Artifacts of the Seven Site: A Compact?

We think we’ve found the remains of a woman’s compact from the 1930s at the Seven Site, similar to compacts that Amelia Earhart may have used.  Here’s the evidence.

1.       In 2001, we found a fragment of clear, thin, flat glass with one straight, finished, beveled finished edge (2-6-S-18), on the surface near the crest of the surge ridge.

2.       In 2007, we found another fragment (2-8-S-1) that fit the first, forming a finished corner; the glass had evidently been rectangular.

The two glass fragments

3.       We began speculating that the glass might have been the mirror from a compact that had lost its silvery backing.  Several TIGHAR researchers got to work and uncovered the fact that Earhart did regularly carry and use a compact; there was in fact one in Purdue University’s Earhart collection.

4.       Also in 2007, we found three tabular fragments of what we called (technical term) “red stuff;” two were in the WR feature, one in the SL feature.  We speculated that these might represent dried-up rouge.  Ric Gillespie measured the rouge compartment in a 1930s compact, and found that the three fragments fit easily in it.

The Red Stuff Superimposed on

Dimensions of a Rouge Compartment

5.       Ric also submitted a sample of the red stuff to the Winterthur Museum Analytical Laboratories, together with a rouge sample from a 1930s compact scored on Ebay by ace researcher Karen Hoy.  The results of comparative chemical analysis were not identical, but very similar.

Winterthur Analytical Results

6.       We wracked our brains trying to think of other things the red stuff might represent, and continue to do so, but so far, rouge seems to be the best bet.

7.       Starting in June, 2008, I began an experiment to see whether and how fast exposure to the elements would strip the silvery backing from a mirror.  Placing a small mirror under the most Niku-like conditions I could create in Silver Spring, Maryland, I’ve recorded its status monthly ever since. 

The Test Mirror After Six Months (1/1/2009)

The Test Mirror on 9/1/2012

(Brown material is remaining backing; glass otherwise is clear)

8.       So, five years in the rather more-benign-than-Niku environment of my backyard (and office during the winters; there’s no snow on Niku) have been sufficient to strip most of the backing off my mirror; seventy years at the Seven Site should have done it for our fragments.

9.       Meanwhile, the indefatigable Karen Hoy came up with two quite different antique compacts on Ebay, the first with a mirror that matched the Seven Site fragments in thickness and bevel but was a little larger; the second with a mirror whose size and bevel matched exactly.  It is apparent that some compacts in the 1930s did have mirrors the size, shape, and thickness of the Seven Site specimens, with the same kind of beveled edges.

Karen’s First Compact, with Seven Site Shards

Karen’s Second Compact; Mirror Removed for Comparison

Seven Site Shards on Mirror from Karen’s Second Compact

10.   In 2010, we found more fragments – tiny slivers – of red stuff, mostly around the SL Feature.  These collectively fit easily with the 2007 fragments in a compact’s rouge compartment.

Distribution of Red Stuff

11.   The SL Feature produced a great many tiny rusted fragments of thin ferrous metal.  Much of it appears to represent containers of various kinds, and possibly cooking implements.  A few very small, very thin fragments have traces of a non-metallic substance (another technical term: “black stuff”) on them.  In 2011 we submitted two of these – 2-8-S-52 and 2-9-S-94C – to the Evans Analytical Group (EAG) for analysis.  X-Ray Flourescence characterized the metal in 2-8-S-52 as a low-alloy steel, possibly tin-coated, but I had painted this particular fragile piece of rust with B-72 preservative when it came in from the site, and this frustrated characterization of the non-metallic substance. 

 12.   The second (untreated) sample, 2-9-S-94C, is a fragment of very thin ferrous metal bent into a right angle, as though it were from the edge of a small box.  Black stuff is concentrated in the bend.  Based on Fourier Transform Infrared Spectroscopy (FTIR), EAG reported that the black residuum “contained organic material, possibly: saccharide such as cellulose or carbohydrate; polyamide such as protein or similar biological material; aromatic hydrocarbon such as lignin or other complex aromatic hydrocarbon; organic acid salt such as sodium alginate, and alphatic hydrocarbon…”  Among the aromatic hydrocarbons in the mix of products and byproducts was apparently carminic acid, the active ingredient in Carmine red dye, widely used in cosmetics.

