a friend to ride bikes with me in the scorching sun with our babies in seats on the backs, looking for Indian mounds that were marked on the map of the [Army] post. We never found the mounds, but later I learned that they were on the firing range, with targets propped up against them. Off limits.” She vetoed an assignment to Fort Bragg, in North Carolina. My turn, she told Hal.

At age thirty-six, Nelson won a spot in archaeology graduate school at the University of Michigan; she had interviewed in pearls and heels. She found herself a student again, a mother of three trying to fit in with the hippies. Most of her professors made it clear that training women was a waste of time. Even after her time in Asia, she said that reentry to the university had been the worst culture shock of her life.

When her husband accepted an assignment to spend 1970 and 1971 in Korea, “unaccompanied,” as the Army delicately put it, Nelson planned to take the children and a tutor to Taiwan to do research for her dissertation. While camping at her sister's house in California with her entourage, Nelson's plan collapsed; she couldn't get visas for her children for longer than thirty days, and
“we couldn't be flying to Hong Kong every month,” she says. “Anyway, what kind of mother would take her children off to the wild?” There she sat in a house in California with her three sons, her sister's five young children, and eight cats. “I had to get out of there,” she said. So she improvised a plan to spend the year in Korea, off the base; at least there she and the children could visit her husband every other weekend. She didn't know much about archaeology in Korea. There was nothing in the literature in any of the languages she spoke (English, French, Spanish, German, or Chinese), so she began to teach herself Korean.

Never mind the complex grammar, or the characters in both Korean and Chinese. Nelson was studying with nine-, twelve-, and thirteen-year-old boys running around. Korean is a subtle language. The meaning is hard to pin down, which is maddening to a scientist; it's “more adapted to nuance than to straightforward declarative sentences,” she wrote in the introduction to one of her books. “When reading Korean with various native Korean tutors, I would ask exactly where in the sentence it said such-and-such. ‘You have to catch between the lines,' they told me. And sometimes even my tutors could not be sure they had caught it right. . . .” Within a year, though, she was reading the language.

Then one of her tutors introduced her to a local archaeologist who offered to collaborate with her on a survey of sites along the Han River. The archaeologist provided the permits and the tools; Nelson wrote up a plan using the new methods of surveying she'd learned in graduate school, and also provided the team with access to American cigarettes and beer from the military commissary.

Nelson enlisted the extended Army community for help with the survey. “The area we lived in was full of women who had nothing to do because they were there with their husbands, so I organized them into a very nice field team. Some had husbands who were very helpful. One got detailed maps from the U.S. Navy, one did helicopter photography—he would go up and take pictures of the Han
River. One woman had a very nice car, and a driver, Mr. Oh, who wore little white gloves and took us on many expeditions—and then Mr. Oh would dig with us.” She is still delighted at the way people pitched in. “Something new and wonderful had dropped in my lap,” she said. The survey of Neolithic sites along the Han River became the topic of her dissertation, and at forty-one, Sarah Nelson became the second woman awarded a Ph.D. in archaeology from the University of Michigan. She returned to Korea multiple times, twice as a visiting scholar. At sixty-two, more than two decades after her first improvised appearance, she wrote
The Archaeology of Korea
. “This book has been written in the hope of placing Korea on the map of world archaeology, from which it has been conspicuously absent,” she states on its opening page.

I imagine her story as material for musical comedy, with sporty Army wives sifting soil and singing on the Korean riverbanks, and Mr. Oh in his proper white gloves, the calendar pages flying by, and, ultimately, the triumphant book. But there are glimpses in the book's preface of what exactly it meant to bridge this culture: the fact that someone's name could be spelled Lee, Li, Rhee, Rhi, or Yi—“and sometimes the same author has used several alternative spellings of his name”; or how to cover North Korea archaeology when “archaeological reports from the north have been difficult to obtain, and at one time were illegal to own in the Republic of Korea.” And, oh yes, she told me, there was that one time they were digging too close to the DMZ and someone fired a warning shot.

Nelson lifted her hair and cooled her neck. We had snagged one of the tables in a hotel lobby across from the Memphis convention center. Archaeologists shouted and clinked glass bottles around us. Because Nelson's left eye “is all gone but around the edges” from macular degeneration, she has trouble recognizing faces, but she still seemed to know everyone. She introduced me to a parade of colleagues who had spent time with her in China or on fellowship in Bellagio, Italy, and we chatted above the noise, taking turns buying
rounds of wine in convivial rhythm. Some of her stories were like scenes from exotic novels, full of shamans and warriors. While teaching a class in Seoul, she and her students would sit on the rocks above the walls of the city and watch female shamans, called
mudangs
, at work; once, the women beckoned them down, and they got to join a graceful ceremonial dance. And Lady Hao of the Shang dynasty. Had I heard of her? Nelson wondered. She had been buried in China with her servants, all of whom were beheaded except for one who had been cut in half at the waist!

