- Well, as Kathy mentioned I have been
doing these reviews for about 15 years
and one of the really delightful things about doing it
is that every once in a while I'll be able to come upon,
discover, a new author.
And about 13 years ago I was fortunate enough
to come across Mary Anna's
first "Faye Longchamp" novel,
and basically fell in love with it at first sight.
I've reviewed, I believe, about nine of 'em now,
and it is my pleasure, really,
to introduce her this evening.
I should also mention that the "Faye Longchamp"
mysteries have been awarded
several literary awards over the years
including the Benjamin Franklin Award,
Mississippi Author Award,
and three book awards from the state of Florida.
Mary Anna is an Assistant Professor
of Professional Writing at
the University of Oklahoma in Norman,
where she teaches both Fiction and Non-Fiction Writing.
Mary Anna earned a Master of Fine Arts
in Creative Writing from Rutgers-Camden quite recently,
but before that earned a Bachelor of Science
in Engineering Physics and a Master of Science
in Chemical Engineering,
areas that I know absolutely nothing about
and am just sort of blown over by people who
are expert in those sorts of fields.
She is still licensed to practice engineering
in the state of Florida.
She's also the co-author of scholarly articles
and a book on mathematical literacy
and she's co-authored an environmental
engineering continuing education course.
In 2016 she published two essays on environmental topics
and she developed and taught a course
on writing environmental essays.
And possibly most importantly for our purposes this evening,
she is currently working on her tenth
"Faye Longchamp" archaeology mystery,
which I believe you said may be coming out
about next February of 2017.
I'm obviously looking forward to that.
Please welcome Mary Anna Evans.
[applause]
- Thank you.
I'm so pleased to be here.
Very honored to speak to a group, I think, of
probably mostly archaeologists.
I'm as he said an engineer and a writer.
And I blundered into, in the middle of my career,
a sub-field of math and science literacy
when I met a professor of young adult literacy
and we felt like all of our expertise came together
in a special synergy.
And that encounter ended up with a couple
of peer-reviewed articles on math and science literacy
and a book that we co-wrote called
"Mathematical Literacy in the Middle
and Secondary Grades."
In the course of writing these things we realized
that teachers are being required
by No Child Left Behind to bring writing
into the math and science classroom,
math and science into the writing classrooms,
but nobody really tells them how to do that.
And at the time we wrote the book there wasn't
anything really out there like it.
So in order to feel our way into this fairly new
field for both of us it was an interesting process
that I took a step back to say
well how do I do what I do and how does it draw
from my background in the sciences?
And I have to tell you that
everyday I come up with a new way that my work
in the arts draws from my education in the sciences.
And I enjoy that synergy and I would like to foster it.
So the topic at hand is particularly about my books,
which are based in archaeology.
And there is a very thriving sub-field
in archaeological crime fiction that is about,
well, in crime fiction, that is about archaeology,
and which is interesting when you think about it.
And so to prepare for this topic I asked myself why.
Why are there so many mysteries about archaeology?
And so you have to just out of the gate say
the Indiana Jones effect cannot be denied.
People like Indiana Jones.
They like the romance of it all.
They like the swashbuckling nature that is
probably not the way it really is to be an archaeologist,
but it's fun.
So there's the fun aspect of it.
I think for all archaeological fiction,
but especially crime fiction,
there's an allure to the treasure hunt.
We read mysteries because of that unknown
that sucks you in and you want to know the answer,
and archaeologists just adds another layer to that,
of what are you gonna find when you dig.
What are you gonna find in the bowels
of that museum?
So I think there's just the treasure hunt aspect.
And then from my point of view as the writer,
something that has become more and more clear to me
over the years is that archaeology
gives my heroine a reason to be out lookin' for trouble.
When you write a series of mystery novels,
at some point someone might ask
why does your interior designer keep
stumbling over dead bodies?
It doesn't happen to most of us all the time.
Archaeologists are out looking for things
and sometimes those things are dead bodies.
So it means that it's just a little more plausible.
