“We found about two-thirds of an intact calf,” David Landon says matter-of-factly of the young cow his team unearthed in 2016, as he leans forward, elbows on the archaeological papers that cover his desk.
Landon, Associate Director of the Andrew Fiske Memorial Center for Archeological Research at the University of Massachusetts (UMass), Boston, is in the midst of a substantial project unearthing artifacts at the 1620 Plymouth site, one of the earliest English colonies in North America. These artifacts belong to the Pilgrims and highlight the country’s hidden history that so many are still trying to discover — including the sixty-six percent of a calf that lay in the ground.
“Usually when you find animal bones, they’re chopped up into little pieces after people have eaten the meat, and spread all around,” Landon explains. “This was actually a big part of an animal that had been taken — intact — and buried in a pit.” And not just any pit — a pit right outside a Pilgrim home.
“The house is here, the pit’s there,” he says, pointing from his chair to the door of his office, about seven feet away, giving a rough gauge of the pit-to-house distance. His cramped office sits at the end of a hallway at UMass Boston, with two windows that overlook a parking lot and the Squantum Channel, part of the Boston Harbor. A whiteboard stands behind him, enshrouded by papers and notes.
Landon says all that remained of the calf when they found it were its bones, though they didn’t include its head, rear limbs, and feet. The calf was largely articulated, meaning when it was buried, tissues still connected the bones. The Pilgrims had partially butchered the animal then threw it into the pit, perhaps because it had gone rancid too quickly to preserve or eat in the warmest days of the summer. But every little detail counts in piecing together history, even if that little detail is two-thirds of a four-hundred-year-old skeleton.
The archaeologists know the cow belonged to the Pilgrims because Native Americans didn’t have domestic cattle at the time. Yet, “it was in a pit that had a lot of native pottery in it — more native pottery than English pottery,” Landon says. If the Pilgrims had Native American pottery, and a lot of it, it shows that they were interacting with the Native Americans even more than previously thought.
These are the types of discoveries that Landon set out to make, the ones that can help shape history and make an impact, even before he became an archaeologist.
“I fell into this by accident,” he says. “I wanted to be an international development economist.” Then in 1981, his freshman-year archaeology professor at Wesleyan College convinced him to set off down a more historical path. Stephen Dyson ran the class with no due dates and a plethora of independence. Landon enjoyed the freedom of researching archaeology and disliked the business-school focused students in his economics classes, leading him to make the switch.
But it wasn’t easy to convince himself changing majors was the right choice. He says, “Honestly at the time, the mental debate I was having with myself was, ‘Is it okay to do something that’s so irrelevant or am I compelled to do something that more directly engages the social issues in our world?’” When he was pursuing international developmental economics, he had visions of improving the world and didn’t know if archaeology could have the same effect.
Landon, who at age fifty-four has short gray hair yet a still youthful face, says that archaeology is now more real-world relevant. Through various positions in the field, including one as a research fellow at the Smithsonian Institution’s Archaeobiology Laboratory, he’s developed into a historical archaeologist who works in the most recent time periods. Historical archaeologists study time periods that have written records or oral traditions that can confirm — or conflict — with what the archaeologists find.
“Historical archaeology is like working on the margins of history and archaeology,” he says. “We’re putting documentary and archaeological evidence together.” Historical archaeologists use records from the era they’re studying to corroborate their findings. At the Plymouth site, Landon’s team set out to learn more about the Pilgrims who lived there in the 1620s. Since the site in Plymouth is fairly recent at only 400 years old, it means Landon can still collaborate with descendants of those who lived there and who have a stake in the history, like the Wampanoag Mashpee tribe, one of the groups of native people whose ancestors were known to interact with the Pilgrims. Working with these communities and ensuring their voices are heard is important to Landon, and he makes sure to do that at his other sites as well. Landon’s use of collaboration in his research and commitment to teaching allows for him to serve as an archaeologist for the people of today, not just the people of the past.
Landon studies more than just the Pilgrims. The Museum of African American History in Boston is restoring a house on Nantucket Island that a formerly enslaved man, Seneca Boston, owned. He lived in the home with his wife, a native Wampanoag woman named Thankful Micah, and their six children. Boston purchased the land in 1774, a decade before slavery was abolished in Massachusetts. African Americans owned the home for the next two centuries, except for a period of one year. Landon analyzes the material found there, but says he also tries to help the museum answer the question, “How do you actually translate this to the public, and how can you help modern communities use this information to address real-world concerns that they have?”
“We’d like to make this public archaeology,” Landon says. The museum’s team is going to transform part of the house into an interpretive center and display some of the artifacts that Landon’s group found to educate visitors about the family who lived there.
Each year in Plymouth, undergraduate and graduate students join Landon at the site to dig, search, and learn. Allie Crowder is a graduate student at UMass Boston who is pursuing a Masters in Historical Archaeology and was both a student in Landon’s classes and a researcher at the Plymouth site. She says that while students are digging, Landon will come check on what they’re doing. “He’ll listen to what you have to say and will engage with your opinions on it, rather than just saying ‘yes’ or ‘no’ or flat-out just tell you what’s going on. I can’t stress enough how important that is and how much of an impact that has on his students.”
Crowder says, “He has this kind of infectious energy and enthusiasm, so not only is it an academic exercise when we’re working in the field, but he helps us recognize that you can have a lot of fun while doing it.” Landon challenges the students to a poetry competition each summer, culminating into a performance where the students read poetry and parodied song lyrics about their experience in Plymouth.
In the archaeology center, where he works at UMass, Landon leans against a doorway that connects two labs while Crowder sits at a computer off to the side. Lining the walls are drawers filled with small pieces of pottery, fabric, bone, plants, and more for the researchers to reference while studying new artifacts. These drawers also contain coins to help the students determine which era the ones they uncover in the dirt are from. Students compete with each other to be the first to find a coin while digging each summer in Plymouth.
At the start of last summer, a freshman student was digging when she excitedly yelped out that she’d found the first coin. Landon ran over to her, asking when she thought it was from. “1987!” she excitedly told him, holding up a dusty penny, obviously thinking she’d found something old. Laughing, he called the graduate students to come look, expecting them to agree that the coin wasn’t old at all. In 1987, Landon was twenty-four and a Ph.D. student in archaeology at Boston University, but to his dismay, the students revealed that none of them had even been alive in 1987.
“That’s when I realized how old I really am,” Landon says, shaking his head. His silver wireframe glasses slide slightly down his nose as his head remains permanently and uncomfortably tilted to the right side. His severe neck and back problems make it so he can’t dig anymore, he can only supervise. When asked if he misses digging, he hesitates, then remains silent. Crowder pipes up from the side, “Yes, I think he does.”
Despite this, Landon still finds ways to stay involved, such as through his collaboration with descendant communities and other researchers like Christa Beranek, a research scientist at the archaeology center. After working with Landon in various capacities for the last ten years, Beranek knows Landon is very committed to working collaboratively. She says, “that’s something that a lot of archaeologists talk about doing, but Landon actually succeeds in it.”
In Plymouth, he’s determined to include the Mashpee Wampanoag tribe, who work on the site with Landon and his student researchers. The tribe gives context to the items found on the site and explains their history to his students. Landon says, “For the last two years, staff from the tribal historic preservation office have come out and worked with us on the project so that they can not only see what we’re doing, understand it, and make sure that they’re comfortable with it, but also to bring their tribal understanding of the history.”
-Abbey Interrante
Abbey Interrante 