Looking for Pumpkin Pie in the Kenyan dirt

Our excavations at Mtwapa have the main research goal of acquiring as many samples of human remains as possible, in order to analyze their DNA and determine who, genetically speaking, was living at the site during the early 2^nd millennium AD.  For me, it would be wonderful if we find that Arabs and Africans were living together from an early date—this is the perfect situation for creolization to occur.  The end result is visible today in Mombasa’s Old Town, where Indians and Europeans and Africans and Arabs all live together and contribute to the architecture, food, and fashion (among other things) of the city.

So far, we’ve uncovered the remains of 21 individuals, and after cleaning, describing, and photographing them, we will collect samples from them.  Now, an individual doesn’t necessarily mean an entire skeleton.  In fact, in several cases, an individual (or “operation,” as we call it in the business) can be a single tooth.

Teeth contain the best-preserved DNA samples, and this is what we will take from the more complete operations we uncover.  Today, I was handed a molar and an incisor that were found together.  I encased them in tin foil, placed them in a Ziploc bag, and labeled them “Operation 20.”  This labeling transformed the Ziploc bag into a body bag, and morphed the dental duo into a human being.

I hope my teeth don’t represent who I am.  Am I easily removed to make room for more important others, like my wisdom teeth?  Am I in constant need of support, like my 8 lower front teeth held in place by a permanent retainer?  Is my only purpose in life to crush and destroy things??

Teeth might be the best genetic indicator of Allison Mickel, but they don’t seem to be a good metaphor for who I am, outside of my double helix.  But what body part is? It certainly isn’t my hand, which currently looks like I punched a wall due to an allergic reaction to some overnight spider bites.  I have to rub a concoction of Gold Bond, antihistamine cream, and steroid cream on it several times daily.  Judging by my hand, I seem like a very bloated Jose Conseco if he were a Benadryl spokesman… and nothing could be further from the truth; I would certainly show up to my own AMP event.

Some anthropologists (Lynn Meskell, for example) research the anthropology of the body—how people of different cultures conceive of them, represent them, treat them.  It’s so interesting to think about this in a place like the Swahili Coast, where Muslim women in burqas frequent the same restaurants as Italian men wearing Speedos (under very tight embellished jeans, of course).  At the site, we seem to consider DNA to be some kind of intimate hidden key to personhood—would a woman wearing a hijab place similar importance on her hair?  What about all of the old white European men on the beach with their 20-something African girlfriends?  There are so many of them, and naturally money might have something to do with how they conduct their lives, but they must have some interesting conceptions of their bodies to go after women with bodies so… different… from theirs.

Every day at Mtwapa, I look into holes full of infants and adults alike, not to mention the disarticulated and sometimes frightening piles of bones we find from bodies that were disturbed after their first interment.  An “operation” can be the identifiable bones of a six-foot-tall man, a disintegrating stillbirth, or even a single femur poking creepily—think Poltergeist—out of the 10YR 3/6 sandy clay loam.  (That’s dirt, for non-archaeologists.)  Terms as seemingly simple as “body” and “person” are culturally determined, and for the mini-culture of the archaeological team at Mtwapa, both words have as a synonym the term “upper lateral front incisor.”

