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Digging in Folklore, Unearthing Science
By FELICIA R. LEE
Published: June 12, 2004
PRINCETON, N.J. — Adrienne Mayor, known as a folklorist, has a story for each of the objects inside her curio chest: the gila monster stuffed by her great-grandfather, the skeletons, a Zuni fetish in the shape of a dinosaur and casts of mastodon teeth collected by Abenaki Indians in 1739 along the Ohio River, among others.
The casts, though, are one of Ms. Mayor's favorite curiosities because they represent the first American fossils ever studied by scientists.
"It all comes back to the question that is at the center of my research: what are the first inklings of science?" said Ms. Mayor, a short 58-year-old with black wire-framed glasses, a gentle manner and a musical voice. "All these stories I collect are based on observation and interpretation, which is what science is. Science didn't just burst on the scene, but it wasn't noticed because it was written in mythological language."
Ms. Mayor was talking in the living room of her home on a quiet dead-end street in this leafy community. Although she lives in a university town, she came late to scholarship after spending most of her professional life as a printmaker and freelance copy editor. "I never even thought about writing a book until I was 50 years old," she said.
But when Ms. Mayor's first book, "The First Fossil Hunters: Paleontology in Greek and Roman Times" (Princeton University Press), came out four years ago, this late-blooming outsider with no advanced degrees caused something of a sensation among high-ranking anthropologists, paleontologists, geologists and others. She used Roman and Greek texts to argue that some fossils were used to support or create myths about strange creatures in the ancient world.
"Art historians think that Ms. Mayor may well have solved the puzzle of the Corinthian vase depicting Heracles shooting arrows at the head of the monster of the Troy legend," John Noble Wilford wrote in The New York Times in 2000. She noticed that the mysterious monster's head closely resembled the skull of an extinct giraffe.
Now Ms. Mayor is at it again. She said her third and latest book, a combination of history, archaeology, folklore and old-fashioned detective work, would be the first scholarly attempt to set the record straight about Native American contributions to paleontology.
American museums often juxtapose Indian artifacts with dinosaur remains, Ms. Mayor said, but curators never seem to make the connection between local native cultures and the evidence of remarkable creatures from another age that the Indians had encountered on their lands. ("The message you get is that both are extinct," she said.) So she took on the task of documenting the extensive paleontological knowledge of many Indians, expanding a historical record that showed that they often served as sources and guides for early fossil expeditions.
But many of the Native Americans' contributions were either lost or dismissed as myth as paleontology sought to become a more formal science, she explained. Sometimes they were ignored because of racist ideas about Native Americans, Ms. Mayor said. And because Native American history is largely passed down orally, much of it was simply not written down. Her corrective journey took her everywhere from museums in Paris to Indian reservations around the United States. She drove more than 8,000 miles, her companions several small wire-bound notebooks, as well as a sleeping bag, water and food.
Ms. Mayor ended up finding many of the native people's explanations for the fossils on Indian reservations, where residents were surprisingly forthcoming. Sometimes she literally went door to door, seeking medicine men and traditional historians, hoping to make a connection with people who often regard their stories as personal possessions.
"In Pine Ridge, S.D., I knocked on the door of Johnson Holy Rock," she recalled, referring to an 87-year-old Lakota historian. "I just knocked on the door, and he let me in. He talked to me for two and a half hours. He wanted to talk about Crazy Horse. His father was there with Custer; he was just a little boy. He recalled an old story about warriors' watching thunder in the valley and finding the carcass of a creature they'd never seen before, a gigantic rhinoceroslike beast."
The Comanche people in Oklahoma, she said, told stories about grandmothers' sending them out to find the bones of monsters, which they would grind into a powder for medicine or mix with water to set bones.
"They said you could tell if it was the right bone if it stuck to your tongue," Ms. Mayor said. Researching that report, she discovered that paleontologists do indeed lick bones to tell whether they are real fossils, because the real ones cling to the tongue. (Fossil bone is hydrophilic, which means that it absorbs moisture.)
"I expect a little controversy with this book because of the continuing tension, quite raw, between paleontologists and Native Americans," Ms. Mayor said.