My stories are a little bit more rooted
in the real world,
and my heroine has an excuse to be doing
what she's doing.
I was naive when I started writing.
I didn't even realize that mystery readers
expected a series,
so I wrote the first book all out.
Gave it my all and thought that was it.
And when the publisher,
that first book got a couple of awards, it did well,
and the publisher says, "You wanna do another one?"
and I go, "Sure, um."
And the idea did come to me,
but part of the reason that I've been able
to have a long series is because my archaeologist
is a deep and interesting character
who's out lookin' for trouble, diggin' up trouble.
And so also more broadly,
not just archaeologists,
but other kinds of scientists crop up
again and again in fiction.
Not just crime fiction.
And when I was doing the literature course work
for my Master's of Fine Arts in Creative Writing,
they want you to know what came before.
So we were reading classic novels from
the early 20th century,
and I would find extended metaphors based in science
that you would not expect to find in Virginia Woolf perhaps.
And it was Modernism.
It was the time that science was coming to the fore,
and I actually wrote a paper in graduate school
about science in unexpected places in fiction.
And I think it appeals to a certain kind of mind,
a creative mind,
and also I find that when I'm writing fiction
it's no secret that you have to get your readers
to suspend their disbelief.
You have to make them believe that your
character has stumbled over the tenth dead body.
And so for me science and also history,
things that are rooted in fact,
I think it allows me to build a framework
of a story that people can believe.
They know that the physics works.
They can feel it even if they don't know physics.
They know that the history feels accurate.
They can go to "Google" and check it.
And so I create a world that makes some sense,
and then when I get into the more fanciful
parts of the story people go more easily with me, I think.
So now that we've established a link
between science and fiction,
I like to think of the discipline of science
and the art of writing as being the two rails of my career.
And I also like to think of the discipline of writing
and the art of science.
I think that they have more in common
than we understand them to have.
And so I want to backtrack a bit
and take you through my journey
to get from science to writing
because it has given me a lot of insight
in my work in science literacy,
to see how the two have worked together for me.
So I promise that the two tracks do come
together at the end,
but I want to back up a little bit in time
and talk about how I got to this point in the career.
So I have a lot of thanks for my father
who spent a lot of my childhood saying,
"No education is ever wasted."
I'm sure that was not original to him,
but it resonated for him.
It resonated for me.
I think that it might not have been ordinary
in 1961 to start a college fund
for a girl child in Mississippi,
but my parents did.
I was raised to be an educated person
and a curious person.
I have a lot of gratitude for that,
and I think it brought me to both science and writing.
My mother, who also believed that no education
was ever wasted,
but the other aspect of her personality
that was key was her curiosity.
There's a story of her when she was four years old
and she and her cousin were having quite a fight
over a worm they had found
because she wanted to cut it up
and see how it worked and he wasn't so sure
that was the best idea.
And that story followed her around for
the rest of her life.
She became a nurse,
which is what girls who were interested in science
did in the 1950s.
And so I was brought up with a woman who
was gonna find out how somethin' worked,
which is the very root of science.
And so this is my childhood.
A basis in education.
Curiosity was an important factor.
And then an innate practicality which led me
directly to science,
but it also led me to writing.
And I don't know what,
that's a recipe for both of those things to me,
and I find them very important.
And also a reverence
for history came into play.
This picture was taken somewhere in
the American South,
sometime before the First World War
because the long leaf pine forest in the American South
was flattened before the end of the First World War.
It was gone by 1917.
So the destruction of a forest that reached
from Virginia to Texas was a notable fact.
They had the portable vehicles to flatten the forest.
They built the temporary rail lines that you can see.
They built temporary saw mills,
and then once the trees were gone they
packed it all up and moved to the next patch of trees.
I grew up on the site of one of those saw mills.
You would've thought that after 50 years
there'd be nothing left,
and this is where we get into the archaeology part.
There was quite a bit of
remnants of that saw mill.
There was a huge pile of sawdust
at the bottom of the hill.
There were logging roads through the woods,
and they were still paved with half timbers.
