“Oh, look, a tooth. A human tooth.”

Ooops.

One never knows when one is going to run into a burial, but I can tell you that there certainly is an optimal time for it, and a preliminary test pit is not the optimal time. Better to find the burial later on when you are more prepared. But, well, that is how it goes sometimes.

So I came up out of the hole to have a look. I looked. Aha! I thought to myself. Finally, something I know more about than these guys!

“Nope, not human.”

“Are you sure?”

“Yes, I am. Look at this tooth. Then look at these teeth,” opening my mouth and showing him all my teeth. “Eee aee ing ihn ere at ooks ike is?”

“Nope. You’re right, it’s not human.”

“Hey, you can be so stupid sometimes,” chimed in another of the guys. “That’s a monkey tooth. I’m sure of it. Of course, how would you know, since you’ve never been close to a monkey!”

That got a laugh, because monkey is one of the main thing these guys hunt, so to say another man has not been close to a monkey is a dig at his hunting abilities.

And it was indeed a monkey. But it prompted me to resume an ongoing conversation that archaeologists tend to have with the local people on a regular basis.

“So, how would you feel if we found a human, say an Efe (Pygmy), buried here or somewhere?”

“Mbore!” was the answer.

Mbore means…nothing, used up, meaningless, having nothing to add, uninteresting. Was my question uninteresting?

“What do you mean: Mbore?” I asked, seeking clarification.

“Mbore. When you are dead, you are mbore. Who cares what happens to your body! We’ll dig up all the bodies if you want!”

Which, really, is an idiomatic way of saying, “We don’t care about no stinking bodies” but just in case, I asked…

“…All of the bodies? Do you know where all of the bodies are buried? Any bodies?”

“Nope, not out here. Just back near the villages.”

Right. Me too. I knew as well where most of the recently dead people were buried, more or less. Why, I even buried some of them myself. But out here in the forest, there must be some places to avoid (recent burials) as well as some places to investigate (ancient burials). (As it turns out, another archaeologist who went to the Ituri Forest after I did managed to find some of these burials, and one was even found in the vicinity of the test pit I was digging at the moment. And he was prepared, reasonably well-funded, and found very interesting results. But that is another story.)

Burial is one of the most basic cultural practice for most peoples, and there are occasions when the method of burial is an excellent indicator of cultural boundaries or geographical centers. Archaeologists pay close attention to this sort of thing, which is why I thought it fascinating when I investigated the written literature on Pygmy burial practices and found out that they have in historic times in this one region practiced pretty much all the different kinds of treatment of the dead known. To these folks, burying the dead was like trends in music in the West. Every decade seems to have its own way of doing it, and some decades are remembered more fondly than others.

I also found it very interesting to read about finding the body of Navy Captain Michael Scott Speicher. Speicher was shot down and killed in Iraq during Gulf War I, and in fact, he was the first casualty of the war. His body was never recovered. It was not initially found at the crash site.

It turns out that local Bedouin had found his body and, as is their custom, they buried it. Nice of them to go through the trouble. His body was not found until someone asked around, and someone said, “Oh, that body? You’ve been looking for that body? The Bedouin buried it! Over there!”

On hearing this news, President Barack Obama remarked that this is “a reminder of the selfless service that led him to make the ultimate sacrifice for our freedom.” On hearing the news, I thought, “Jeezh…how often do they just not bother to ASK???”

People tend to ignore the Bedouin, and there are other people around the world who get ignored as well. I wonder how may U.S. “MIA” soldiers died in Vietnam who were buried there by people who were being ignored. Has anyone asked?

The MSNBC piece reporting this notes that “Sands hid fate of Gulf War pilot.” No, not really. Not seeing what is really there…the military not seeing it, the governments of Iraq and the U.S. not seeing it, and the press not seeing it…hid this event from our eyes.

So, after establishing that the tooth was a monkey and not a person, we went back to digging and sifting. Then, I asked the same question I’d asked a half dozen times before.

“Hey, the villagers, they lived in this cave during The Troubles, right?” I was referring to the Simba Rebellion when everyone fled the roadside villages.

“Yes, they did. They came to live with us Efe. We tried to help them.”

“A lot of people died, right?”

“Everybody starved, Greg. Most of the children and old people died. Lots of people died.”

“So I’ve heard.”

Dig…dig…dig…dig….

“So…where are the bodies buried?”

Silence for a while.

“Look, another bone. I think this one is an antelope.”

I never did get an answer to that question.

So, on behalf of the President of the United States and the Secretary of War, as well as the family of Captain Michael “Scott” Speicher and the press, all of whom seem to have become inexplicably discourteous, I would like to thank the Bedouin for having properly treated his body according to custom.

