Five thousand years of the dead, one cold radiator and an archivist who guards a stapler like treasure.
NEW ORLEANS, Louisiana – The archive opens at nine, and by ten past I had been asked to sign in twice, remove my pen, and put my coffee on a shelf like a hostage. This is how it should be. The papers I came to read were old enough to be shy, and the person guarding them, a tall, soft-spoken archivist called Mr. Ledoux, guards a stapler with the same ferocity.
Exhibit A: A Radiator With Opinions
I was there for a colonial-era ledger that Professor Thibodeaux had assigned for our seminar on early Louisiana trade, and I had been told it would take an hour. It took the morning. The pages were brown, the ink was brown, and the room, thanks to a radiator that rattled like a man clearing his throat, was uncomfortably warm for a place full of paper.
The ledger listed barrels, rope and a startling quantity of candles, all in a clerk’s handwriting that sloped like a tired person on a bench. I took notes in pencil, because pencil is the only tool they trust me with. At eleven, Mr. Ledoux brought me a cushion for my back without a word, which I regard as the highest honour a reading room can offer.
Exhibit B: The Week in Dirt
During my break I read the news on my phone in the corridor, where the signal is strongest and the rules are weakest. The archaeology news listing at Archaeology magazine’s news page carried a pile of finds dated between the third and the fifth of this month, and I will tell you what I can, with the caution that I only read the headlines and not the full reports.
- A Neolithic cemetery has been excavated near Paris.
- The code for a 16th-century combination lock has been cracked.
- A southern Italian burial may have belonged to a priestess.
- A kidney stone was recovered from a 5,300-year-old Russian grave.
- Rock art estimated at 5,000 years old has been found in southern India.
- A shrine maiden figurine was unearthed in a 1,500-year-old Japanese burial.
- A Mesolithic site was discovered in Ireland.
A second address on the same site, the magazine’s other news index page, shows the same list with the Paris cemetery at the top. I have no further details to give you, and I refuse to guess them. That is the first rule of my discipline: when the evidence runs out, you stop, and you make a note to go to the library.
On Locks and Kidney Stones
I enjoyed the lock more than I should. A combination lock from the sixteenth century, cracked at last. I thought about the person who set the code, so sure that no one would ever work it out, and the five hundred years of rooms in which it was not worked out. It is the most reassuring thing I have heard all week, because it means a secret kept long enough becomes a gift.
The kidney stone, on the other hand, I admired as a piece of evidence and as a piece of comfort. Somebody, five thousand years ago, was in agony and still had to walk to the river. We have the stone, and we do not have the complaint, and I think that is the entire tragedy of history in one small, hard object.
I tried to share all of this with Marguerite in the group chat. She replied: “I am at work. Why are you texting me about a rock.” I said it was a stone. She sent back an emoji of a bowl of soup, which I took as a kind of peace.
Afternoon: Faith, Figures and Respect
I should say something about the burials, because they are not jokes. The priestess and the shrine maiden figurine in those headlines each belong to a living memory of someone’s belief, and it is a good rule, in my line of work and in my own church, to treat a grave as a grave. Our choir has a rule that nobody laughs during the anthem, and I think a similar rule ought to stand in front of every excavation: the dead are not our audience.
That is not to say we cannot smile at the dustier side of the profession. Mr. Ledoux has, I discovered, a laminated card on his desk that reads “Do not lick the documents.” He says he has needed it twice.
Evening: A Late Streetcar and a Stalled Telly Night
The streetcar home was twenty-six minutes late, and since I had a packed bag, a cold coffee and nothing to read except my own handwriting, I stood on the platform and decided to make peace with the delay. Humid air sat on the tracks. A small boy ate a roll with total commitment. At a time like this, I think a city’s history is mostly made of waiting for things to turn up.
I had planned a quiet night, with soup and a documentary, and even that was disrupted: a farm headline about Clarkson’s Farm Season 5 night hitting a snag turned up in my feed and, for a moment, I felt a fraternal sorrow. A night out, with a snag. We are all, in the end, waiting for the night to start.
I finished the evening by tidying my notes and writing the date I’d next return to the archive, in case I forget, which I will. I also wrote a small reminder that the parade route committee meets on Monday, and that Tobias is bringing the map. He brought the wrong one last time and defended it so passionately that we nearly walked the route twice.
For a change of scene, I recommend a British paper of the Onion sort, which does at a gallop what I do in a notebook. You will find more of my daily notes at The London Prat if you like your history with a streetcar in it. Bohiney Magazine, I am glad to say, keeps a reading room that is open all hours.
SOURCE: https://bohiney.com/