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asked. And they discussed it, back and forth in the night breeze blowing off the bay, their children asleep in the back of the house.“Twenty-one?” she guessed—“. . . no, later. Not Christmas, surely.” He said, “No, your mother would have freaked. Valentine’s Day?” It was a puzzle—people who were trained to take any puzzle out there and pin it to a map and date it couldn’t quite locate this oddly endearing event in their own past.
    The rain from the tropical storm that had been threatening since I arrived finally came, a hot August downpour. It kept our little band of volunteers indoors for pottery lessons and a show-and-tell about eighteenth-century pipes, mirrors, and ink bottles, some of them marked POLICE EVIDENCE because they had been confiscated from a doctor trying to smuggle them out of the country.
    Why do we study pottery? Because it endures; because, for thousands of years, most cultures have made it in one form or another; because it appears in breathtaking variety and tells us stories about the people who made and used it. I rubbed the pieces of creamware and pearlware from Europe and Asia and felt the rough salt glaze on a local piece of stoneware. Gilmore quickly figured out that Courtney, the newest volunteer, had taken pottery classes, and used her experience to explain the differences in how each was made. Then he told us about the beautiful hexagonal blue beads of Statia, the famous blue beads worth $150 or $200 apiece to collectors. I briefly entertained a detour into the archaeology of beads, following bead archaeologists, subscribing to the Journal of the Society of Bead Researchers , flying to the International Bead Conference in Borneo—it was not too late to go to Borneo. Whenever there was a storm, beads and other goods that had sunk when the British burned Statia’s warehouses would wash ashore. “I bet you there are thirty or forty people combing the beach after this storm, looking for blue beads,” Gilmore said.
    The next day, a steamy one, we returned to the plantation, this time to learn how to operate the “total station,” a surveying tool that measured distances and helped archaeologists map their sites. Gilmore carried the high-tech tool and an equally important low-techone: a nineteenth-century edition of Diderot’s Pictorial Encyclopedia of Trades and Industry , with its detailed drawings of how various industries, including sugar mills, worked. You can’t identify artifacts if you don’t know what they are—it’s one of the challenges of historical archaeology, industrial archaeology, military archaeology, any type of archaeology: you have to know what you’re looking for. Which meant, since we were digging in a sugar plantation, we had to know the components of a sugar mill, so we could recognize the pieces that went into refining sugar and turning it into rum. If we looked sharp, maybe we could find a conical sugar pot used to drain molasses from raw sugar.
    After the lessons, Gilmore worked the sifting screen with a volunteer while I peppered him with questions and took notes.
    â€œOops, spider,” I heard Gilmore say, but I was scribbling and didn’t see him pick it off the screen and toss it over his shoulder. A few minutes later, it reappeared—a gray tarantula the size of a baby’s fist—on the front of his shirt. I felt fur sprouting around my heart. I had never seen Gilmore motionless before, but there he stood, frozen except for his eyes, which looked at me expectantly. It was one thing to obliterate two test pits, another to stand by and let my first archaeology teacher be attacked by a tarantula. I couldn’t let him down twice. Also, I needed him; he was my source, my guide to poison trees, my ride to the airport. I used my pencil to get under the spider, and tried to lift it off his shirt, but the determined thing kept creeping up toward