EAG FTIR Plot of Black Residuum Against Carminic Acid

13.   Examining the EAG report, chemist Greg George points out that some of the identified compounds have sunscreening properties, and that the lignins might also match the FTIR spectrum for tannic acid, which was used in skin powders as an "irritant" to produce a "healthy pink."  This clearly needs more research by people who, like Greg, and unlike me, know their way around the periodic table.

14.   Other TIGHAR researchers are looking into direct evidence of Earhart’s compact use.  Joe Cerniglia has unearthed a 1934 photograph in the Purdue collection showing Earhart getting her hair cut by her rancher friend Carl Dunrud on his Double D Ranch in Wyoming.  She’s holding something rectangular in her hand that looks very much like the mirror from a compact, about the right size to be the one from the Seven Site.  It appears that it may have swiveled out from the body of the compact, represented by the rectangular-ish thing resting in her fingertips.

Haircut Photo: Source Purdue Special Collections and http://www.wyomingtalesandtrails.com/bighorn3.html

Detail from Haircut Photo

15.   Another photo from Purdue, also found by Joe Cerniglia, shows Earhart standing in front of her Lockheed Vega holding a rectangular book-shaped thing, too small to be a book.  “Book-shaped” compacts were popular in the 1930s; based on the Vega, Ric Gillespie assigns this image a date of about 1935.

Earhart with “Book-Shaped” Compact?

Source:  Purdue Special Collections

16.   Finally, Ricker Jones found a June 29, 1937 news article from the Argus, a newspaper in Melbourne, Australia, and a photo from the July 3, 1937 issue of the Melbourne Sun, both dealing with Earhart’s June 27^th landing in Darwin.  The Argus describes her powdering her nose before deplaning, and in the Sun’s photo of her descending from the plane she’s carrying something rectangular and box-like, about the size of a large “carry-all” compact.

Earhart Deplaning in Darwin (From Melbourne Sun Courtesy Newspix)

Detail of Earhart’s Hand and Contents,

Darwin Photo

All the usual caveats, now: we do NOT have an unequivocal, unambiguous woman’s compact, and we don’t have a smoking gun connection between what we’ve found at the Seven Site and Earhart.  We have several artifacts that are consistent with pieces of a compact, of a size and shape resembling what appear to be compacts in Earhart’s hands in two or three relevant photographs.

If the mirror, red stuff, and thin metal don’t represent a compact, what do they represent? 

·         The thin metal with black stuff on it is, if you’ll excuse it, the thinnest piece of evidence; it could be from any number of thin metal artifacts, and the black residuum could have been produced in a variety of ways. 

·         The glass might not be from a mirror, though the fact that it’s identical with the mirrors found by Karen Hoy in two different compacts makes it seem pretty likely that it is. 

·         The red stuff contains no lead, so it isn’t red lead paint – a common paint in military and industrial uses in the 1940s, ‘50s and ‘60s, which we can be sure the Coast Guardsmen and probably the colonists had.  It might be some other kind of red paint, but we haven’t found examples of such paint anywhere else on the island (There are cans of what appears to be dried-up red lead in the colonial village).

If the artifacts we’ve found do represent a compact, could someone other than Earhart have brought it to the Seven Site?  Certainly, but the realistic options are pretty limited.  Those that have been suggested, or that we’ve thought of, are:

·         Women of the colony.  This is possible, but we have no evidence that I Kiribati or Tuvaluan women of the period living on isolated islands carried compacts, and there’s nothing of the kind in the inventories we’ve found from the colony’s cooperative store.

·         Passing female pearl divers.  We’ve seen no historical or archaeological evidence of pearl divers – male or female, with or without makeup – visiting Niku.

