The English humorist P.G. Wodehouse got archaeologists right when he wrote: “A mere hole in the ground, which of all sights is perhaps the least vivid and dramatic, is enough to grip their attention for hours at a time.” He was actually describing spectators at a London construction site, but we archaeologists have a fixation with small holes and the extraordinary range of information that comes from them.

Most archaeologists are specialists, who are experts in tiny segments of ancient times—the technology of the first humans, Bronze Age brooches, deer bones, Pueblo painted pottery from the American Southwest, or, my favorite, prehistoric domestic bugs. We’re purveyors of esoteric, and often seemingly irrelevant, information.

An eminent French historian, Le Roy Ladurie, also got students of the past right, when he divided them into two broad categories. Most of us are what he called truffle hunters, content to dig for small, delectable information. Then there are those parachutists, who are content to float gently toward earth, calmly surveying the broad issues of the past.

I’m definitely a historical parachutist, and one of the few archaeologists in the world whose full-time specialty is writing about archaeology on the broadest possible canvas. This blog will be part of my constant, and ever varied, journey through the remote and recent past—opinionated, yes, controversial, sometimes, but hopefully always food for thought.

Let the parachuting begin!

Archaeology and Lake Clark National Park and Preserve, Alaska:
The search for John W. Clark

I’m currently writing a general book on the archaeology of Lake Clark National Park and Preserve, a spectacular glacial landscape of lakes and mountains on the western shore of the Cook Inlet in southern Alaska. Lake Clark Park is remote and difficult of access except by light plane, a trip that is an adventure in itself—of which more anon. The project is a challenging one, for almost nothing is known of the Park’s archaeology, except for two painted rock shelters. I’ve been busily extrapolating from the better known archaeological sites of nearby regions, a journey that’s involved me in fascinating excursions into such obscure subjects as Aleutian kayak hats, stone projectile points, toggled harpoons, and the lives of 19th-century pioneers. One such was John W. Clark, the Alaska Commercial Company’s agent at Nushagak on Bristol Bay, after whom the Park, and Lake Clark itself, are named. This is what I love about my research—the people from the past you meet, and the helpful folk out there who help you at every turn. I knew nothing about Clark, except that he was an ACC agent at Nushagak in the year 1890, but I wanted a picture of him for the book. My cyberjourney began with the University of Alaska Library in Fairbanks. The archivist replied within hours and sent me to the Anchorage Museum, where another archivist referred me to several people, among them Bruce Merrell, the Alaska Bibliographer at the Anchorage Public Library, who delivered the goods. An obscure article in the Alaska Journal for 1975 reprinted an account of Alaskan travel from Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper for 1891, complete with a portrait of Mr. Clark. The story recounted an epic journey from St. Michael to the Katmai Peninsula by Aleutian kayak and sledge in late autumn, led by the writer E.H. Wells. “How wild and weird, how strangely lonesome were the northlands on those October days!” he wrote in his understated account of what must have been a horrifically tough journey—days without food and heat and very rugged terrain. Wells tells us little about Clark, except that he was “much surprised” by our arrival. So I fell back on his portrait, a depiction of a well mustachioed gentleman, perhaps in his late 30s, with somewhat hooded eyes. He comes across as calm and kindly, someone not easily rattled by what must have been a lonely and demanding life, with a ship visiting but once a year.

Some years ago, the English writer Jan Morris wrote a charming biography of Admiral “Jacky” Fisher, of dreadnaught fame, which she called Fisher’s Face. It all came about because she became obsessed with a portrait of the Admiral as a young Royal Navy Captain and started reading things into his expression. Fisher’s Face is a lovely read, a historical love affair with someone who was flamboyant, hard driving, and full of life.

I was tempted to do the same with J.W. Clark, but Aleutian hats and Kodiak Island whale hunters diverted me. But I enjoyed my brief visit to 19th-century Nushagak.

The Great Warming

I’ve published three books on ancient climate change—one on El Niño, The Little Ice Age, which covers six-and-a-half centuries of exceptionally unpredictable climate between A.D. 1200 and 1860, and The Long Summer, which describes climate change and its impact on human societies over the last 15,000 years. The fourth, and final, book in the quartet will appear in March 2008. The Great Warming describes four centuries of slightly warmer climate of the so-called Medieval Warm Period between A.D. 800 and 1200 that were benign enough to allow farmers to plant vineyards in Central England. The same centuries also helped the Norse trade with the Inuit of Baffinland and to over-winter in northern Newfoundland. All this is familiar historical territory, but if you look at the Medieval Warm Period on a global canvas, you find something much more significant for our own world. There were epochal droughts in the American West, over much of the Pacific and large tracts of the tropical world—these the result of relatively minor warming. The more I delved into the subject, the more I realized that drought is what I ended up calling “The Silent Elephant in the Room”, often neglected in the face of dire predictions about sea level rises and higher temperatures. When I got to Britain’s Hadley Center for Climatic Change’s predictions of future extreme droughts, I became really frightened. Imagine a world where a third of the land surface suffers from such droughts! This may be the case by 2050, and that’s not too far away.

The lessons of the past for the future are worth thinking about.