Late July. Eight-thirty. Bright morning sun. Neighbors’ tall sycamore across the road casting a long, broad, cool, front-yard shadow. Two-mile walk a couple hours in the rearview.
The phone on the table to the left of my chair rings. Caller ID reveals an unnamed “wireless caller,” with a 978 area code number I don’t immediately recognize.
Taking a gamble, I answer it.
It’s archaeologist friend Mike Gramly – a man closing in on 80, yet still a remarkable bundle of boundless energy and intellectual enthusiasm. He checks in at least once a week to chat about his latest focus and discoveries. This time, he’s calling from the New England Auctions parking lot outside of New Haven, Connecticut, some 155 miles from his North Andover home. He was the high bidder on a few strategic “left bids” for lots he was interested in – most notably a couple of miniature, 19th-century, ivory Inuit sled carvings – and he’s waiting for the doors to open at 9.
Nothing unusual. Just another day in the busy existence of scholarly Richard Michael Gramly – an endangered, some might say old-fashioned, breed of archaeologist, who still digs, sifts, analyzes, and documents his findings, hypotheses, and conclusions between two covers.
Having spent the weekend selling books and shooting the breeze with fellow travelers at a Pennsylvania Indian artifact show for collectors and dealers, he’d driven six or more hours home and had no time to relax; doubling halfway back to retrieve the auction house merchandise.
Despite a few health concerns that have cropped up in recent years, Gramly doesn’t seem to have slowed down a bit. In fact, for the past 10 years he’s been revved up exploring North American human-proboscidean interactions that occurred 13,000 and more years before present. While your average Joe can find such deep time disorienting, Gramly spends much of his time there, studying artifacts and pondering their meaning.
The early-morning auction journey is insignificant compared to his agenda in the coming weeks and months. This weekend, it’s off to New York’s Letchworth State Park for the Genesee Valley Flint Knappers Association’s 35th-anniversary Stone Tool Craftsman and Artisan Show.
Then he’ll motor west to Kentucky for two or three weeks of archaeological investigation at the so-called Lower Blue Licks Battlefield, where he’s been making groundbreaking discoveries at an ancient mastodon boneyard purchased by an old friend – a proud member of the Honorable Order of Kentucky Colonels, no less.
The Lower Blue Licks site has become Gramly’s latest treasure trove of cutting-edge discoveries relating to human predation and ritualistic treatment of mastodons they killed. He was drawn to the site by his buddy’s museum discovery of a previously unidentified ivory-tusk sled runner. His friend recognized a familiar form among a collection of skeletal mastodon remains unearthed long ago and squirreled away for posterity in a Kentucky museum,
The ivory artifact resembled 13,000-year-old sled runners Gramly had identified in recent years among mastodon remains stored for years at the Buffalo Museum of Science. The Buffalo collection Gramly studied was gathered at the Hiscock Site, a well-known proboscidean boneyard in upstate New York’s Lake Ontario region.
There Gramly also brought to light a 13,000-plus-year-old sled burial of a female shaman. That sled is the oldest yet discovered on the planet – though others may come to light as Siberian and other Arctic permafrost continues to melt and reveal archaeological treasures.
Assisted by a loyal group of volunteers from his own American Society for Amateur Archaeology, Gramly expects to be finished for the year at Lower Blue Licks in September. From there, he’ll drive home to enjoy a brief October respite before going international. In Vienna, Austria, he’ll deliver a 30-minute lecture in November at the Symposium of the International Study Group on Music Archaeology (ISGMA). His title is the Description and Absolute Age of a Late Upper Paleolithic Zoomorphic Drum Beater from the Hiscock Site, Genesee County, New York State.
Which brings us back to the presumed shaman burial at the Hiscock Site, which no one except Gramly seems willing to address. According to the report he will hand out for his November 20 presentation in Vienna, discovered along with the fragmentary skeletal remains of a female, aged 27 to 39, were the remains of a sled with tusk-ivory runners, “a dog associated with the sled, and many artifacts of ritual and practical nature.”
Among those artifacts, collected near the human remains and presumed by Gramly to be personal property of the buried shaman, was an “heirloom drum-beater” made of what he believes to be either caribou or extinct moose-elk antler. This drum-beater, which wears the zoomorphic carving of a moose or elk head in profile, and traces of ancient red-ochre paint, is the focus of Gramly’s ISGMA presentation.
Symposium officials are so eager to hear what Gramly has to say they have already taken it upon themselves to mail him a check to help cover his expenses. A generous outlay, indeed.
The salient questions in my mind are: Why must this venerable archaeologist, a Harvard PhD with mountains of Paleo-Indian knowledge under his hat, fly 4,000 miles to another continent to share his fascinating findings with experts in his field?
And, for that matter, why is it that his two comprehensive magazine articles chronicling recent mastodon findings have thus far been published abroad as well – in the prestigious French journal L’Anthropologie?
Is America not interested, or just giving the academic cold shoulder to an old-school archaeologist who’s bucked modern trends at every turn and chosen instead to do it his way?
In rigid academic circles and hierarchies, independence doesn’t always fly.