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.”