The Big Dig. There's Never Nothing There

When there was such a thing as empty lots in Queens, my grade school friends and I sometimes found ourselves playing in them. As young boys we were always one unsupervised adult day away from another tetanus shot. But who cared? This was adventure.

This was the 1950s, and because of a New York City taxation policy that used frontage to determine real estate  taxes, there were any number of vacant corner properties. Corner lot, more frontage. More moolah. Which is really surprising, because the real estate taxation basis never really became realistic until the Bloomberg administration. How much more could the real estate and sewer tax have been that it stymied corner lot development? Lots of corner properties had houses on them, but they tended more often than not to be occupied my physicians and dentists. So the world went.

In one of these empty lots in Whitestone my friends and I found what we firmly believed were the remains of trolley tracks. You'd think we found dinosaur bones. Considering that trolleys went out of existence, even in Queens, sometime in the late 1940s, our sense of what was really old was not very realistic. Never mind.

I think our teacher took such an interest that he investigated the lot himself. Turns out they were not trolley tracks at all, but some sort of steel beams, likely dumped illegally by a demolition company.

But you know what? Before our voices changed and our interests could care less about empty lots, we were, without our knowing it, archaeologists.

Ever bury money in the backyard as a kid? Willie Sutton buried his bank loot in parks: Central Park, Prospect Park, and would return to some very moldy, sometimes unusable United States currency when he got of prison, whether he was released, or he released himself. Willie was many things to many people. He was a legendary criminal. He was also an archaeologist.

Marilyn Johnson, in her new book, 'Lives in Ruins,' quickly sets us straight on what an archaeologist is. Right there on the first page, opening paragraph, she tells us if you're expecting to read about dinosaur bones, you need a book on paleontologists. Archaeologists study people, and what they left behind, "their bones, their trash, and their ruins."

So, if you want to read about dinosaur bones and human remains, you're going to have to--like the comedian Alan King once said about reading about love and marriage--buy two books.

Ms. Johnson is foremost a journalist with a literary background--and a poet. She'll pop in the subtlest of phrases that leave a delayed reaction. Take the opening narrative that explains where archaeologists get their volunteers from, their grunts, their go-fers. Somewhat like Tom Sawyer and his whitewashed fence, the interested are hooked into labor and even pay for the privilege to sweat and strain. She wonders if all this doesn't resemble some sort of "'pyramid scheme."

The book takes us longitudinally and latitudinally halfway around the world from New York. We start on a caraway seed-size island in the Caribbean, St. Eustatius, under Dutch governance. Pirates loved the place. Here, Ms. Johnson describes her "boot camp" where she first crouches with a trowel. Her travels are extensive, and impressive. She attends archaeology conferences and chats up more than one person smitten with the calling. She has a list of who she'd like to meet, but doesn't always catch up to everyone. Archaeologists don't always come out and play.

And in case your preconceived notion of an archaeologist is someone in a pith helmet in an Agatha Christie novel dying for tea time, then cocktails, you're going to be surprised. Some of the most interesting parts of this multi-layered book are the stories that were just on CNN if your TV was plugged in and on. Operation Iraqi Freedom, Afghanistan involvement of American troops have all produced work for archaeologists. The Department of Defense employees archaeologists? You betcha.

A glance at the author's dust jacket photo and it might be understandable how Ms. Johnson works her way into conference breakout sessions and manages to stay invited, especially to the one that numbers archaeologists and the United States military. One of the most interesting chapters is produced because of it. This is current. We're seeing this in our living rooms.

Profiles of archaeologists fill the book. One woman, Laurie Rush, works as a civilian archaeologist out of Fort Drum in Watertown, New York. This is an area of the state I'm familiar with and which even Ms. Johnson's prose fails to capture its bleakness. Harry Chapin, in an introduction to one of his narrative songs, 'Better Place to Be,' describes the area as where he spent a "week there one afternoon."

Ms. Rush has a staff and is the is the guiding force behind the playing cards that are distributed to the troops that depict historic, and hoped for protected sites, they might encounter in their deployments. An educated soldier is a better soldier.

The only shortcoming felt is that there are no photos in the book. Expense, and the ease of the Internet can be excuses. Still, a choice few would have been welcomed, especially a sample of the playing cards.

A small distraction. Pay attention, and you will encounter a word like 'paleoethnobotany." Really pay attention, and you'll learn the spelling distinction of an ancient Peruvian civilization that's not at all to be confused with an international sex club. Distinction is everything.

Ms. Johnson is smart enough to tell us in her poignant last chapter how today's debris is, a century or so from now, tomorrow's archaeological find. That Lincoln head penny with the newly designed back you no longer pick up because it has so little value, is a find a century from now.

There is even such a thing as "the archaeology of the contemporary past." I won't admit that this is what I realize I'm engaging in when I remind myself that I've been coming and going through New York's Pennsylvania Station for over 60 years now. But I do see the past, especially when I hold onto one of the remaining brass banisters with the giant ball at the top that line staircases from some of the tracks. What a find that is going to make someday.

The book is a joy to read and goes by fast. Just like time.

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