·         Gallagher.  Possible, but there’s no evidence that Gallagher engaged in cross-dressing.

·         A Coast Guardsman.  Possible; we have no evidence of a cross-dressing Coast Guardsman, but we wouldn’t expect to find much.

·         A visiting European, Australian, New Zealand, or American woman.  This is probably the most likely non-Earhart option.  We know that colonial administrator Paul Laxton’s wife was with him on the island for awhile in 1949-50, and he mentions that an unidentified American woman visited.  We have a photo of Mrs. Laxton on Nutiran at the north end of the island, and it’s certainly not impossible that she, or the mysterious American woman, or another visiting woman, also went south and spent time at the Seven Site.  It’s not impossible that she left a compact there for some reason.

So, alternative explanations can be imagined for a compact – or stuff that collectively looks like a compact – at the Seven Site.  When considered in the context of the other evidence at the Seven Site, however, we think there’s a good chance that the fragments we’ve found there represent the remains of Amelia Earhart’s compact.

Thanks to Joe Cerniglia, Karen Hoy, Greg George, and Ricker Jones for their help in producing this paper; errors and omissions are my own responsibility, however.

Artifacts of the Seven Site: "Clam Shuckers"

There’s been some web chatter recently about two ferrous metal “clam shuckers” found at the Seven Site on Nikumaroro.  Here’s some elaboration.

First off, we don’t know that the things were clam shuckers.   We suspect that one or more of them may have been used in a (probably unsuccessful) effort to open some Tridacna clams because:

1.       1. There are two clusters of Tridacna valves on the site.  We call them “Clambush 1” and “Clambush 2” because of a joke someone  (Gary Quigg?) offered when we found them – that the clams were there because they had crawled up to the site to ambush the Coast Guardsmen from the Loran station.

2.       2. Clambush 1 was close to the crest of the Seven Site surge ridge, roughly oval in shape, with the valves fairly scattered.  Nineteen whole (both valves) or half (one valve) Tridacna were found in Clambush 1.  Seven of the valves were broken, typically with single breaks across their midsections, shattered into multiple fragments (some of which couldn't be found), some apparently smashed with heavy objects (breakage patterns radiating inward).  Several small coral rocks suitable as hammerstones were found nearby.   

3    3. Of the seven broken valves, three had unbroken mates; in two cases both valves were broken, and in the other two cases the matching valve could not be found.  Among the broken and non-broken specimens, some are chipped on the hinge side as though someone had tried to insert a tool to pry them open.

Clambush 1

3.       The valves of Clambush 2 were laid out in a rather linear fashion, parallel to the southeast side of the SL fire feature and about 25 cm. from it.  Clambush 2 contained 24 complete clams (both valves present). None of them are broken or chipped along the hinges.

Clambush 2 under excavation by Lonnie Schorer

4.       The first of the two “clam shuckers” was found in 2007 about 10 meters north of Clambush 1; the second, found three years later, was in the same general vicinity.

5.       The tip of the first “shucker” fits in the wound in one of the Tridacna valves where it appears an attempt was made to open it from the hinge side.

“Shucker” and wounded Tridacna (U.S. quarter for scale)

6.       Analysis by Ric Gillespie has shown convincingly (to me) that the “shuckers” represent fragments of the steel rim of a barrel (probably also steel), some 22” (55.88 cm.) in diameter; this is the diameter of a standard steel drum used to contain fuel oil and a wide variety of other substances.

7.       There is one steel drum on the Seven Site, but it is of smaller diameter.  Fragments of standard steel drums are found in the colonial village, on the Nutiran mudflat, on the Nutiran reef, at the Aukaraime Shoe Site, and at the Loran station.  They were certainly used by the colonists and coast guardsmen, and there is photographic and other evidence of their use by the 1939 New Zealand survey party.  There is also every reason to believe that they were aboard the Norwich City when she grounded in 1929 on the Nutiran reef, exploded and burned.

