Reading the Bones. Gina McMurchy-Barber

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      Now, since I couldn’t sleep, I crawled out of bed and pulled down my shell collection from the shelf. I rolled the long tubular tusk shells in my fingers and thought about the ancient people and what Eddy had said about the burial. For the first time I was glad I had moved to Crescent Beach with Aunt Margaret and Uncle Stuart. Still, it would take some time getting used to the idea of living over an ancient Native burial ground.

      Finally, I got back into bed and closed my eyes. I tried to imagine a time when the tiny peninsula was covered in trees and the only people were the dark-skinned Natives who lived by the sea.

      CHAPTER 3

      The next morning Eddy and I stood at the edge of the hole, looking down on the burial. She had already cleared away some of the dirt, and I could see a form beginning to emerge. It seemed more like a small child lying on its side, curled up in sleep. I felt a little weird staring at those fragile bones, bare of all life.

      “Okay, Peggy, when excavating a site, what’s more important at the time — the artifacts you find or the place you find them?”

      In some ways Eddy reminded me of Mrs. Hobbs, though not in the way she dressed. Eddy wore a goofy hat covered in souvenir pins from all over the world and a khaki shirt with little pockets holding lots of little things, like a plumb bob, a measuring tape, and calipers. Her hands were thick and tough — the kind used to hard work and getting dirty. But she was easy to talk to like Mrs. Hobbs and made me feel as if what I thought mattered.

      I searched for the words Eddy had used the day before. “It’s the artifacts in ... ah ... situ — that’s it! The artifacts in situ can tell you the most. That’s why an archaeologist never takes the stuff out until every bit of information around the artifact has been recorded.”

      Eddy smiled. “What kind of information are we looking for?”

      “Okay, I know this. How deep the things are from the surface ... ah, what other stuff is associated nearby ... um, and what the layers of soil are like. That’s the matrix, right?”

      “All right! You’ve been listening! Now that you’ve passed the test you’re ready to be my assistant.” Eddy’s round, wrinkled face smiled approvingly. Gently, she stepped over the string barrier she’d made and knelt by the bones. “Hand me the trowel and dustpan. I’m going to start by levelling this layer that you and your uncle started. Before we can remove the skull and bones, we have to see what else this burial can tell us.”

      I handed her the tool box. Many of the objects inside were things most people had in their garden shed — a dustpan, a bucket, a hand broom, and a diamond-shaped mason’s trowel. There were also some plastic sandwich bags, a small paint brush, and a dental pick like the one Dr. Forsythe used.

      Carefully, Eddy scraped the dirt into the dustpan “We’re not planting flowers and shrubs, so it’s important to consider that just millimetres below, or in the next scoop of matrix, we might find some important bit of information. We don’t want anything to be damaged or missed.” Eddy’s pudgy body was perched over the burial as if she were a medic giving first aid. Occasionally, she stopped and wiped her forehead with the red bandana hanging loosely around her neck.

      Soon the bucket was filled with black sandy soil dotted with bits of broken shell. “Okay, let’s screen this stuff.” She pointed to a rectangular frame covered in fine wire mesh dangling from three poles tied at the top like a teepee. “Once we’ve screened away the loose dirt, we’ll look carefully for any small things I might have missed.”

      I struggled to carry the bucket over to the screening station. Every time I hoisted the pail up to dump its contents, the screen swung away. After three tries, I finally managed to empty the pail.

      “We need to look for anything that appears to be plant life, small animal bones, or shell fragments that I can use to determine food sources available at the time of this burial,” Eddy said. “There might even be some small artifacts, like flaked stone from tool-making.”

      I pushed around the cold, damp soil, which felt like coarse sandpaper to my hands.

      “That-a-girl!” Eddy said. “Now push it around evenly and search for anything that might be important.”

      I studied the surface without recognizing anything special.

      “Okay, nothing there,” Eddy instructed. “Now start to shake it back and forth.”

      I rocked the screen as if it were a baby in a cradle. “You’ll have to do better than that,” she told me. “Give it a good shake.”

      The tiniest grains of soil fell through, covering the plastic sheet with an ever-rising mound of dirt. I could imagine what Aunt Margaret was going to think when she saw all this dirt flattening her grass. Soon there was nothing left in the screen except some tiny pebbles and bits of broken shell that were too large to slip through the wire.

      “It’s nothing too exciting, but we’ll bag these shell fragments as a food sample.” Eddy brought out a clipboard, a paper form, and a plastic Ziploc bag. At the top of the paper were the words “Artifact Record Form.” Below was the word Site, and next to it Eddy wrote “DhRr 1 — Peggy’s Pond.”

      “These letters are a code that will tell any other scientist exactly which site this sample was taken from.” Eddy winked. “Kind of like when X marks the spot on a pirate’s treasure map.”

      “But why did you write Peggy’s Pond?”

      “It’s customary to name a site. Sometimes we name it after the local Native group, or the landowner — or in this case the site discoverer.”

      My cheeks turned warm with colour, then I watched as Eddy wrote: “Shell samples are a possible food source, found in level 1, ten centimetres below datum.” After that she filled the bag.

      “Seems kind of gross that broken shell bits could be evidence of what ancient people ate, especially with a dead person in the mix,” I said. “That’s about as appetizing as finding the remains of a dead pet in the garden along with the zucchini and carrots.”

      Eddy chuckled. “I can see what you mean. But all these broken shells are here because the ancient ones heaped up the used clamshells or fish bones when they were finished with them — kind of like an ancient garbage dump, except it was all organic. Archaeologists call this a shell midden. We’re not absolutely certain why, but it’s quite common in this area to find burials in the midden.”

      “I bet it has something to do with covering the scent of the body so wild animals don’t go digging it up. Nothing could stink as much as rotting fish guts and stuff, right?”

      “That could be it,” Eddy said, smiling. “All right, now that you’ve seen how we record information and store it in bags, you can do the next one.”

      She picked up the bucket and returned to the excavation pit. I knelt beside her on the grass, staring at the black midden like a pup ready to pounce on a ball.

      The morning passed quickly, and I lost track of the number of buckets I screened. We didn’t find a single artifact, and all there was to show for our hard work was a neat mound of loose sand, shell, and dirt under the screen.

      “My legs are getting stiff,” Eddy finally said. “How would you like to dig for a while?”

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