To begin to answer Bob’s question about who the three men with the bowl were, I needed to see and measure as many skeletons of citadel defenders as possible. Bob had hired about a hundred local men as workers for the summer; he would use ninety of them to dig for artifacts; Ted and I were given thirteen to excavate buried warriors. My assumption — an educated guess — was that the citadel’s defenders would be buried in the local cemetery, while invaders killed in the assault would not be. In the course of my Native American digs in South Dakota, I’d grown accustomed to using earthmoving equipment to remove tons of topsoil quickly. Here, my resources were more limited; instead of road graders, I had the Iranian prototype of a dump truck: a donkey with a couple of jute sacks we could fill with dirt or rocks. The division of manpower in my crew was simple: four pickmen, four shovel-men, four wheelbarrow-men, and one water boy. Still, despite the primitive approach, we developed a good rhythm — the pickmen were surprisingly skilled at reading the soil and avoiding damage to the ancient skulls and bones — and soon we were unearthing several skeletons a day. Over the weeks to come, we would excavate a total of eighty-three burials, which was a dozen more than crews had excavated in the previous six summers combined.
As the skeletons mounted, we began to get a good idea of the skeletal characteristics of these ancient warriors. Their bones tended to be quite robust, with prominent muscle markings created by the tug of mighty sword arms and powerful legs. That makes sense: fighting men need to be big and strong. The three men associated with the golden bowl fit this general description as well, with one notable exception: the man who died with the bowl in his arms was big all right, but judging by the very slight muscle markings, he couldn’t have been very strong. Perhaps his size got him a job as a palace guard, but, having a more sedentary job than a soldier would, he got soft. Ted went so far as to speculate that he might have been the palace eunuch, an unprovable but reasonable hypothesis, since castration would have reduced his testosterone level drastically, and testosterone helps athletes build muscle mass (one reason some hard-core female bodybuilders take synthetic testosterone). I was pretty confident that, given his lack of strength, the guy carrying the bowl wasn’t a battle-hardened invader who’d fought his way through the ranks of the citadel’s defenders.
But what about the two other guys hot on his heels — were they running With him, watching his back? Or were they running after him — chasing him, and on the verge of catching him when the walls came tumbling down? To answer that part of the question, I needed to measure Hasanlu’s living, breathing inhabitants and see what clues to the dead I might find among the living.
Before leaving Kansas, I’d searched the literature and found that there were no modern studies of the people of the Solduz Valley. An anthropologist named Henry Fields had measured several populations in the Middle East, including groups about seventy or eighty miles south, but none in Azerbaijan, and certainly none in the Solduz Valley. I asked Bob Dyson if I could measure workers during lunch breaks or other slow times, and he said sure. So I’d go around and measure people who were on the crews — their stature, arm length, cranial length and breadth, and the height and width of their noses (which tended to be big and beaklike). After a few days I noticed that people were lining up to get measured — not just workmen but women and children, who were walking out from the village, a thirty-minute round-trip. This puzzled me greatly, so I asked the interpreter to find out why my measurement project had made me so popular. It took some asking around for him to find out the truth, but eventually he learned the reason: word on the street had it that I was measuring people for overcoats for the winter, and that everyone I measured would get a free coat.
By that time I’d measured sixty or eighty people, and I felt bad that, through no fault of my own, people’s hopes were going to be raised and then — come winter — dashed. I tried to correct the misinformation; I asked the interpreter to explain that this was strictly science, that nobody from this area had ever been measured before, and that I wasn’t going to be able to send overcoats. But the villagers simply wouldn’t believe that, and they kept coming, so I stopped taking my measurements.
Another reason I stopped taking measurements was that I got deathly ill. The intestinal bug I’d picked up in Tehran came roaring back with a vengeance, causing me to double over with cramps. My digestive system didn’t know what hit it — bouts of near-constant diarrhea alternated with spells of painful constipation. I was weak from hunger and dehydration, because I was vomiting frequently, too. One moment I would be shaking with chills, and the next, sweating with fever. I spent days in delirium.
During the day, while Ted was out supervising the excavation crew, the expedition’s recorder, Carolyn Dosker, kept an eye on me, bringing me boiled water, yogurt (the Iranian cure-all), and a bit of rice when I could handle it. At night, Ted — after a long day of running herd over the crew — would take over. During my lucid moments, I thought of my wife Ann, who was eight months pregnant; my sons Charlie and Billy; and the baby I might never see. I vowed not to die in Iran.
I got help keeping that vow. I’d written home when my illness began to worsen, asking if my physician could send me some prescription antibiotics, since the over-the-counter medications we had weren’t helping. Unfortunately, it wasn’t possible to send prescriptions through normal channels. Luckily, thanks to Carlton Coon, we had access to other, better channels. Just when I was starting to wonder whether I would survive, a diplomatic courier pouch reached Tabriz from the States loaded with powerful antibiotics, which were brought to me in Hasanlu. The medicine didn’t cure me overnight, but in the days that followed I rallied, regained much of my strength, and returned to the field. It would take me another six months to recover fully, but I knew within days of the medicine’s arrival that I wouldn’t die in a primitive village in the Solduz Valley, thousands of miles from my home and my family.
After I was back on my feet, we took our crew to spend several days excavating at a Kurdish site — a mountaintop fort that had been destroyed by an earthquake a couple thousand years ago. The drive over was hot and dusty, so we stopped at a creek to cool down and clean up. We stripped to our boxer shorts to bathe in the creek; I looked up from the water and noticed a crowd of Kurdish women gathered on a nearby hill to look at us. We waved and they chattered excitedly, but I’m not sure what they were saying.
The ruins of the Kurdish fort were terraced into a mountainside about a thousand feet above a valley. During our lunch break, we wrestled a big rock to the edge and rolled it off, then watched and whooped as it crashed down a thousand feet. From the pile of debris it shattered upon, I could tell we weren’t the first to succumb to that boyish impulse.
Back at Hasanlu, we began to wind down for the summer. We’d been boxing up the bones all along, as they were excavated. Ted and I left before the expedition completely wound down for the summer. We left maybe a week or two before Bob did — school was starting soon, and we had families to get back to. Ann had given birth to our third son, Jim, and she and I were both eager to have me back home. Bob had to shut down the site and sort through the summer’s worth of excavated relics. We just picked a day and stopped.
At the end of the season, when the site was shut down and the crews were all gone, the U.S. ambassador and the head of the Tehran museum would inspect the relics, which had been divided into two batches of roughly equivalent value, labeled “A” and “B.” Small slips of paper would be put into a hat, and the American and the Iranian would draw lots to see which nation got batch “A” and which got “B.” We’d divided all the skeletal material into sixteen roughly equal units — big wooden crates of skeletal material — sitting out in the hallway of the museum. But either no one cared about the bones or they never got around to dividing them up, because those bones eventually trailed me back to Kansas, and later from Kansas to Tennessee.