And there was a strip where
the grass wouldn't grow where the rail lines,
the temporary spurs had been.
And so about 50 years later
sometime during the Vietnam War
we bought that house.
That's me in the knee socks.
The strip of land where the grass didn't grow
is just on the other side of the driveway
and the logging roads went back into the trees.
The trees came back pretty well in 50 years.
There was a house on the site in between
that apparently the people watched the trees grow.
So the archaeology part of all that is
my mother found the trash pit and the privy
for the saw mill and the house
and she excavated them.
I still have some of the things she dug up.
They're family treasures.
She walked those old roads and found debris
thrown here and there.
She walked the old rail line.
She found the gravel pits in the woods
that they had used to build the roads.
In the gravel pits she found what she was pretty sure,
we never had an expert look at it,
but she was pretty sure she'd found the remnants
of flint knapping.
She found finished points.
She found things that she thought
were probably points that didn't quite make it.
They weren't quite good enough.
And the raw material, the flint.
And so then after Hurricane Camille came through in 1969
and stirred all that up, she walked it again.
And I remember walking behind her through the woods.
And I'm not a finder.
I gave that gift to my character Faye Longchamp
in my books.
My mother was finder.
And so I walked right past a downed tree
with the root ball almost as tall as I was.
My mother walked along behind me
and picked up a spear point that was
laying right on top.
I have that, too.
So is it any wonder that I write about archaeology?
I had her and we went to the book mobile
every summer and got all the books about archaeology.
And I tell my writing students that when
you live your life,
you're putting creative material into a well,
and it will be there when you reach in
and need something to write about.
I teach in a writing program.
I think writing programs are valuable,
but I tell them that that's not all of their education
or else they'll only write about writers.
And so thanks to my mother I had
enough grounding in,
at least a fascination in archaeology
that I could go to experts.
I could go to written material and craft stories
that at least make some degree of sense
about archaeology.
The first book got an award from
the Florida Historical Society,
which scared me to death because I'm going,
"Don't they know I made it up?"
And they did.
They give one award for fiction
and I was very honored to receive it.
So during all this time Daddy would periodically say,
and you can join with me,
"No education is ever wasted."
Especially when you're a writer.
You gotta have something to draw from.
So I took him seriously.
I was a little nerdy, I guess.
I was into English, obviously.
Math, band, physics.
The piano.
Not chemistry because the chemistry teacher
was known to think girls were stupid.
My sister and I both avoided him.
I have a Master's in Chemical Engineering.
She has a PhD in Analytical Chemistry.
He knows this.
[laughter]
Mechanical drawing, all of it.
I might have enjoyed majoring in piano,
but we're practical people and engineering
seemed like a good way to put food on the table
when I needed to, and I have.
And I loved it.
It's like solving puzzles every day.
It's like figuring out the way the world works.
And so I enjoyed my class work a great deal
and I enjoyed the experiences it brought me.
And those of you who may have read the books
will start to see where I'm going with this
because you'll start to see things that crop up
in the books.
But one thing that was interesting about
my engineering career was the time and the place.
It was 1979.
It was Ole Miss.
There had been a few engineering majors at that time,
but they must've been very lonely.
They were always alone.
We were in the first class that had a critical mass.
There were five of us in the chemical engineering class.
It was an interesting time.
I was told that they had to convert the faculty lounge
because there was no women's room
in the engineering building at Ole Miss at that time.
I believed this because it was for Ole Miss
at that time it was a nice bathroom.
It had a little lounge with some old furniture in it
and so I think it was where the faculty
used to hang out and they had to give it to us.
So it was an interesting time.
I've written about it in my essays.
And I've written about this in my archaeology.
I worked offshore for Mobil Oil between
my sophomore and junior years.
[microphone glitch] I'm sorry.
And so I, and it looked a great deal like this.
I worked for Mobil.
They had us come into New Orleans.
They told us that we would be engineering assistants,
my roommate and I.
That we would be on the same platform
and that we would work under an engineer
to train for our eventual job later.
This was all a lie.
We were not on the same platform.
There was no engineer out there.
