Lives in Ruins (20 page)

We weren't isolated on Yeronisos. Every afternoon, we heard the tour boat docking nearby, the clear strains of “Saving All My Love For You” floating up, or we'd glimpse the Pirate Cruise boat gliding past. An odd collection of stacked rocks beyond where we dug turned out to spell “I love you” in Russian, clearly a modern incursion. Yeronisos was a cultural monument owned by Cyprus, and no law keeps people away. But it was also fragile land, so fragile that although tours of Yeronisos would be a natural thing to offer at the annual party, the project couldn't risk it, particularly with that rocky landing dock. In the long run, Connelly wanted to restore Apollo's circular dance floor, bring Andreas and the local boys who danced together to perform out here—“bring my village.” But this was a dream, the happiest possibility for a distant and by no means
certain future. And now here was this unwelcome news, the missing foghorn, the first theft in the history of the dig.

In Valentinos's dinghy, Connelly brooded about the changes to Cyprus that she had seen, the concrete buildings and subdivisions that have sprung up across Cyprus, the bulky generator on the beautiful shoreline that runs constantly to provide electricity to a snack shop. “I gave this talk at the new Acropolis Museum, called ‘Building Partnerships in Eco-archaeology: Lessons from Yeronisos on Cyprus,' and I start it off by showing how from the beginning we had done floral studies and bird counts. I showed them 1992 aerial photographs that I took from a helicopter of this whole area. At the end of it everyone was like ‘Wow, wow,' and then I said, but this year I returned to this. And I showed these horrible developments, and the whole auditorium gasped. It is shocking. In one year, its character is destroyed. All this really happened in a year. Bad stuff trickled along, and then in one year, boom!”

More invasions. I was standing in the trench dumping buckets of dirt in the wheelbarrow when a couple in flip-flops and bathing suits emerged at the top of the staircase and walked onto the site. Connelly swooped down and engaged them in conversation, then they wandered over to the lip of the quarry, a giant hole that separated the sites where we dug and the
khalifi
s from the eastern cliffs, where the seagulls nested and where we ducked when we had to pee (the archaeologists speculated that it was the place where the early people of Yeronisos quarried limestone and a chalky white clay called
marl
). What were they doing here? The woman stood at the top while her friend clambered down, and after a while they headed back down the stairs together and chugged off in their boat. “What's geocaching?” Connelly asked when they left. I tried to explain what I knew—geocaching was a scavenger hunt run from a website; caches and clues were hidden in the real world and participants used GPS to find them. Connelly said there was a clue apparently hidden in a plastic container at the bottom of the quarry,
which was what the couple was looking for. She wanted it removed from Yeronisos. I worried that if its coordinates were listed on a website, people would come looking for the cache, whether it was at the bottom of the quarry or not; I promised Connelly that I'd find the website and send a note of protest. I had nothing against the sport—it seemed to me like a neat way to explore the world—but geocachers should not be traipsing through archaeological sites. (A few weeks later, the geocache website responded to my note and took down the listing).

Connelly's distaste for the sport was visceral. She hated fake explorers, contrived adventures, virtual games. “There is so much real adventure, real engagement. There's so much to be done!” she said. “These people are playing at exploring.” The difference between her team and the geocachers was obvious. She said, passionately, “We're not playing!”

I was digging in the trench next to her nephew when Connelly came to observe our technique. We both met with her approval, though I didn't squat in the classic archaeological pose, but instead sat on a foamy kids' pool float and saved my knees. I was swaddled against the elements, a bandanna moistened and tied over my mouth and nose to keep me from inhaling the swirling dirt. First I chipped rhythmically across my section of the trench with the pick (my two-centimeter pass), then scraped with the trowel, then swept up the debris for further inspection. I chiseled around protuberances and kept the surface dusted and the edges straight—“This is your workspace,” she had told us. “This is your laboratory. Keep it clean!” Her nephew was doing a beautiful job, brushing around the top of an amphora he had found. Connelly turned to me and spotted a piece of pottery with a fresh break where, no doubt, one of my tools whacked it. I wanted to sink into the quarry and curl up in shame.