In her seventies, Nelson looked back at her scholarly work, including the books about ancient queens, goddesses, and shamans, and decided to have some fun with what she had learned in Korea and China—not just the stories of big clay statues of women and other exotica, but the whole scene: the collision of East and West; sex in the field; sexism in the field; looting and drinking; jealousy. She began writing archaeological novels from her home in Denver. “Teaching novels,” she calls them, with real artifacts and discoveries as the grist. Nelson is well aware that “we don't know a lot about some of these periods,” but says that “everything we do know makes it into the books,” including pig dragons, a status symbol for the Hongshan people who built the Goddess Temple, and oracle bones, bones with prophecies carved into the surface—northeast China is apparently littered with these.

The novels gave Nelson another way to work out archaeological puzzles, another tool to imagine variations on the distant past. The excavation of a Korean dwelling with a rare double hearth, for instance, inspired one of these novels. Why two hearths? Nelson remembers a male archaeologist speculating that it belonged to a chief with two wives, a presumption that bothered her. The chief might have had two mates—but what if the chief were a woman? “A lot of evidence in East Asia suggests that women had leadership roles. If you look at historic times, important women ruled in China,” she said. The largest burial mound discovered in the ancient
Silla region of Korea contained a noble woman in a spectacular crown, though written histories mention only kings. Lady Hao was not just buried with the accoutrements of a warrior; according to the inscriptions on oracle bones, she had led men in battle. “There's so much we can never know,” Nelson said. “We do know that so much has been pushed under the rug or misinterpreted.”

In typical pragmatic fashion, Nelson breezed by the frustrations of the difficult publishing market and founded RKLOG Press, with the intention of publishing her fiction and the fiction of other archaeologists, too. RKLOG? “Say the letters aloud,” she said, laughing. She didn't lack for readers; fans who had read her scholarly work on goddesses made sure of that.

In one of Nelson's novels, an older professor is asked about his future plans. “‘Retiring soon,' he said. ‘But I have so many ideas to write up that I may never be really retired.'” I thought of that scene from her fiction when Nelson and I caught up via Skype. She was about to turn eighty-two. She was packing for a conference in Jordan. She had visited ten foreign countries the previous year, from Mongolia to Morocco, including a trip to Australia to witness the total eclipse of the sun. Direct injections to her eyes were controlling her macular degeneration (“I know!” she said, “but thank goodness for modern medicine.”). She was working on six different papers she had agreed to deliver, planning three more novels, and finishing a draft of a memoir “about being a woman in a field that was proclaimed to be a ‘band of brothers.'” The manuscript began with her quoting a famous male archaeologist on the divisions in the profession—not between men and women, but between “the hairy-chinned” theorists and “the hairy-chested”
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field-workers. Neither hairy-chinned nor hairy-chested, Nelson made it clear that the hardest battles she had to fight were the ones for the respect
of her male colleagues. “My archaeological writings presume that what women did in the past is recoverable and interesting,” she wrote.

And interesting
. That she felt the need to add that phrase was telling. To some extent, archaeologists find what they're looking for, and if you never look for evidence of powerful women, even if the hills and valleys are full of queens and warriors, they'll be invisible.

Art Gallery Interlude

SERENDIPITY RULED MY
chance meeting with Nelson, and serendipity led me, the year after we first met, to spot a gallery ad in the
New York Times
for Hongshan Late Neolithic Chinese Jades. I thought Hongshan was an overlooked culture, but here were the objects from Nelson's beloved Goddess Temple, on display, and apparently for sale, in Manhattan. You'd have to travel from Seattle to Florida to see two pig dragons in the United States; there are perhaps four altogether in American museums. But I had only to take a short train ride into New York City to find a cool dozen or more on display in the midtown art gallery. I signed in with a guard at the desk. Inside someone took my coat, offered me tea, and left me free to roam in a big room filled with treasures, while soft Asian music set the mood. Was a secret camera following me, in case I was the sort who pocketed pig dragons? I didn't see one. After a circuit of the whole room, and even after seeing the “hooked cloud” plaques and horned owl pendants, I had to admit that the pig dragons stood out. The term
pig dragon
is misleading in English. A pig dragon has no scales or long tail; it is a piece of jade shaped like the early Chinese symbol for dragon, a curved C. The C is smooth and the top of it ends in a carved pig face. The objects range in size from fat little rings to large paperweights, and in color from dark-green jade to the palest green and even yellow. From what I could see, each pig face was different.