We were not engineering assistants.
We worked on the crew.
We chipped paint. We painted.
We fetched tools.
And we were told that we would spend
a lot of time on these work boats
from which we would have to swing on ropes
to get back onto the platform.
And I was a ninety-five-pound weakling, and I was
pretty sure I would die.
And so I was on the phone to my father that night,
sittin' on the floor weeping, "I have to come home.
I can't do this."
And Daddy said, "You can come home
or you can go out."
It was seven days on, seven days off.
"You can go out for a week and if you don't like it,
then you can come home."
So I did and then I wound up spending the whole summer.
It has crept up in my work, and it was
an experience I wouldn't trade.
So again, you have to put experiences in the well.
And then I went to graduate school
and I worked as an environmental engineer.
Again, those of you who have read the books
will know where that comes in.
This came from my company website.
I'm not actually sure that's me,
but it could be me there in the yellow shirt.
And this was the contamination assessment work
that we did.
Underground storage tanks, hazardous waste work,
remediation design.
And it was fascinating work.
I really loved that work.
And again, I've used it quite a lot.
But I had three children shortly after that
and I decided to stay home with my children.
But I feel like I always needed something for myself
and that was my writing.
So when they were napping,
when they were at tennis practice,
I would write.
And after quite a number of years
because that's slow work,
my first book came out and I found that
the logic that I learned in science
really comes home when you try to do
any large project that requires planning.
Even a novel.
So even though you would not think chemical engineering
and novel writing were related at all,
the cause and effect,
which is just engrained into your psyche
by the time you get out of engineering school,
stood me in good stead.
And so I finished the first book.
It was called "Artifacts"
and it draws very heavily from my mother's
amateur archaeological career.
My character is, she's digging in the woods,
not officially.
And she was an interesting character who came to me
while I was drivin' down the highway.
I was driving down I-10,
which is like the most boring stretch of road in the world,
at least east of the Mississippi,
and I started picturing an old plantation house
in the woods, abandoned,
and I thought, "Who would live there?"
And I came up with a character who was not
what you would imagine as the debutante
that inherited a plantation house.
This is a woman who has no money,
but she has this house that's a money pit,
and she inherited it from the side of her family
who had been enslaved,
who had built the house.
And I thought this was an interesting story
for the twenty-first century,
that recognizes the reality of slavery.
And so pretty soon I decided she would be
even more interesting if she was also
descended from the masters who lived in the house.
And so that was the genesis of Faye Longchamp,
who has that internal conflict that will never go away,
and a fascination with history because
of who she is.
She's also just a little bit Creek, or Muscogee,
and I call Faye a piece of shrapnel
from the great explosion that happened here in 1492.
She has an angle on American history
that nobody else really has because of her family history.
She's now supported nine books.
I'm writing the tenth.
I have a lot more stories left for Faye to tell.
The second book, if we keep with the science theme,
draws heavily from geology.
My parents took us to a place called Red Bluff
which is not ordinary for Mississippi.
I don't know that there's any place else
like this in Mississippi.
Perhaps not east of the Mississippi River.
It's an erosional feature near the Pearl River
and it's a great redneck thing to do
to take a bus full of kids and turn them loose
on Red Bluff to play, to climb,
to play in the creek at the bottom.
And so the geology of Red Bluff comes to play
in my second book "Relics" because I gave
my characters a similar place.
I called it Great Tiger Bluff because I think
it kind of looks like a tiger,
and so the geology crept into the second book
along with the archaeology.
And for the history buffs among you,
which may be everybody,
this historical map is very old.
It's before New Orleans, if you can see.
It's probably before Mobile.
There are no towns on it.
There's the location of the various tribes.
And I can't blow it up big enough so that you can see it,
but just below the middle of the map
on the Pearl River, it's labeled Red Cliffs.
So before anything that we know of was
in Mississippi, they knew were Red Bluff was.
And I just found that to be fascinating.
And so the gravel pits behind my house
that where people made stone tools a long time ago
came into play in "Effigies,"
which is set in the Choctaw Nation in Mississippi.