So – We can’t demonstrate that the pointy ferrous objects on the Seven Site were clam shuckers, and we certainly don’t suggest that they were effective clam shuckers, but they were found fairly close to a cluster of clams that looks very much like someone tried to shuck by prying on their hinge sides with something whose tip resembled that of the shuckers, and when he or she failed to do so, bashed them with rocks.  

Who might that person be?

·         Probably not a colonist; they all had knives with which to shuck, and their typical documented practice was either to harvest the meat out of a clam by cutting its adductor muscle while it was still in the water, thus keeping it from closing, or by laying the clams out in the sun or next to a fire until they opened naturally (This appears to be what someone did to produce Clambush 2).

·         Probably not a Coast Guardsman.  Those we’ve interviewed say they didn’t do it, but besides this, they had knives that would have been far more effective shuckers than the barrel lid fragments.

That leaves the putative castaway as the most likely shucking-attempter.  The castaway might not have had an effective knife to apply to the endeavor, and might not have known that clams would open if exposed to heat.  

If the castaway had experience collecting oysters and clams in the eastern United States, he or she might have applied that knowledge to the Niku clams; a recommended practice with Eastern U.S. oysters and clams is to pry them open from the hinge side.

Where would the castaway get the “shuckers,” since they apparently did not occur “naturally” at the Seven Site?  My guess – which I stress is only a guess – is that they were part of the Norwich City wreckage, broken into more or less their present shapes by the explosive oxidation associated with the explosion and fire, picked up because they looked potentially useful, and carried to the Seven Site with no particular use in mind, then applied to the clams of Clambush 1 when the need to open them became apparent.  

Obviously the “shuckers” are not smoking guns, but in the context of Clambush 1 I think they’re evidence suggesting – and I stress, only suggesting – that someone not indigenous to the South Pacific spent time at the Seven Site trying to live off the local fauna.

Review of Amelia Earhart: The Truth at Last. Mike Campbell, 2012, Sunbury Press, Camp Hill, PA

 Like most books about the 1937 disappearance of Amelia Earhart and Fred Noonan, Mike Campbell's is rather adventurously titled, or rather subtitled.  The book certainly presents "the Truth" about the Earhart disappearance as Mike Campbell perceives it   Indeed, it is a near-encyclopedic exposition of the truth in which Campbell and some others believe -- that Earhart and Noonan were captured by the Japanese and executed on Saipan, and that the United States and Japan have covered up these alleged facts through the last 75 years.  Campbell here presents, in a fairly organized way, virtually every piece of evidence for the Saipan Execution/Coverup (SE/C) Hypothesis, together with a great deal that is not exactly evidence -- notably statements of opinion by people whose opinions might or might not be particularly well informed.  What he does not present is a balanced analysis of this and other evidence, particularly any evidence supporting contrary hypotheses.

Campbell is a true believer, and his book reflects it.  In fairness to him, he is not an entirely rigid or inflexible true believer; he does puzzle over some of the contradictions in the data, and he has revised and refined some of his opinions since publication of his previous book on the subject, With Our Own Eyes (Campbell with Devine 2002).  But he firmly believes that he knows what happened to Earhart and Noonan, and he has no use whatever for anyone who wants to consider alternative possibilities.  Such people -- the Smithsonian's Tom Crouch and TIGHAR's Ric Gillespie, for example -- are to Campbell mere tools of the "establishment" that has covered up Japanese perfidy and Earhart's fate since 1944, if not since 1937.  Or, as he characterizes Gillespie, they are mere hucksters trying to capitalize on Earhart's name.

I could find nothing in the way of new evidence in Campbell's new book, but he has organized a great deal of information presented heretofore in scattered form -- books, articles, letters, internet offerings -- and that is certainly a contribution.  The problem is that he is for the most part entirely uncritical of any evidence that comports with his beliefs, and utterly scornful of anyone and anything that contradicts it.  And his evidence remains overwhelmingly anecdotal in nature, comprising things that people said, or said other people said, or said other people said other people said (or wrote in documents allegedly held secret by the "establishment").  Often, the people quoted were interviewed many decades after the alleged dates of the incidents they described, usually by people with distinct interests in "proving" some variant on the SE/C hypothesis, with none of the controls that are routinely used by courts and law enforcement personnel to guard against leading the witness and planting false memories (For a discussion of this problem see King, Roberts and Cerniglia 2012).  To Campbell all the resulting ambiguous data adds up to "the Truth," and he is in no way shy about pronouncing it so.