I think I’m more oblivious than I should be.  For an archaeologist, inattention to detail is kind of an Achilles’ heel… but luckily it doesn’t seem to affect me in the field.  I’ll notice minor changes in soil color, or a tiny cluster of disarticulated bone shards—yet somehow it took me almost a week to notice the door leading outdoors from our kitchen.  So the other day, when I found myself having to repeatedly empty washbasins full of dirty water outside and refill them in the kitchen sink, noticing the door leading to the garden outside from our kitchen was like finding the road to El Dorado.
Holding a plastic bowl of murky water, I happily unlocked the door, turned the handle, and opened it.  Suddenly, there was something enormous and alive immediately on the other side of the screen door.  There was a flash of motion, and naturally I went into Velociraptor Attack mode.  Which basically meant jumping in alarm (thereby sloshing dirty water all over myself) and standing paralyzed in fear.
Once I was no longer blinded by adrenaline, I realized that the screen door was not the only thing stopping me from certain death at the hands of a prehistoric beast (obviously… the Jurassic Park dinosaurs never made it to Africa anyway. Duh.)  I was looking, instead, at a two-and-a-half-foot tall monkey holding a piece of papaya, staring intently back at me through the mesh of the screen, looking like he, too, was in Velociraptor Attack mode.  The last thing he had expected was for me to open that door, which normally remained closed and locked, and the last thing I expected was to find Curious George in our gated apartment complex.
At Mtwapa, we excavate under a forest canopy.  It’s never very sunny, but it’s never particularly dark either.  Mostly, it is just impossible to tell what the weather is like beyond the trees and mossy ruins.  This morning, all of the members of the excavation team, who live here in Mombasa, told me that it was going to rain heavily later in the day.  We bought a plastic tarp with which to cover the site, and continued working.  I kept waiting for the rain to begin falling, but aside from a sun shower in the midmorning, everything seemed clear.  Over and over, I gazed up through the treetops, at the keyholes of sky visible through the leaves, and it didn’t seem cloudy.
I heard it before I saw it.
Out of nowhere, it sounded like people were shooting gongs with birdshot.  Everyone at the site moved quickly, grabbed some equipment, and crowded under a small shed, because ten seconds of standing in that downpour would make you as wet and cold as Leo in Titanic.  As I watched anthills and leaves being swept away by the mini-rapids forming in the forest floor, I realized that even with a warning, I was completely caught off guard by the deluge.
I’m surprised every day by the things I do right.  I sound a little bit like Eeyore on Zoloft saying that, but it’s true.  Last year, I bumbled through the Kenyan lifestyle, not understanding that the handshake people offer when they enter a room means “hello” rather than “introduce yourself.”  This year, I drink the tea, which I hated last year. I know enough of the language that people initially think I’m fluent. I can answer the high schoolers’ every wary “What is that?” and “How do I eat this?”  I’m surprised at my own ability to blend, something I never really used to possess.
Archaeological research is all about surprises.  You’re surprised by how much you find, by what you don’t find.  You’re surprise-disappointed when you find a coin from the 1940’s along with ceramics you thought were from the 1700’s.  You’re surprise-excited when you unearth a near-complete pot with which you can perform studies on food residue.  The very act of digging slowly (at Mtwapa, we dig in rectangles which we deepen by 10 cm at a time) acknowledges that the nature of archaeology is characterized by a hope to be surprised.  An archaeologist recognizes that he doesn’t know what he’ll find.  Like a child shaking a wrapped present under the tree on Christmas Eve, he does his best beforehand to ascertain what the earth might contain, but in the end, the only way to find out is to dig, and to constantly, constantly, allow oneself to be surprised.

Blogs, I think, very often become either diaries or soapboxes.  This propensity made me dread blogging a little bit initially; I didn’t want to turn into one of those people who just has too many feelings… One of those people who keeps seven Livejournals to leach the poison of their anguish and turmoil  from their blood.

Neither did I want to become someone who preaches to their imagined Internet audience of billions about exactly what humankind is doing wrong politically, economically, spiritually, emotionally, environmentally, recreationally, and nutritionally.  Personally, I don’t really have a better plan in mind for your life.  Sorry.  I’m busy enough trying to sort out my own—an endeavor clouded by all of those emotions clouding my head all the time, just longing to be freed into the Elysian Fields of Feelings: cyberspace.

Just kidding.

Honestly, I just feel as though the beast we call blogging is pregnant with triplets named ranting, raving, and complaining.  And while that may be unavoidable or even cathartic at times, I never wanted to be the wet nurse to any of those babies. Ew.

Luckily, my experiences so far have allowed me to avoid that role.  I’ve come upon some really interesting things that will allow me to produce two truly excellent research papers at the end of this experience.  At this point, they’re still just little tidbits—hints at creolization that will require further research.  But these “pumpkin tarts” are still sweet to find, especially this early on.