This is the mother mound of the Choctaw
on the cover.
And the book opens at the mother mound of the Choctaw,
and the murder weapon in this book is a stone tool.
My second lead, Faye's best friend, is a flint knapper,
so this makes him a suspect.
And then one of the archaeologists in the book,
his specialty was taking the debris left behind
and learning about the people who did
the flint knapping in ancient times.
So this came directly from the time I spent
in the woods with my mother exploring the gravel pits.
We were also taught quite a lot about history,
and my mother loaded a bunch of Brownies
and Girl Scouts into school buses and took us
to the battlefield at Vicksburg,
which is quite a sobering place.
If you ever want to think about what war can do,
Vicksburg is the place.
And so those memories, tied with the archaeological memories,
come out in "Findings" because I have
its Civil War re-enactors in this book.
I have a historical character who's a dignitary
in the Confederate government who's having
second thoughts about the cause that he serves,
writing home to his wife who he may never see again.
And that relationship made this book special to me
because I didn't even know what it was about
until I finished it,
and this is where the subconscious comes into play
when you write fiction.
Because my first three books,
I knew what they were about.
They were about justice.
That's what crime fiction is,
an exploration of justice.
An exploration of the notion that what is just
is not always what is legal.
What is just is not always what is moral.
And I felt like I did quite a lot with those questions
in the first three books.
I wrote all of "Findings" thinking that I was
exploring the same questions,
only to find out that this book is about love.
There is no character in this book, good or evil,
who is not touched by romantic love
for good or ill,
and I had to write the book to find out
that that's what I was writing about.
So I find the process of writing still fascinating
after all these years.
It took me five books to write about engineers
because people think we're boring.
We're not, but you know,
you have to take that into account.
And so finally in "Flood Gates" I wrote about engineering.
"Flood Gates" is about the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina.
It's set about three years after the storm.
And I approached my editor to say
I want to write about Katrina.
I want to write about New Orleans.
And she goes, "New Orleans has already been done.
You should do Baton Rouge."
And I go, "Baton Rouge has all the charm
"of government city surrounded by oil refineries
"because that is what it is.
I don't want to do Baton Rouge."
And so I don't argue with my editor much
because I'm afraid of her.
When I talk about this book among mystery readers,
they all know Barbara.
They're like, "Oh, yeah.
We know why you're afraid of her."
But I have apparently touched a maternal chord
with Barbara over the years
'cause she signs my emails XOXO now.
But anyway I was a little afraid,
but I wanted to do this book,
so I said, "Um, I know New Orleans has been done before,
"but Katrina was different in New Orleans
"than it was anywhere else because it was a flood,
"and you can no longer do archaeology in New Orleans
without going through a layer of history
"that we remember, but it's still history,
and it will always be there."
And she liked that.
She's listening, but I haven't convinced her yet.
So we're doing all this by e-mail.
So I decided I'm gonna try one more time
and then I'm gonna quit because
I'm afraid of Barbara.
And so I said, "I know New Orleans has already been done,
"and Katrina's already been done,
"but I don't think it's been done by a licensed engineer
"with a family history in New Orleans,
"a personal history in New Orleans,
"a work history in New Orleans,
"who just might have something to say
about those levee failures."
And she said, "Oh, okay, you can do it,
"but I hate the title.
"Send me a hundred pages and we'll decide
about the title."
So the first hundred pages I set up the history
of engineering in New Orleans because
we had to have a city there,
but you shouldn't have a city there.
And so the military engineers who served
in the Battle of New Orleans during the War of 1812,
and then all the way to the present,
these people have built levees and dikes
and dug tunnels big enough to drive buses through,
and invented pumps that were the world
standard a hundred years ago, and still are,
to build this city that's in the only place
it can be even though it's a bad place.
And so I wrote that 100 pages
and I sent it to Barbara and she goes,
"Oh, now I see where you're going.
"You can keep the title."
So I got to keep Flood Gates.
So another of my fascinations is first contact
between Native Americans and Europeans.
