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the nails?” Gilmore replied calmly. I tried to fix the depth of my error. “Not as bad as erasing sixty sites?” I said. “No, no,” Gilmore allowed. “You erased only two.” So on Explorers’ Day, least trained and most repentant, I looked harder than anyone. And I found something under the mango tree, two things, in fact: broken shells. Unbroken, they would be nothing special, but broken might mean someone had crafted them into tools. Gilmore came over and examined one of the shells, an act of attention that was gratifying. He pointed it out to one of the Ph.D. students, who didn’t bother to stop. “It’s most likely hermit crabs,” he said. So much for my redemption.
    Suddenly a commotion broke out above us on the hill. “Bees!” someone shouted, and another slapped at her ear. One of the Dutch archaeologists yelled, “Get out!” and suddenly all ten of us were in a downhill rush, crashing through the undergrowth. Thomas the law student was slapping at his head, so Gilmore stopped and pulled a bee out of his long hair. The Dutch crew stumbled past, yelling. I stuck close to Gilmore, who hesitated again partway down and pointed. “Lilies,” he said, reaching down for the leaves of two plants. “They don’t grow wild here, but slaves planted them at grave sites,” and of all the markers we had seen today, this would seem the most promising—but he would have to note it on a map for later investigation. “Hurry, they’re still on us!” came the cry from the volunteers farther up, so we stumbled down the last stretch of the slope. When we broke through to the road, Thomas had his head bowed and Hofman was pulling another bee out of his hair with a tissue. One Dutch student was nursing a sting at her waist, one shrugged off a sting on his arm.
    Bees, you say? A band of fit and hearty archaeologists brought low by little flying insects? I know it seems silly, but consider thewords of the archaeologist who listed all of the terrible snakes and spiders and scorpions he encountered in the course of excavating in Central America, then waved his hand dismissively—snakes are stupid, spiders are kind of cute, and our fears about these creatures are irrational. Then what would be a rational fear? “What is deadly in the jungle is the mosquitoes,” he declared. What is most likely to kill us? “The bugs.”
    And these bugs were not little honeybees. “Africanized bees,” Gilmore explained. “They appeared on the island about five years ago. They have sentry bees who patrol their territory. They’ll bounce against your head, bump into your forehead, and then, if you don’t get away, they’ll come after you.” Ah, bugs that stalk people.
    But the archaeologists didn’t seem horrified, or upset. Everyone’s cheeks were flushed. They seemed recharged, in a heightened state of—could this be pleasure? Why yes, they were having fun . Even Thomas, who had had two mad bees trying to drill through his skull, was shaking off the stings and grinning. This was much more fun than law school! This was the adventure we longed for, the Indiana Jones adventure, starring us and a swarm of—let’s go ahead and say it— killer bees.
    GRANT GILMORE WAS sitting in his comfortable home on the north side of the island, on Zeelander Bay, beaming at his wife as she told me how she fell in love with archaeology as a teenager. Joanna, a decade younger than Grant, was soft-voiced, gentle, but steely at the core; she had analyzed bone damage in the skeletons of leprosy victims. She first came to Statia to work with Gilmore when she was a master’s student and he a doctoral candidate at University College London; she returned as his girlfriend, then moved in as his wife. “Grant gave me a human skull for my birthday one year,” she told me, shyly. “Really? Which year?” I