In Oka’s 2008 dissertation, Resilience and Adaptation of Trade Networks in East African and South Asian Port Polities, 1500-1800 C.E., he mentions that cloth was manufactured on the Swahili Coast in two main ways.  One way was entirely indigenous from start to finish—from sheep to sweater, if you will.  The other way involved importing finished cloths from South Asia, deconstructing them, and reweaving the threads into cloth again in ways that suited local tastes and preferences.  Timothy Insoll mentions this as well, in his book The Archaeology of Sub-Saharan Africa.  When I read about this technique, it fascinated me: here is a behavior that is essentially a literal interpretation of the process of creolization.  The action of taking something that seems complete, stripping it down to its basic components, and making use of the same materials (along with one’s own—the tools used to re-weave would have been indigenous) to create something unique and new—this is the theoretical model of creolization acted out almost as if some second millennium Swahili textile manufacturer knew Allison Mickel would really appreciate a metaphor to weave through a research paper in 2009.  Thanks, Swahili textile manufacturer! And I didn’t even have the foresight to bring Afterbite with me.

Even better: spindle whorls and looms (tools used for cloth manufacture) have been recovered at Mtwapa, the site where I’m participating in excavations.  And Chap told me that based on documentary evidence, it’s likely that people at Mtwapa were mostly participating in the second form of cloth textile production—the my-research-wrapped-up-in-a-tidy-bow one.  Bingo!

Meanwhile, I’ve now been to Mtwapa and toured half the site, and the walls of the houses, along with many doorways, are still standing from 800 or more years ago.  Immediately, the doorways struck me—they aren’t square, like I’ve seen in most places in Kenya.  They’re arched, but they come to a point at the top.  They look, in fact, like a lot of doorways that I’ve seen from the Middle East, and, I later found out, like doorways from India.  Chap explained to me that people were moving around so much and learning from each other, studying in places like Baghdad and taking home more than just lessons in Islam, plus trading with people from all around the Indian Ocean Doorways like those at Mtwapa represent the convalescence of cultural contributions from this whole area.  Before, I had mainly been focusing on the African and Arab factors in this story of culture creation.  I had largely forgotten about India—a player as important in the creation of this pumpkin pie as the Reddi Whip!  These doorways sound like an important thing to research more when I get home.

Doorways were also discussed at the Fort Jesus Museum—a museum created in 1960 from a fortress that was built by the Portuguese in 1593.  The fortress was captured by Omani Arabs in 1698, and the museum had an exhibit on Omani culture and contributions to the area.  One of the glass cases had lots of silver jewelry worn by Omani women.  I asked the man showing us around the museum if Swahili women wore jewelry like that, and he said that they did.  I also asked him if he thought that they always had done so, or if it had changed since the Omani Arabs arrived.  He told me he thought it was mostly because the Omanis had introduced it.  Now, I clearly can’t cite that kind of source, and it’s not quite creolization, since I didn’t probe for information on East African contributions to the jewelry, but at least I have some more terms to type into JSTOR when I get home!

Not only am I with newfound research direction, but I have a writing direction as well.  Since the Charles Center was generous enough to fund my entire summer with both a Monroe scholarship and a Charles Center International Scholarship, I’ll be writing two research papers when I get home, on two different topics.  The subjects are distinct but overlapping (both dealing with creolization and the Swahili Coast), so I was struggling with how to produce two satisfactorily different and interesting projects.  But what I’ve decided to do is to write one paper on Mtwapa, the site I’m excavating at, in specific, and one on the creolization processes visible in the contemporary Indian Ocean systems at large.  This way, I’ll be able to make the most of both my archaeological experience and my library research. 

Today, I drank out of a coconut and watched the sun set over Mombasa’s old town.  If I have overflowing feelings, they’re fueled by the taste of shwarma at Tarboush Café and the sight of a tiny monkey trying to steal my artifact-washing toothbrush.  Anakula hapi.

After getting off my second international red-eye flight and waiting in the (almost) laughably long line to get a Kenyan visa, the man in whose excavation I’m participating took me to his brother’s house in Nairobi.  While he ran errands, I stayed at the house.  He told me before he left, “You are safe here. You are home.”

I certainly felt welcome, and after I took a shower and napped, I watched The Yes Man with his niece and nephew.  After that, more and more family members began to arrive.  I was introduced, and they asked me a few questions, but eventually they began acting like any family does, and started laughing and joking with each other… in Swahili.