And Strangers was the book where I explored that
because I was at the time living like
an hour and a half from St. Augustine.
So I set Strangers in St. Augustine.
Whenever I needed to look at the place
I'd just drive over.
And I dedicated it to the Americans who were here first.
And I spent some time with the city archaeologists
of St. Augustine who has like the coolest job
in the world,
and he showed me,
he's dug up doublet buttons.
Where in America can you dig up doublet buttons
other than St. Augustine?
It's been there since 1565.
Queen Elizabeth was on the throne.
So I had all this history to work with
and only one book to write.
So I have a plot that's set at the time of first contact.
Then I have a present day plot,
and then also St. Augustine was Hollywood
before Hollywood was Hollywood.
Some of the most famous silent movies
were filmed in St. Augustine at the fort.
Errol Flynn filmed in St. Augustine.
So I have a sub-plot that's set during the movie era.
That was a lot of fun to write.
And again, I didn't know what the book was about
until I finished it,
and I realized I was drawing on fairytale tropes.
There's a reason that the beautiful girl
behind the window on the cover
has very, very long hair.
So fairytales came out in this quite a lot.
And those of you who are wondering
where the engineering was going as far as the offshore,
"Plunder" was the book where my offshore
career came home.
"Plunder" is set in the aftermath of
the Deepwater Horizon explosion.
It's set during the two weeks between when
the explosion happened and the oil came ashore.
So when you're writing something suspenseful,
a ticking clock like that is very useful.
And it was a ticking clock.
I spent some time in that area when I was
working offshore, just driving back and forth,
and working with the people from that area.
And their entire economy hung in the balance
because what do they do there?
They work in the oil industry.
They fish.
And they have tourism.
And all of these things were hanging by a thread
during those two weeks.
So "Plunder" was my
solidarity with these people who have been plundered
for most of history.
I have pirates in "Plunder",
and then, of course, are the modern pirates
who take the oil and don't leave much of the money.
So that would be "Plunder".
I also have a scene in one of the dive bars
that the offshore workers go to because
I got to go to one of those at like
9 o'clock in the morning on a Thursday,
'cause that's when you're coming back.
So one of my friends was going,
"I couldn't really picture you writing that scene"
and I'm going, "I've been places you don't know."
[laughter]
So and to write that I like to do my research.
So to write "Plunder" I went down there
while they were doing the clean up,
and so I have a cousin there and a friend with a boat,
and we went out.
This is Barataria Bay.
And they commandeered shrimp boats,
fitted them out with booms, absorbent booms,
and used them to soak up the water.
The barges had drums where the booms
were used for disposal.
People fully suited up.
You can see we were not.
We were in bathing suits.
And it was around Barataria Bay
as far as you could see,
there was black staining on the grass,
and you knew that it extended everywhere.
And I really got the feeling, the sense,
that we can cause destruction that we cannot fix
because it's too big.
It's just beyond us.
And so that experience I think is what enabled
me to make this book more than it might have been,
which is again going back to the putting
experiences in the well so that you can pull
them out when it comes time to write your fiction.
This was a little oddball,
but I've always been fascinated by spiritualism.
There's a spiritualist town in Florida
that I have visited.
You can walk down the street and have your
pick of places to get your fortune told
or your palm read.
You can go to their church service
which is just like a regular church service
except for they stop and they read people
and they do healings in the middle.
I was fascinated with that.
And as a physics person I wanted to know
how they made the tables fly
and the bugles bang into the wall and all that.
So I did a lot of reading.
I found out how they made the tables fly
and I put it in "Rituals,"
which was really a lot of fun to write.
It's set in upstate New York
where the spiritualists started.
At the same time that there was this second
great religious awakening and the Seneca Falls
Convention for Women's Rights,
all of which show in the book.
And I have to wonder what was in the water
in upstate New York in the early 1800s?
And I love the crystal ball on the cover.
And then for now,
this is the last of the book, the most recent book,
and this came of my experience with
contamination assessment.
In "Isolation" Faye's in bad straights.
She's an emotional wreck.
She has lost a baby late in a pregnancy
that she wanted very much.
