Larking in the past

Looby Journal #5: A lifelong fascination with the imagination of archaeology, and the archaeology of imagination.

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Hello again,

Apparently, a "bone rush" is happening in New York City's East River. In a freezing cold, dirty, heavy current, highly trafficked part of the river, keen make-it-rich folks are leaping in and diving for mammoth bones. The reason for the rush is that at the end of last year, notorious podcaster Joe Rogan had a guest on his show, fossil collector and gold miner John Reeves. He revealed a questionable story, based on a random aside in an unpublished paper from 2000, about the dumping of tens of thousands of priceless woolly mammoth tusks into the river in the 1940s. The culprit, the American Museum of Natural History, has no record of this dumping, and some co-authors of the original paper have serious doubts that there is anything more than dust and tiny fragments in the muddy depths. Nevertheless, in the past, a pair of tusks have been known to fetch as much as €75,000, so Rogan fans and treasure hunters are hopping in and hoping to score big. 

I completely understand the lure of treasure hunting. I have always loved the idea of the search, not for the cash rewards, but for the stories, and the history, and the imagination. In my first year of university I even considered taking an archaeology career track. At the time, I wore my hair long, dressed in flowing medieval-inspired gowns, and hung heavy pewter Celtic knot pendants around my neck. I wanted to hang out in mossy castle ruins, listen to lute music on my walkman, and gently dust off ancient bones. I think I imagined that this kind of excavation would inevitably lead to me being haunted by some hot viking ghost. Unfortunately, my university didn't participate in any actual digs, plus let’s face it, Australia doesn’t have much in the way of European Medieval ruins, or pagan spirits. The course was all theoretical; reading and research, and writing papers about ancient Mycenaean pottery shards.