Now, I have the Swahili Rosetta Stone, and I’m on lesson nine.  I know how to say a few useful things, such as “Yes, the pink car is new” and “A hat is not food.” But my self-education in Swahili has not so far prepared me to evaluate the suggestiveness of the “Candy Shop” music video, or espouse Tupac-inspired theories about the truthfulness of Michael Jackson’s death– both subjects that were actually discussed.  It’s impossible to complain, however, since I ended up playing Purble Place on my laptop with the two incredibly smart and friendly youngest children.

But my linguistic difficulties have extended beyond that first day.  I am traveling with the curator of anthropology at the Field Museum, Chap Kusimba, and two high school students from Perspectives High School. Between us, we speak a lot of languages– and three of them are English.

Chap’s English is soft in volume, lilting in its music, and sounds dignified with his Kenyan accent.  He takes thoughtful pauses, and speaks slowly, as if to make sure that his audience fully understands each morpheme he chooses.  My r-filled American accent, with its nasal Northern Cities affectation, clashes with full speed against his deliberate words.  My diction feels hasty and my intonation false.  Our conversations make sense, and each of us certainly understands what the other is saying, but we just don’t sound like we are speaking the same language.

Meanwhile, the high schoolers have their own language that they use to speak to each other.  Any school has its own dialect of sorts, with its own vocabulary words (“C-dub?” “TWaMP?”) and vocal patterning.  People who spend a lot of time together tend to match each others’ way of speaking.  Karim and Victoria, the Perspectives students, are no exception.  They use different words than I do, their sense of humor is slightly different than mine– and the way we talk to each other is even more uncertain because my role is so unclear.  I’m neither a mother figure to them nor a peer figure.  So what is appropriate to be talking to them about? How much should my language adapt when I’m talking to them– and in what way?

I remember these feelings of doubt from last year, when I came to western Kenya.  I was the youngest person on the trip besides the high-schoolers who came, and for the first few days, I felt as though I had been dropped into that well from The Ring, except instead of water at the bottom, there was ice-cold intellectualism and academia.  In the end, I adapted and found I adored the almost citation-filled dialogue, but at first, my ANTH 202-prepared self felt lost and ill-equipped as the scholars around me discussed the merits of arbitrary v. natural levels, and threw around more names of anthropologists than I have Facebook friends.  Things I knew: Lewis Henry Morgan, and Balinese cock-fighting. End.

My point is just that people have difficulties understanding each other even when they’re all speaking the same formal language.  Even when they’re from the same city, as we are this year, people have unique ways of communicating that work for them, in their familiar environment.  And when different people are thrown together in an unusual situation, they become part of a tiny, microcosmic, Lego-Tower-of-Babel story.

And maybe it’s just my anthropological inclinations, but experiences like this make me question how people can simply accept the stiff narratives of history that they are taught.  Even more, I don’t understand how others can create those motivation-less, emotion-less, positively mechanical stories where the only bits resembling reality are the ubiquitous dates serving as landmarks for the robotic actions of people of the past.  These chronicles are the distilled versions of impossibly complex time periods when sentient Homo Sapiens made choices based on innumerable factors both tangible and intangible.  The authors of these narratives appear uninterested in the character of those choices, and their somehow eager audiences must be equally so, if they do not demand more.

I demand more.  I wonder about people like the Arab traders who came to the Swahili Coast and married Swahili women– how did they overcome a language barrier so much larger than the one I’m currently struggling with? Not to impose my high standards for a life partner (namely, fluent in a language I speak) onto the early 2nd millennium Muslim traders, but how do you begin to consider marrying somone if you can’t even say things like, “We’re having a baby!” or “Honey, I’m watching the game”?  All jokes aside, I don’t want to sound like a marriage counselor, and I certainly don’t want to imply that I think all marriage historically has been or should have been for romantic reasons.  But if it’s hard enough for me to figure out how to communicate with people so similar to me by comparison, what could those men and women have done to overcome such a phenomenal language, let alone cultural, difference?