She's not herself.
She may not even be sane.
Who knows what her hormones are doing
at this time?
And she is out doing very poor archaeology,
digging for no good reason,
and she uncovers a very old kerosene tank
and punctures it with her trowel,
and starts a contamination problem
on her island that brings in the authorities,
brings in the Environmental Protection people
who find that there's also arsenic there.
Why is there arsenic there?
There's actually some very interesting historical
reasons that arsenic might be there,
which you have to read the book to find out.
But it was a metaphor for where Faye was,
that she's in this dark place.
Her beloved island is tainted
and a very good friend is murdered,
and she has to bring herself back
so that she can make these things right.
And "Isolation" was a lot of fun to write
even though it came from a very dark spot.
It just came out last fall.
I just moved to Oklahoma last fall
and it was already a finalist for the
Oklahoma Book Award,
so I felt like it was a nice introduction
to my new home.
So what does all this tell us about
the topic at hand?
Archaeology, crime fiction, science?
How does that all come together?
I think it tells us that we make a mistake
when we think these things are separate.
I think that science pervades everything.
I think that fiction is rooted in story
which we have used to tell us who we are
ever since we sat around fires or before
we sat around fires perhaps.
I think that they're both ways that we
find out who we are and understand the world where we live.
I think we do ourselves no good putting science
in a box that's intended only for scientists.
I think our culture makes a mistake saying that,
well, it's okay in our culture to say
I'm not good at science,
I'm not good at math,
I'll leave that for the people who are.
And I think we cut ourselves off from something
that's very important.
I don't think we should put knowledge in boxes at all.
I think that stories are the way that we bring
it all together.
They are how we explain the world to ourselves.
I think story, it's obviously related to history,
because the word story is in history.
It tells us who we have been.
Archaeology is the scientific application
of our interest in history.
Science itself is rooted in the curiosity
that my parents engrained in my sister and me
from the time we were very, very small.
And then all of it comes together for education,
which is the way we pass all these things down.
And we pass our knowledge down through stories.
It makes sense to learn about archaeology
from fiction, I think.
So I think our lives are stories.
And I think that we use stories to tell
the story of our lives, to make sense of our lives.
So before I take questions,
I wanted to read to you the first couple of pages
of the new book, "Burials",
because in the first couple of pages
I have math, I have geology,
I have a bit of physics, I have a bit of biology.
I don't think any of that intrudes on the story at all
and I think I do have a story.
So I thought I would read that
and then take questions from the audience.
But this is the first time "Burials" has had
any outing at all,
so you're the first to hear the story.
"Burials", Chapter One.
"Powerful forces are constantly at work
"on a human body that is buried under
"10 feet of red clay.
"Every cubic foot of that clay weighs a hundred pounds.
"For simplicity's sake,
"presume that the body is six feet long.
"No, make that five feet long because this body
"once belonged to a woman,
"and a small one at that.
"Perhaps her buried form was two feet across
"at its widest point.
"It was probably less,
"but let's choose two feet for convenience.
"Thus, she'd offer 10 square feet of surface area
"to the 10 foot depth of the clay soil
"that had crushed her.
"Simple math says that this 100 cubic feet of soil
"had weighed and still weigh to this day
"10,000 pounds.
"It weighed five tons.
"Five tons of downward force will break bones.
"It will press the flesh from those bones.
"It will force the air out of decomposing lungs.
"Over the years the overbearing clay
"had moved ceaselessly,
"swelling when wet and shrinking when dry.
"Every rainstorm had shifted the clay.
"Some of the motion was vertical.
"Some of it was lateral.
"This slow shimmy had disarticulated her bones,
"leaving them in a configuration,
"it was almost the natural shape of a woman
"who lay on her bed asleep, but not quite.
"The clay had dyed her bones red.
"Still, she waited for someone to find her.
"Had she been able to wonder,
"she would've wondered were there anyone
"had ever even noticed she was gone.
Twenty-nine years is a long time to go without a proper burial."
[applause] Oh, thank you. [laughs]