But I get ahead of myself.
In mid August of 1964, I got to put my Iranian driver’s license to good use. I drove a Land Rover carrying Ted and a couple of other anthropologists from Hasanlu to Tehran. From there I flew to Beirut, then London, New York, and Kansas City, where I found Ann, Charlie and Billy, and baby Jim waiting for me.
I’d set out strong and confident; I arrived home weaker and less certain. Besides falling gravely ill, I’d encountered two serious problems in answering Bob Dyson’s question about the three men with the bowl. We knew that the attackers had burned down the palace, but we didn’t know if they had taken possession of the village and stayed put, or had simply destroyed the citadel and moved on. That was one problem. The other was a recent and drastic change in the region’s migration patterns. For thousands of years, the population in the Solduz Valley had remained remarkably stable and isolated. Unlike Europe, where populations have long mixed and mingled, this area was remote and rugged enough to remain geographically and genetically insulated. Lake Urmia provided a water barrier to the northeast; the Zagros Mountains reared thousands of feet high to the west, limiting contact with Iraq; and even higher mountains to the north (including 18,000-foot Mount Ararat) blocked migration from Turkey. But in the 1900s, roads and powered vehicles breached these barriers as surely as Hasanlu’s ancient attackers had breached the citadel’s walls and chariot gate. Many of the modern inhabitants of the Solduz Valley had come down from Turkey during the past century; when I took the measure of some “foreign”-looking head or nose, I didn’t know if I was recording a descendant of some ancient invader or the grandson of a twentieth-century transplant. Today, as anthropologists learn to use DNA to trace the ancient roots of modern populations, it might be possible to provide a more definitive answer to the identities of the three men with the bowl. Possible, but expensive.
And I believe the answer would be the same as what my intuition told me back in 1964 as I pondered the death scene in a village where time — like the dead men — had been frozen for three millennia. I believe the soft-bodied guard with the bowl cradled in his right arm was in the company of two stronger, tougher palace guards: fighting men handpicked for their size and strength. The one least able to fight was given the bowl to carry; the other two were watching his back as they raced to save the bowl from fire and invaders.
I’ve seen scores of death scenes since then. Each one has told me a story, sometimes complete, sometimes fragmentary. Many have been more gruesome; none has been more memorable — or more tantalizing — than the 2,800-year-old tale whispered down through the ages by the golden bowl in the burning palace.
2
SPLASH LANDING, PART 1: FINDING ANSWERS IN TEETH AND SKULL MORPHOLOGY
One of the main missions of a forensic anthropologist is to restore names and identities to the unknown dead. Often these are murder victims; sometimes — as in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina or the World Trade Center attacks — they are victims of mass disasters (mass murder, obviously, in the case of 9/11); occasionally they are people who died of natural or accidental causes and were found without any form of identification.
“Identity” is an interesting notion. What is it that makes us unique as individuals? Is it the sum total of our thoughts and feelings? Is it our place in a family tree, as offspring of a particular set of parents? Or the paper trail we create as we buy cars and houses, cash paychecks, file tax returns? The patterns of raised loops and whorls that help our fingertips grip objects more securely? The chemical composition of our DNA?
The answer, of course, is “all of the above,” and more. Forensically speaking, it’s possible to make a positive identification of an individual in a variety of ways. In recent years, the gold standard has become DNA typing: each of us carries, within the nucleus of every cell in our body, a genetic blueprint written in biochemical code — a coded message that’s three billion lines long, and different from every other person’s. But DNA testing is far from the only technique for positive identification, and it’s often not the fastest or most efficient. Despite what you might gather from television shows like CSI, DNA analysis can take weeks or even months and can cost thousands of dollars. Genetic testing is getting faster and cheaper, but it still has a long, long way to go to rival the speed and affordability of matching a skeleton’s teeth, fillings, and other unique features with missing persons’ antemortem (before-death) dental records, X-rays, and other medical information.
One afternoon in March of 1974, not quite three years after I moved to Knoxville to head the Anthropology Department at the University of Tennessee, four people showed up in my office beneath Neyland Stadium: the sheriff of Blount County (the county just south of Knox County), the coroner of Blount County, the president of the East Tennessee Pilots Association, and a reporter from the Maryville Daily Times.
Actually, four people and one skull showed up in my office. The skull had been found, partially buried in the sand, by a boy walking along an exposed stretch of shoreline in Blount County. That explained the newspaper reporter: Maryville is the county seat of Blount County, but it’s a small town, so it’s big news when somebody finds a human skull along a freshly exposed stretch of riverbank.
Every winter the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) lowers the water level in the string of lakes it has created along the Tennessee River and its tributaries, as a flood-control measure so that when the spring rains set in, the reservoirs can accommodate the extra runoff. Some of the lakes on the Tennessee’s tributaries — Norris and Fontana lakes, for instance — are lowered by fifteen or twenty feet every winter; Fort Loudoun Lake, though, must remain navigable by barge traffic, so TVA drops it by only a few feet. Even so, a drop of several feet is enough to expose large stretches of shoreline — prime territory for arrowhead hunters looking for souvenirs of the valley’s prior, pre-TVA inhabitants.
I don’t know whether this Blount County boy was looking for Indian relics; in any case, what he found was a human skull. He left it there by the river, but that evening he told his father about it. “We’d better go back and get it,” said the boy’s dad. Once they’d retrieved the skull, they contacted the Blount County Sheriff ’s Office, which was understandably anxious to determine whether the skull was ancient or modern, and whether it belonged to a murder victim.
From the heavy, prominent brow ridge over the eyes, this was clearly a male skull. The narrow nasal opening and the vertical structure of the teeth and jaws told me that it was Caucasoid rather than Negroid (in black or African-American people, the teeth and jaws tend to angle forward, a distinctive trait called “prognathism”). And the fact that the incisors were basically flat across the back, rather than shovel-shaped, ruled out the possibility that this was a Native American skull. Besides, except for the lack of a mandible, or lower jaw, the skull was in remarkably good shape — far too pristine to have been stuck in the mud for decades or centuries. Amalgam fillings — done by a good dentist, judging from the handiwork — confirmed the skull’s recent vintage. The skull was unblemished; if it belonged to a murder victim, the murder was definitely not committed by a blow or gunshot to the head. From the wear on the teeth and the prominence of the cranial sutures — the joints between the bones of the cranial vault — I estimated the age to be somewhere between thirty and thirty-four.