Digging with MacNeish

Suggesting why archaeology, combining thought with group activity, appeals to young people, this memoir also recalls an era more open to youthful initiative than the present, filled with male camaraderie, before drugs and social media made being young a harder thing to do.  

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In early June 1961, R. S. MacNeish, head of archaeology at the National Museum on MacLeod Street in Ottawa, where I lived, agreed to hire Bill Baker, a schoolmate, and me as local labourers on a dig in the central Yukon, provided we got there by ourselves. I had just graduated from high school and was ready for adventure. So I bought a Morris Minor from my uncle for $100 and we drove in this tiny car, top speed 55 mph, to Sault Ste Marie, then to North Dakota, to Edmonton, up the Alaska Highway over Liard Crossing to Whitehorse. Bill and I took to smoking pipes. We’d sleep in the back seat with our feet up on the folded front seats. The trip took ten days.

Being early, we drove onward to Burwash Landing on Kluane Lake. A horseback ride led to a drowned horse and a grizzly confrontation; a fuel pump failure forced a tow into Haines Junction where my improvised fuel system, gravity-fed through tubing to the carburetor, soon failed on a hill; and then a long tow brought us back to Whitehorse where, already quite adventured, we met our team.  

Almost the first day I became a centre of attention when, entering the Taku Hotel in Whitehorse and being asked if I wanted a beer, I said maybe, but I’d never had an alcoholic drink. (My family was teetotal both sides.)  This was a sensation. All the teamsters and barflies gathered around. A first drink? Incomprehensible. They’d grown up with booze. What would happen to the kid? Well, I drank the beer, had a laugh, and seemed fine. People walked away shaking their heads. They’d been hoping for more.

Our leader was Richard S. (Scottie) MacNeish, at age 43 a short, pug-nosed former Golden Gloves boxer from Chicago, already a master of New World archaeology. (Over the years he became a hemispheric legend until his death in a field accident in Belize in 2001, and his career continues to inspire: Ian Morris, Why the West Rules - For Now, p 120, Profile: 2011.)

Along to gain the benefits and reputation of having “dug with MacNeish” were two PhD students,  Ed Wilmsen of the University of Arizona in Tucson and Rom Vastokas from Queen’s, later Trent University in Ontario. Also Bill and me, labourers. The actual labour was done by everyone the same way, using MacNeish’s digging system, where, instead of sinking a square from above, we would carve horizontally through a profile. Our system was optimized for a very compressed set of layers. At our dig on an old river terrace, erosion and deposition were so balanced that we had 5000 years in two vertical feet.

Digging was all done by trowel, and it wasn’t a question of shovelling earth. Rather it was a question of sifting and filtering, sometimes even using toothbrushes, occasionally leaving a little item perched on its own tiny tower for a while. All on hands and knees, and going over to where somebody found something. Each layer had its expected technology, scrapers here, microblades (flakes of obsidian embedded in bone) there. When something seemed new or out of place there was discussion. I recall finding the northernmost jaw bone of some ruminant ever found, then promptly losing one of its teeth in the grass.

Early in the century, Whitehorse was on the Lewes River, which at the confluence with the Pelly River became the Yukon River, flowing north and west to Dawson, through Alaska to Nome on Bering Strait. At that initial confluence once stood Fort Selkirk, and a mile or two up the Pelly River was the Pelly River Ranch, run by the two Bradley brothers, Dick and Hugh. Their rough, winding road in from the highway was our lifeline, and we camped in tents behind the farmhouse, trudging out to the site through some woods and up the bank to the terrace top, where we had a marvellous view over and down the Pelly River. No accident.

My little Morris Minor was stored in Whitehorse while the team drove a big Chevy windowed van with an awkward add-on front-wheel drive. We called it the Mounting Monster. One day on the gravel highway with Ed driving we met an oncoming oversize Yukon semitrailer raising an enormous cloud of fine white dust behind. As we entered the artificial whiteout, suddenly we faced two headlights. Ed by reflex jerked the wheel to the right and we twisted, skidding, fighting for control, and nearly overturning into the ditch. We got out and looked back. Receding diesel tap-tap and slowly settling dust. Did the oncoming driver who had chosen that moment to pass the truck not realize his life had been saved? Somewhat shaken we lurched back up and continued. The rough overland road that tested our four-wheel drive suddenly looked relatively safe. 

There were study sessions when MacNeish talked views and methods with Wilmsen and Vastokas. I would slip out to feel the enchantment of the great north woods, rolling uplands of boreal forest stretching across hills and mountain ranges to the arctic. I have since understood why northerners love what southerners would loathe: the emptiness. One day we took a boat from the ranch down to the confluence to do a survey at abandoned Fort Selkirk. Sure enough, there were microblades and bits of scraper. Scottie seemed to find sites by looking down.

Late in the trip before ending in Whitehorse we drove west to Champagne, then north to Aishihik. The location and road are no longer on the map, but we passed Otter Falls, pictured on the five-dollar bill at the time. I took a photo of it for my father. In a bar (by now I was a regular), the team got me to arm wrestle with a First Nations man. He easily defeated me. Then the team pushed me to try harder, so the second time I put some juice into it. Arm movement stopped. Then I really dug in and his hand started to move back. The room went quiet. Then a bit more. Suddenly MacNeish called a halt, announced a tie, and broke it up. He didn’t want an incident with the locals.

Scottie was preparing to visit his excavation sites in Mexico. (He said he had a bird’s brain: when it got cold, he headed south!) Bill and I were assigned to drive the big beast back to Ottawa. MacNeish arranged with a friend in Whitehorse to sell my little Morris Minor, in storage, to the wife of the local newspaper proprietor as a runabout for $220 dollars (a profit in itself). Scottie seemed to know everybody, and this kindly arranging friend had been a destroyer captain on the North Atlantic during the war. When I asked, he wouldn’t talk about it. Like so many veterans of serious combat, he’d quietly faded appreciatively back into supportive roles in civilian life.

And so, Bill and I, sitting higher above the road, drove back down the Alaska Highway to Edmonton and then across the country, this time north around Lake Superior, with only minor adventures, to Ottawa.

Epilogue

Within days I registered as a student at University of Toronto. Among the courses I signed up for was anthropology. Other students looked at me in wonder, not because of my understanding of archaeology (obviously narrow), but, surprisingly, because they could now say they had met someone who had Dug With MacNeish!  With perhaps a tinge of impatience that they could have done it better.

Where did the mystique come from? In the days when I knew them well, archaeologists loved to make heroes of one another. I bet it was all those evening gossip sessions around the campfires.