Instead, I asked her about the skeleton of the woman her team
found several years earlier, and Connelly glowed telling us. “It was a woman, found near where the dance floor to Apollo is now. She was dated to the first or second century
A
.
D
. We have nothing from that era here on the island, no artifacts at all, so Yeronisos was a ruin then. She was buried facing east, so apparently she was Christian. Her diet reflected wealth—mostly protein—and she had both hands positioned at her waist. Perhaps she was holding something. She was old for those days, into her fifties. Was she an early Christian holy woman, a hermit? Could be. The Church didn't stop women from participating as elders, deaconesses, and priests until the fourth century. And her shoulders were drawn up high. Can you guess why?” I couldn't. Even my imagination was stumped.

“From the winding cloth,” Connelly said. She gestured toward Apollo's dance floor, part of its wall exposing the particular beauty of historic ruins, and looked down at her nephew. “When I die, I'd like to be buried where she was found,” she told him. “Or if that's too complicated, maybe my heart could be buried here.” I couldn't see her face, partially obscured by her canvas hat, and she had the light behind her, what she called “a raking light,” casting shadows at the edge of the trench.

When I brought this up later, the touching idea that she might be buried one day on Yeronisos, Connelly was all brisk scientist, and laughed off her momentary romantic impulse. Surely the Cyprus Department of Antiquities would have something to say about that, not to mention the laws of this country. She was an honorary citizen of the local village, but that didn't come with any privileges. Her relatives might have trouble with it, as well. Really, I should just forget it!

But I tagged along on a tour of Yeronisos that Connelly gave one day to the visiting high school students, and when she got to Apollo's dance floor and the place where the pilgrim had been found, she lay down on the ground to show them how the woman
had been buried with her shoulders hunched. She closed her eyes and lay very still. The students and I stood transfixed. The gulls whirred and cried overhead. Again I heard the echo of her words:
We're not playing
.

CONNELLY WAS SENSITIVE
to the expression of religion over the centuries on Yeronisos, and she had located women's power in ancient Greece in the realm of religion. She satisfied her own spiritual hunger with long, philosophical conversations with the Orthodox monk, Father Neophytos, an imposing figure with a black beard and a probing intelligence. “Perhaps because I am Catholic, I'm enthralled by the Orthodox Church and their talk of the soul,” she said; “I know some of my friends on the island look at the Church differently, but . . .”
^*
She has an annual Clergy Day on the dig and credits the bishop of the local monastery with unearthing the inscription that linked Yeronisos with Apollo. On New Year's Eve of 2000, Connelly decided she wanted to celebrate in a place that had been around for a thousand years. “I couldn't manage that exactly, but I felt that the Monastery of St. Neophytos was as close as I could get, having been founded in 1159.” She flew to Cyprus and spent New Year's Eve with ten monks and their abbot at the monastery, cut into the rock face of a mountain above Paphos. She attended services, sang, talked about the spiritual life, watched fireworks from their balcony, and drank French champagne. “And then we watched
Star Wars
and the segment with Yoda teaching, and Father Neophytos demonstrated to us how Yoda's words are based on the teachings of the Egyptian Desert Fathers of the fourth century
A
.
D
.!”

I was charmed by this whole story. I pictured her in the departure
lounge at JFK airport, an explorer, a pilgrim on a pilgrimage, and I wondered what her island would look like with a shroud of New Year's mist.

When the season was over, and New York swallowed us all back up, I found that, by virtue of my time in Cyprus, I had gained admittance to a rarefied club, the Friends of Yeronisos. Connelly met me near NYU in her low-heeled walking boots, wearing noise-canceling headphones to block out the din of city traffic. We laughed and gossiped about archaeology and publishing. The students from the dig were sophisticated adults in the city, appreciably taller here. How could that be? Perhaps because we were always crouching in a trench in Cyprus.