Luckily for me, a growing number of people are interested in answering questions like these.  Personally, I feel as though the answers will largely come from approaching archaeology as an anthropological discipline. It seems a far analytical cry from seeing a chipped piece of white ceramic with blue decoration to claiming a complete understanding of the feelings of people so far away in space and time and circumstances from a white Jewish William and Mary undergrad from the suburbs of Chicago.  And it will be difficult.  But, for one thing, I certainly don’t intend to claim a complete understanding of anything… That’s what grad school’s for! (Just kidding.)  Really, the hope is that my ideas will inspire other people, from wholly different backgrounds than mine, to contradict and critique, or contribute to, my personally biased perceptions.  Welcome to the academic discourse!

It is unbelievable to me what a different experience it is before you cross the jetbridge versus afterward.  Seriously, even when you hand the guy at the gate your boarding pass, once he rips off the piece that he hands back to you, it’s as if you’ve engaged in a mystical sharing ritual, whereby dividing that slip of paper has bound the two of you together, and he is prepared to be your Tenzing Norgay, showing you the way through the gateway leading you to friendly British women eager to direct you to your seat which is clearly marked anyway, before they serve you food and wine at regular intervals for the next eight hours.

Meanwhile, the duty manager behind the Virgin Atlantic check-in counter served me unwarranted smugness from behind the sunglasses he was wearing—indoors.  Which was offensive enough.

I was trying to change my second flight to an earlier one, so I wouldn’t have a day and a half layover in London.  Naturally, the airline told me I would need to pay a $250 change fee.  This seemed preposterous, since it was really the website’s fault that I ended up with such a ridiculous flight pattern.  The only option you have when booking a flight using the Virgin website is to select how many stopovers you have (not how long of a layover you’d like), so I assumed that when I chose to leave on June 24, that it would automatically book me on the most efficient route to Nairobi.  Somehow, it didn’t, and my time spent patting myself on the back for having found such an inexpensive fare would have been better spent examining the itinerary more closely.  Still, I felt as though there should have been some kind of warning—some kind of “YOU ARE TAKING THE MOST INCONVENIENT COMBINATION OF FLIGHTS POSSIBLE” alert like American Airlines has, especially since the length of the layover would mean that I would have to retrieve my bags and re-check in the next day.

But when we explained this to the Virgin desk, they said they would have to ask their manager if they could waive the fee. One of the attendants left and never returned, but gave us the impression that we wouldn’t have to pay the fee.  So I was taken aback when they asked for my credit card to charge it $250.

We asked what happened to asking the manager to waive the fee. Enter the lamer version of Corey Hart.  Bloated with delusions of power, he stated cheerily that he had denied our request, and said something about how he didn’t appreciate the way we were treating his workers.  He was both haughty and passive-aggressive enough to warrant a cameo on The Hills, and his tone of voice was the verbal equivalent of a double-polo with two popped collars.

Compare this to the smiling and friendly flight attendants on flight VS040.  In their starched red pencil skirts, they were attentive and kind.  When I needed a landing card at the last minute, they got me one right away.  Even though they were enforcing pointless rules (explain to me again why I can’t have a blanket on during takeoff?), they were polite about it.

And while their waitstaff manners certainly didn’t erase the memory of my buddy the white Ray Charles wannabe, the experience of such an abrupt transition between the Virgin employees off versus on the plane was jarring.  It made me think about the international terminal at O’Hare.  Where do different cultures meet on more equal, noncolonial terms, than in the international terminal at an airport?  And yet the personable European women providing me orange juice and sleep masks seem an entirely different species from the American with a Napoleon complex, unwilling to help a customer with anything except feeling frustrated and unappreciated.  Maybe not creolization in its strictest sense, but I would think that there would have been some kind of airport/airline code of conduct—culture, if you will, and that this code of conduct would largely have been informed by the convergence of peoples in the international terminal of the airport.  If cultures and cultural standards can remain so distinct when separated only by TSA conveyer belts, how am I going to find evidence of cultures meeting and recombining in footnotes and pottery sherds?

Depends how hungry I get.