More on the Congo here and here.

Then, the writer totally surprised me by noting (I paraphrase) that “unlike the Pygmies, who live in these forests and are of perfectly proportioned shape and appearance, these subhuman creatures were rather grotesque.”

The traveler was a college-educated westerner with a late-Victorian attitude about Africans. The idea that all Africans are at least a little subhuman would have been a starting point for him. Throwing in a tribe here and there with especially cannibalistic or otherwise uncouth tendencies would be typical. Running into a group of individuals that looked to him almost like a separate species would be notable, and he did in fact make note of it, but this would be something he would take in stride.

Reading this made me wonder about two totally different and to some extent opposed lines of thought. On one hand, I thought, “How can people think such things are real…this guy was obviously seeing something he expected to see. Why? How does that work?” On the other hand, I thought, “What if his observations were essentially accurate, aside from the racial judgments he made. What if he really did encounter a bunch of people with bow legs and funny-looking bodies?”

Then, in the next paragraph of this monologue, a possible answer came. Shortly after the above mentioned description, the traveler mentions that one of these strange heathens, with the bow legs and the disproportioned body, traveled with him as a servant for a while. Then, at the end of that leg of the trip, after serving quite well for being such a subhuman and all, the traveler wanted to leave this misshapen wretch with some sort of extra payment for services. A tip. But the wretch had withdrawn to the forest never to be seen again (by the traveller), apparently uninterested in recompense.

Bingo.

Or at least, maybe bingo. I have an experience that may in fact match that of this ca. 1900-vintage traveler. Actually, a few such experiences. But as a post- (way post!) Victorian anthropologist, I have a slightly different take on the situation.

When I lived in the Ituri Forest, I often lived with the Pygmies for stretches of time. There were two modalities of living with them. In one mode, I would throw myself on their mercy and more or less live exactly as they lived, staying in the same kind of hut they lived in and doing whatever they did, or at least watching them do whatever they were doing, and trying to stay out of the way at the same time as observing and learning things about their lifeway. In the other modality, I stayed in a small dome tent (a cloth version of their hut) and was a bit more involved with the logistics of camp life, because during at least some of that time (several weeks over the course of many many months), it was more like they were living with me. I would hire a small number of Pygmy men, and maybe have one villager with us as well, and another anthropologist, and we’d be doing something like digging an archaeological site, measuring trees, counting monkeys, or whatever.

During some of these forays, especially in the first modality when it was only me (no other anthropologist) travelling with them, and I was living in their lifeway, more or less, I was assigned a wife. Sort of. This happened a couple of times, with different groups, and different individuals. In each case the person whom I eventually came to understand was serving the role of Mrs. Gregoiri (one of my Efe names was Gregoiri, which I admit is not too original) was a man with pretty severe polio.

These were men who could not carry out many of the activities in which the men normally engaged with respect to hunting and other forest activities. Even moving from camp to camp might be a challenge to someone whose legs were very shortened and deformed and who had, essentially, a kind of polio-induced dwarfism. For the most part, these men had outstanding manual skills. They could shoot an arrow as well as any (or better) and were outstanding at making things that the other men also made, but that the polio-afflicted men would make with utmost skill. What they lacked was stamina in the field.

Their condition meant that they would be unlikely to marry. It meant that they would be in camp with the women anywhere from now and then to almost always as the men went off to hunt. It meant that their social and economic gender was unique. And it meant that when someone had to be assigned to keep the big pasty white guy who was always tripping on tree roots and poking himself with sticks from harming himself, well, this person was the obvious choice.

I remembered, rather poignantly in fact, on reading the aforementioned traveler’s notice that the strange deformed subhuman left without any special recompense, that this is what happened to me as well. It was a bit of a privilege to hang out with the visitor, as would be the case in most cultures, and the visitor seemed to overlook the person’s affliction, which is something that many visitors may not have done.

The polio that came through the Ituri Forest of Zaire must have come through at roughly the same time because all the men who had it were about the same age…my age, actually. This population of forest dwelling people must have been very susceptible to it. And the Pygmies were notable for either refusing or just being bad at accepting long-term treatment or hospital stays, so even if there was some help available for them in those days, it may have ended up rather ineffective. Many must have died.

I need not mention that I never saw a subhuman deformed race. I did see some men who were being very good to me, keeping me from getting killed by the snakes, the elements, by getting poked to death or falling off a cliff into quicksand, or whatever one may think of as the dangers of the African Jungle. And they didn’t want any special pay for it.

Those marriages were short lived. But they were good marriages.