my work. "I grub in the dirt, that's what I do. I dig up dead Indians. Archaeologists are really no better than scavengers, sifting through the garbage that people left behind when they died, moved on, built a new house, a new town, a new temple. We're garbage collectors really. Is that clear?" The sleek young woman's smile faltered, but she bravely continued the interview.
That was in Berkeley, just after the publication of my last book, but the memory of the interview lingered with me. I pitied the reporter and the photographer who accompanied her. It was so obvious that they did not know what to do with me.
I am an old woman. My hair is gray and brown—the color of the limestone monuments raised by the Maya one thousand years ago. My face has weathered through the years—the sun has etched wrinkles around the eyes, the wind has carved lines. At age fifty-one, I am a troublesome old woman.
My name is Elizabeth Butler; my friends and students call me Liz. The University of California at Berkeley lists me as a lecturer and field archaeologist, but in actuality I am a mole, a scavenger, a garbage collector. I find it somewhat surprising, though gratifying, that I have managed to make my living in such a strange occupation.
Often, I argue with other people who grub in the dirt. I have a reputation for asking too many embarrassing questions at conferences where everyone presents their findings. I have always enjoyed asking embarrassing questions.
Sometimes, much to the dismay of my fellow academics, I write books about my activities and the activities of my colleagues. In general, I believe that my fellow garbage collectors regard my work as suspect because it has become quite popular. Popularity is not the mark of a properly rigorous academic work. I believe that their distrust of my work reflects a distrust of me. My work smacks of speculation; I tell stories about the people who inhabited the ancient ruins— and my colleagues do not care for my tales.
In academic circles, I linger on the fringes where the warmth of the fire never reaches, an irreverent outsider, a loner who prefers fieldwork to the university and general readership to academic journals.
But then, the popularizers don't like me either. I gave that reporter trouble, I know. I talked about dirt and potsherds when she wanted to hear about romance and adventure. And the photographer—a young man who was more accustomed to fashion-plate beauties than to weatherworn archaeologists— did not know how to picture the crags and fissures of my face. He kept positioning me in one place, then in another. In the end, he took photographs of my hands: pointing out the pattern on a potsherd, holding a jade earring, demonstrating how to use a mano and metate, the mortar and pestle with which the Maya grind corn.
My hands tell more of my history than my face. They are tanned and wrinkled and I can trace the paths of veins along their backs. The nails are short and hard, like the claws of some digging animal, and the wrists are marked with vertical white scars, a permanent record of my attempt to escape my former husband and the world in the most drastic way possible. The magazine photographer was careful to position my hands so that the scars did not show.
I believe that the reporter who interviewed me expected tales of tombs, gold, and glory. I told her about heat, disease, and insect bites. I described the time that my jeep broke an axle fifty miles from anywhere, the time that all my graduate students had diarrhea simultaneously, the time that the local municipality stole half my workmen to work on a local road. "Picture postcards never show the bugs," I told her. "Stinging ants, wasps, fleas, roaches the size of your hand. Postcards never show the heat."
I don't think that I told her what she wanted to hear, but I enjoyed myself. I don't think that she believed all my stories. I think she still believes that archaeologists wear white pith helmets and find treasure each day before breakfast. She asked me why, if conditions were as horrible as I described, why I would ever go on another dig. I remember that she smiled when she asked me, expecting me to talk about the excitement of discovery, the thrill of uncovering lost civilizations. Why do I do it?
"I'm crazy," I said. I don't think she believed me.