Lives in Ruins by Marilyn Johnson Page B

archaeologist could focus on asite for years and never get to break ground. Besides endurance, stubbornness, and hard work, it seemed that an archaeologist also needed luck. And I had not imagined that the desire to dig might still be burning into one’s ninth decade.
    I sat next to this woman, thwarted in her attempt to do hard physical labor in remote China, but still serene as she listened to the tributes made to colleagues who succeeded in acting on their visions: the man who received the gold medal for notable contributions to archaeology; the woman who won the teaching prize that three of her students had already won—an act of tribute to the ancestor that seemed fitting and possibly overdue. And, in my ignorance, I felt sorry for Nelson.
    We traded business cards and went our separate ways, and I found myself caught up with an assortment of other archaeologists, but Nelson stayed on my mind. She might have been disappointed in her efforts to excavate the Goddess Temple, but it turned out she was a recognized authority in the archaeology of Asia, particularly of the remote places and cultures beyond the Great Wall, in the region once known as Manchuria. “Those of us who have had the opportunity to work in Asian archaeology,” one American scholar wrote, “are constantly impressed by the amount and intensity of research undertaken in the region, and by how little of that work is visible in the western-language literature.” The scholar pegged Nelson as a key figure in interpreting Asia, particularly China and Korea, to Western archaeologists. * The more I read about Nelson, the more I got the message: I had picked up a pioneer.
    In addition to her work in Asian archaeology, Nelson has also written and edited a whole shelf of books on gender; she is an outspoken voice for women in their efforts to join the boys’ club that isarchaeology, and to study not just the men and objects of the past but the women, too. How do you do groundbreaking archaeology when almost everything conspires against it? By the time I caught up with Nelson a few months after we met, at the Society for American Archaeology’s annual meeting in Memphis, and once again we sat with our wine in a sea of beer drinkers, I needed to hear her story.
    Nelson set the stage for me. She graduated from Wellesley in 1953 with a degree in biblical archaeology, and married a Harvard man. She spent some years in Germany where her husband, Hal, a doctor for the Army, was stationed. By 1961, they had three sons. They moved often, but Nelson didn’t mind as long as they lived in stimulating places like Europe or San Francisco, but postings in small towns in the southern U.S. were stifling. “At one point,” she said, “I was so desperate for something meaningful to do that I convinced a friend to ride bikes with me in the scorching sun with our babies in seats on the backs, looking for Indian mounds that were marked on the map of the [Army] post. We never found the mounds, but later I learned that they were on the firing range, with targets propped up against them. Off limits.” She vetoed an assignment to Fort Bragg, in North Carolina. My turn, she told Hal.
    At age thirty-six, Nelson won a spot in archaeology graduate school at the University of Michigan; she had interviewed in pearls and heels. She found herself a student again, a mother of three trying to fit in with the hippies. Most of her professors made it clear that training women was a waste of time. Even after her time in Asia, she said that reentry to the university had been the worst culture shock of her life.
    When her husband accepted an assignment to spend 1970 and 1971 in Korea, “unaccompanied,” as the Army delicately put it, Nelson planned to take the children and a tutor to Taiwan to do research for her dissertation. While camping at her sister’s house in California with her entourage, Nelson’s plan collapsed; she couldn’t