Lives in Ruins by Marilyn Johnson Page A

unpurchased book and tried not to look alarmed as his valuable commodity walked out the door. McGovern didn’t hold the rash act against me. We shook hands and he thanked me for assistance in “his hour of need.” (Later, he sent me an e-mail, wondering if I had taken down the name of the archaeologist who had left without paying. I hadn’t, but fortunately a check soon arrived for McGovern—even tipsy archaeologists, apparently, remember their debts.)
    And as suddenly as that, the gallery was cleared and the archaeologists and archaeology fans had scattered. All that was left were empty bottles.

PIG DRAGONS
How to pick up an archaeologist

    S AME CONFERENCE , different bar. The enthusiasts had long since gone home, so the serious business of archaeology could begin. The line of archaeologists snaked around the reception room in the Philadelphia Marriott, waiting patiently for their rations. Soon they would be celebrating colleagues who had made significant contributions to their field, but first they flocked to the back of the room. Pop, pop , the caps were flipped on bottle after bottle, then each archaeologist dove into the appetizer table, juggling a beer with a plate of cheese cubes and grapes.
    The lovely older woman in line ahead of me joked as we watched the bartender serve an endless stream of beer: clearly, we agreed, beer is the international beverage of archaeology, cheap enough for students and shovelbums, and if you made it to awards night at the conference—free! It was her turn to order. White wine, please, she said. My sister in libation! We bonded over our glasses of sour house wine, made a dip over the dip table, and settled in beside each other for the program.
    Her name was Sarah Milledge Nelson: early eighties, snow-white Wellesley pageboy. She wore sharp pants and jacket, a jaunty scarf, and Merrell Mary Janes. She had a way of gathering her hair upand airing her neck, as if she were out in the hot sun. I might have dreamed her up.
    I floated a clumsy pickup line and tried to guess where she had excavated. Style, gravitas, easy banter. . . . I imagined that she headed for Greece, or somewhere else in the Mediterranean. Wrong. She said her spot was China, particularly in the Northeast, near Mongolia, where one of the earliest life-size statues of a woman had been found. China was not a place where you’d expect to find large clay statues of women, certainly not five or six thousand years ago, but there one was, in pieces, at the evocatively named Goddess Temple in China, along with a variety of other sculptures, including many jade pendants with pig heads—“pig dragons,” as the pendants were called.
    And this is what happens when you strike up a conversation with an archaeologist. Soon you are talking about bone grease . . . or pointy-headed babies . . . or pig dragons. No matter how many times I’ve heard about these sculptures since, or said the words pig and dragon together in my head, I still get a kick out of that combination of the homely and the exotic. Even the refined Nelson, I saw, also relished saying the phrase “pig dragon.”
    The Goddess Temple had been Sarah Nelson’s site to dig. She was the first foreign archaeologist allowed to visit it in 1987, and won two American grants to excavate there, and though she squeezed the grants to last over seven years of frugal summer trips, the permit from the Chinese to break ground didn’t come through until after her funding ran out. What does an archaeologist without a permit do? On one visit, she did ground-penetrating radar with a handful of students; on another, she measured the temple’s alignment with the sun, the stars, and the planets, studying the site’s archaeoastronomy. Recently, she applied for another grant to excavate the Goddess Temple but was turned down, she suspected because of her age. Here was something I hadn’t considered: that an