There is a continuing debate between the two groups over who owns the fossil-rich land (and what's inside it) and over who can interpret those findings, she explained. Some traditional Native Americans do not believe in digging beneath the earth's surface or in disturbing fossils.
That battle plays out against an ugly history of scholars' taking Native American skulls and turning them over to natural history museums. She said some paleontologists told her that they feared that Native Americans would try to reclaim some of the fossils now in museums as cultural artifacts belonging to their people.
But the two groups are not as far apart as they think, Ms. Mayor insisted. Each believes there is something valuable to learn from fossils. One idea that she likes, suggested by some Native Americans, is to build museums right over the fossils, on the reservations. It would help the reservation economy and allow museum visitors to see the actual bones right in the ground. (The view would depend on soil erosion and on how much dirt the paleontologists removed.)
"I think she is very courageous to take on the archaeological and anthropological establishment," said Vine Deloria Jr., a leading Native American scholar and professor emeritus of history at the University of Colorado, Boulder. "From our correspondence, I feel it will be a well-researched book asking piercing questions."
Ms. Mayor said she was mostly surprised and delighted by the interest in her work, which captivates not just scientists but also schoolchildren who attend her lectures. In August the History Channel plans to broadcast a show (as yet untitled) about the first fossil hunters, based on her first book.
One of Ms. Mayor's admirers is Barry S. Strauss, a professor of history and classics at Cornell. He said Ms. Mayor was "one of those people with a way of flying in under the radar, and then suddenly it seems as if her presence was there all along." He described her as both modest and exuberant.
"Before Mayor, it seemed outlandish that Greeks and Romans collected fossils, much less based their myths on them," Mr. Strauss said. "Now it seems obviously true. Before Mayor, poison arrows and man-made plagues seemed a far cry from ancient warfare, but now it looks like they were always waiting in the wings."
Ms. Mayor, who has a bachelor's degree in classical legend from the University of Minnesota, Minneapolis — she invented the major by combining her interests in history, science and folklore studies — explained: "I was talking to classicists and archaeologists to point out how interesting this all was. I saw a pattern that nobody else saw."
Her second book, "Greek Fire, Poison Arrows and Scorpion Bombs: Biological and Chemical Warfare in the Ancient World" (Overlook Duckworth, 2003), was also well received, exciting scholars like Robert Cowley, a founder and former editor of MHQ: The Quarterly Journal of Military History. It didn't hurt that the book came out post 9/11, after anthrax became a household word, and there was a resurgence in scholarly interest in the origins and history of war.
"The books are intriguing," said Michael Novacek, the curator of paleontology at the American Museum of Natural History, in Manhattan. "They do have a detective flair, so they make fascinating reading. She takes evidence and matches it with ideas in an insightful way."
Mr. Novacek said that while he did not agree with all the connections that Ms. Mayor makes (like that between griffins and the dinosaurs in the Gobi Desert), he respected her for the originality of her views and for inspiring scholars to find a fresh way of intertwining history and paleontology.
Ms. Mayor's new book, "Fossil Legends of the First Americans," to be published by Princeton next spring, comes at a challenging time in her life. In December she was told she had breast cancer and underwent surgery and chemotherapy. Most of her hair has fallen out. The support of her husband, Josiah Ober, a professor of ancient Greek history at Princeton, has been invaluable, she said, as have the understanding and empathy of others as she has pushed back deadlines.
"It's ironic that I would have researched all those poisons, and now I experience it firsthand," she said evenly, sitting in front of the curio chest, a jaunty beret covering her head. She said she was now looking ahead, considering a book on the Amazons, even as she indulges in the introspection that often comes with illness or finishing a big project.
"I didn't expect all this attention to this field," Ms. Mayor said, coming back to the constant theme of her short, surprising career. "I'm an outsider and ordinary person with ordinary questions but the determination to find the answers."
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/06/12/arts/12MAYO.html?pagewanted=2
Her site on this:
Link and website are defunct. The MIA webpage can be accessed via the Wayback Machine:
https://web.archive.org/web/20080705131857/http://hometown.aol.com/afmayor/myhomepage/writing.html
She has also written a lot on the influence of fossils on legends and it is fascinating stuff - she could write a great article for FT too
Emps
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