Her excursions also take her to Incan ruins and the tomb of King Midas, where she encounters the residue from ancient brew masters. There are also the fascinating findings that Johnson unearths about Ice Age hunters, a forgotten American Revolution burial ground erased by a strip mall, and a dig off the coast of Cypress that might have been a temple to Apollo financed by Cleopatra. John Shea, for example, believes there is genius in our primitive ancestors and takes pride in uncovering the tools that prove 'people are as smart and adaptive as contemporary humans…they simply had different environments and challenges than we do.'

Thus, through a combination of perception and wit, Johnson discovers how archaeologists are invaluable witnesses 'to the loss of our cultural memories.' They dial back the past like a time machine in search of fragments of human history. This is merely one tidbit from a shifting population of experts and volunteers. 'Place is not the background of archaeology - it's the point,' Johnson observes. It played host to a thriving black market, and Gilmore and his diggers found Chinese porcelain and German seltzer bottles, which obviously weren't the usual bounty at slave sites. Eustatius) is different from the rest of the Caribbean.

In boot camp, for instance, Johnson learns from Grant Gilmore, director of the SECAR field school, that Statia (St. Yet Johnson, who previously paid tribute to obituary writers in The Dead Beat and librarians in This Book is Overdue!, manages to convey 'the seductive lure of human rubble,' tracking hardworking and dedicated archaeologists in the Caribbean, the Mediterranean and Machu Picchu. You won't find Indiana Jones among the archaeologists dug up by science reporter Marilyn Johnson in Lives in Ruins.

Lives in Ruins by Marilyn Johnson