I followed Connelly to a conference on cultural heritage in Ohio and listened to another of her lectures about the international trade in illegally acquired artifacts and its harm to communities, cultures, and our bank of knowledge. Her cheerful tone with just a hint of sass was engaging and convincing. The Elgin Marbles, for instance, which now sat in the British Museum in pieces, separated from their context on the Acropolis, were an absurdity to Connelly. “We have the situation where Poseidon's shoulders are in London and his ‘six-pack' is in Athens,” she said to appreciative laughter. She showed a slide with a picture of the Acropolis at night. It looked like an island floating above Athens, a cluster of lights in a sea of purple, and I realized with a start where I had seen that same shape: a photo I took of Yeronisos rising out of the Mediterranean just before sunrise. I thought of a Spielberg movie, not one of the Indiana Jones adventures, but the more mystical
Close Encounters of the Third Kind
, in which people are drawn to a place with a particular shape, one seen in their dreams. They sketch and sculpt this shape until one day they find it: a mountainous structure with a flat top; a raised platform; a place where cultures separated by time and distance meet.

T
HE MOST
important archaeological site in the United States might well be a wooded lot on a battered commercial stretch of Route 9 in Fishkill, New York. So says Bill Sandy, a seasoned contract archaeologist who has had his hands in its soil. Sandy would have shown me the place himself and pointed out its graves, but he was tied up on an emergency excavation in the Bronx, so I drove alone to Fishkill, about sixty miles north of New York City. I parked on the gravel behind the Maya Café and walked across the side road to get a look at what its owners called “the Crossroads lot” and what Sandy claimed was “inch for inch, the most important site in the country.” I saw no marker or trench, only a collar of trees in waist-high grass, a scrubby parcel of ten or so acres, between the café and a Hess superstation and across Route 9 from a ghost mall—a significant archaeological site disguised as a wooded lot. Two signs faced the side road. One sign said
NO TRESPASSING
, the other, partially obscured by leaves,
NO DUMPING
.

In 2007, while assessing the land for development, Sandy discovered seven graves in the lot. Based on their size, the condition of the bones, and the residue of rusted-out coffin nails, he concluded that the bodies belonged to Revolutionary War soldiers. Sandy had
located the burial grounds of the old Fishkill Supply Depot, on land the owners bought to develop as a strip mall.

Who ever heard of the Fishkill Supply Depot? You could turn blue looking for a mention of it in history books, though the place served as the Continental Army's largest supply center, as well as the quarters, staging area, and mustering grounds for two thousand or more troops for seven and a half years, almost the entire length of the Revolutionary War. George Washington had overseen its secret operations, directed the construction of its barracks, ordered troops, provisions, and military supplies moved in and out of Fishkill, and corresponded frequently with his generals about its security, the inoculation of soldiers against smallpox, and the hanging of traitors. Though battles were fought in the area and the British burned the encampment at nearby Continental Village, the Fishkill Supply Depot had not been compromised or captured. It stayed a secret during the course of the war, and has remained secret, more or less, ever since.

Most of the land I could see from the edge of the lot had been part of this seventy-acre military city. What was once an almost treeless stretch of high ground about five miles from the Hudson River
^*
was now a mix of woods and patchy commerce. I was on a weedy stretch of Route 9; looking north, with the Maya Café at my back, beyond the Hess superstation (a Blimpie, a Nathan's, a Godfather's Pizza), and just before the ramp to Interstate 84, I could see the lawn of the Van Wyck Homestead, the only surviving Revolutionary War structure on the Depot grounds; the former headquarters for Washington's generals was now a modest museum. Across Route 9 sprawled the remains of the Dutchess Mall. Only a drive-through McDonald's and a Home Depot survived; the rest was hulking buildings and graffitied windows, with a big apron of pitted asphalt, detritus from the seventies. All of this constituted the
grounds of the historic Depot: armory, barracks, parade grounds, stables, blacksmith, jail, hospital, everything but the general's headquarters invisible now.