TURNER – University of Maine at Farmington archaeologist Bob Bartone can regale you with stories about eating monkey and alligator, or close encounters with poisonous critters and deadly snakes in the Amazon jungle.
But he’ll probably tell you, too, that the majority of his days are not spent digging up fabulous finds or uncovering ancient treasure.
They’re spent, instead, at a desk in a lab (about 90 percent of the time, according to Bartone) and overseeing the deliberate digging of perfectly square holes in the ground (the remaining 10 percent).
“Only about one-tenth of my time is spent in the field,” Bartone said Wednesday, seated in a shady spot on a dig site near Bear Pond amid the usual detritus of an excavation. Wheelbarrows and small plastic baggies, permanent markers and shovels, trowels, cardboard boxes, maps and sieves, books, cameras and surveying equipment, water bottles and a large table were sprawled over less than half an acre of land.
“Archaeologists in general will probably all say they don’t spend as much time in the field as they’d like to,” Bartone said. “But a lot of archaeology is analysis, writing.”
And while that analysis can feel, as Bartone says, “very removed” from the intimacy of finding pieces of stone tools – an ancient man’s trash – where they were dropped 8,000 years ago, it is in the lab that the story comes together.
Ellen Cowie, who is the UMF Archaeology Center’s director and its principal archaeologist, said in the lab she tries, “to decipher what can we say, what kind of story can we make from these bags of artifacts, these fragments of stone tools?'”
For the past two weeks, Archaeology Center staff and between 2 and 16 volunteers – depending on the day – excavated an 8,000- to 10,000-year-old Paleo-Indian site near Bear Pond as part of a UMF-sponsored volunteer dig. Back at the lab, their finds will add a bit more detail to the picture Bartone and Cowie are trying to create of Maine’s ancient past.
Working in a shady excavation pit in Wednesday morning’s relative cool, staff member Hannah Corey, 25, meticulously dug another perfectly square layer out of her section, tossing the dirt almost carelessly into a waiting wheelbarrow.
Volunteer David Cheeseman of Canton pushed the wheelbarrow to a sieve set up on a wooden tripod, where he and his wife, Muriel, shook and jostled the contraption until nothing but small stones and twigs remained. Then they began to comb through the stones, now and then reaching in and pulling out a minute, thin piece and putting it gingerly into a numbered baggie.
Later – as Wednesday was the last full day of the dig – they would fill in the hole, take apart the dig site, and bring the artifacts home.
But for a while, over lunch in the shade, they talked about what draws them, time and time again, to dig pits in the earth looking for a snapshot, as Bartone says, of the past.
For Cheeseman, who says he’s been “finding stuff” since he was a child with his dad, digging is “a necessity.” What with all the development going on these days, he said, “if you don’t do it, you’re losing out on history.”
For Muriel, it’s about the people themselves. “I often wonder what their life was like. Did they have a big family, a small family?”
Bartone and Corey both said they almost fell into the job. Corey, who’s father, Richard, is a UMF staff archaeologist and who has been digging there with her dad and Bartone since she was a kid, said she does it because it’s fun. It’s a way of making a living that gets her outside doing physical labor, while still being intellectually challenging.
But Bartone cut in. “You start doing archaeology because it’s really fun, and then you don’t know how to do anything else. Once you do it, it’s always there.”
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