Actually, almost certainly not.  You see, “pumpkin pie,” in this case, is a metaphor. Disappointing, I know.  I was also really enjoying the mental image of a tiny American girl on her hands and knees, burying Timon and Pumbaa in a pile of dirt as she furiously burrows in search of a somehow magically pristine piece of pumpkin puree-filled flaky Pillsbury crust with a perfect dollop of Reddi Whip on top.

So if that’s not what I’m doing this summer, what is?  Well, one part of that description is actually fairly accurate: I will be spending a lot of time digging.   But not anywhere near Pride Rock– I’ll be excavating at an archaeological site in Mtwapa, Kenya.

While there, I’ll be researching to see if Swahili culture has analogs to American pumpkin pie.  Our favorite Thanksgiving dessert is extraordinarily fascinating to anthropologists, because it represents the convalescence of three distinct cultures to create something entirely new.  The buttery pastry crust comes from Europe, brought to America by the white settlers who came here in the seventeenth century.  Pumpkin is a Native American crop, and is similar to the yams cultivated in Africa by those who would later become slaves.  The allspice and brown sugar, so important to a good pumpkin pie, come from Jamaica, where many slave ships stopped on their way to the New World.  Thus, pumpkin pie is neither Native American, European, or African– and yet it is all three.

This kind of cultural mixing is referred to as “creolization” by New World scholars. The process involves cultures meeting, mixing, and reformulating to produce something new.  (For more on creolization, read James Deetz’s In Small Things Forgotten– it’s a great book about New World archaeology written so even Indiana Jones’s least attentive student could understand.)  This process is really what I’m looking for in Swahili culture, not pumpkin pie per se.

But that search is more difficult than it might seem.  Certainly, the Swahili coast (the Eastern coast of Kenya) is a perfect place for this process to occur: traditional African civilizations existed on the Swahili coast for a long time, long before recorded history begins for this area. Around 500 CE, the first Arab traders from the Middle East arrived on the Swahili Coast, to further their mercantile interests.  As trade routes within the Indian Ocean expanded and blossomed, so did the trade towns on the Swahili Coast.  Islam was brought to Kenya and flourished, at least along the coast.  Meanwhile, the interior of Kenya supported the trade towns, and received many of the goods brought there by merchants.  Middle Eastern and traditional African cultures mixed to create Swahili culture.

This historical narrative is called the “Internal Origins Model” by many East African archaeologists.  However, this was only recently revealed to be a viable explanation for what happened during the first two millennia CE.  Before, an “External Origins Model” was hailed as the truth, a model saying that Arab traders came and built the impressive towns that we find both in the archaeological record and still standing and functioning today. The traders married African women and put down roots, and these marriages catalyzed the expression of Swahili culture– a culture whose foundations are in Islam and Middle Eastern society.

Belief in the External Origins Model was largely fueled by prejudice, an inability to consider the possibility that black Africans had built, or even laid the foundations for state-level society so early on.  Traditionally, Europeans (who were writing history) saw the story of civilization tracing from the cities mentioned in the Bible, to Egypt, to Greece and Rome, then to its culmination in Europe.  Africa did not fit into their picture.

However, this sort of prejudice-colored history governed New World scholarship for a long time– and still does, to some extent.  Some historians still think that Africans brought to America abandoned their traditions in favor of the dominant (and implicitly, better) Anglo-American customs and beliefs.  Nevertheless, this story of cultural imposition has largely been rejected in favor of a story of cultural incorporation, as is the case for scholarship on the Swahili coast.

Still, history is never unbiased, and the Internal Origins Model for Swahili culture could be criticized for giving the Arab traders too little credit for their contributions to Swahili society.  I’m not particularly interested in figuring out what percent of Swahili culture is based in the Middle East, and what percent in traditional Bantu society (the family of ethnic groups from which Swahili Africans and the Kiswahili language come). I’m interested in looking for the perfect marriages– or love children, perhaps– of these cultures. I want to find those you-got-chocolate-in-my-peanut-butter cultural products where it is entirely clear that Islamic traders and traditional Africans both contributed.  Whether this will be in the form of a recipe, a vessel, or livestock remains to be seen, but as a budding archaeologist, I’ll be digging for answers (sorry) until I’m satisfied.