Campbell is also prone to extremely selective reportage.  One example may suffice to illustrate.  On pages 349-53 he makes much of a May 13, 1938 transcribed telephone conversation between Secretary of the Treasury Henry Morgenthau and Malvina Scheider, Eleanor Roosevelt’s secretary, in which Morgenthau expresses reluctance to share records of the Navy's search for Earhart with Earhart’s colleague and advisor Paul Mantz.  Morgenthau says that to release the documents would "smear the whole reputation of Amelia Earhart."  Since the radio logs of the USCGC Itasca, which were later released to Mantz, contained nothing that reflected on Earhart's reputation, Campbell asks with great puzzlement, why could Morgenthau possibly have been unwilling to share the requested documents -- unless they contained evidence of something the US government wanted to keep secret?  What Campbell fails to mention in the context of the Morgenthau-Scheider conversation is the 106-page report prepared by Itasca’s captain, Commander W.K. Thompson, which was highly critical of Earhart, essentially blaming her for her own disappearance and exonerating the Navy and Coast Guard of any responsibility for failing to find her.  Campbell cites Thompson's report in his bibliography, discusses it briefly on pages 29-30, and reports on page 350 that Thompson met with Morgenthau upon Itasca’s return to Honolulu, but he never alerts the reader to the possibility that it might be this document -- not the innocuous logs of the Itasca’s radio room or some secret revelation of Japanese machinations -- that Morgenthau was reluctant to share with Mantz and hence potentially with the world.  

Thompson's report is summarized, quoted, and discussed dispassionately by Ric Gillespie in Finding Amelia (Gillespie 2006:227-31), but if Campbell has read Gillespie's book he doesn't cite it in his bibliography – perhaps because in Campbell's eyes Gillespie is only a shameless self-promoter and darling of the "establishment" that has so long covered up "the Truth."  Campbell’s book is rife with such selective approaches to the “truth” as reflected in the documentary record. 

It may be true that Earhart and Noonan were captured and executed by the Japanese, and it may even be that these events have been kept secret by every U.S. president from Roosevelt on, and by every Japanese government.  But as Tom Roberts, Joe Cerniglia and I wrote after reviewing much of the same data Campbell has (albeit less comprehensively, but we hope more objectively), the evidence "gives us no serious reason to think that it is true.  Some of the (SC/E) story’s variants … are contradicted by objective independent data, while others are grounded only in anecdotal evidence.  And this evidence is tainted by the methods (or lack of method) involved in its collection, making it difficult if not impossible to judge its veracity" (King, Roberts & Cerniglia 2012). 

I can't speak for my co-authors, but Campbell's new book gives me no reason to change my opinion of his evidence.  This will doubtless come as no surprise to Campbell; in a recent email he has advised me that I, too, am part of the "establishment."

References

Campbell, Mike (with Thomas Devine)

            2002     With Our Own Eyes: Eyewitnesses to the Final Days of Amelia Earhart.  Lancaster, OH, Lucky Press

Campbell, Mike

            2012     Amelia Earhart: The Truth at Last. Camp Hill, PA, Sunbury Press

Gillespie, Richard

            2006     Finding Amelia: The True Story of the Earhart Disappearance.  Annapolis, MD, Naval Institute Press.

King, Thomas F., Thomas A. Roberts, and Joseph Cerniglia

            2012     Amelia Earhart in the Marianas: a Consideration of the Evidence.  Paper submitted to the Northern Mariana Islands Council for the Humanities’ Marianas History Conference, Saipan, June 14-16, 2012.

What Next?

Next week, the expedition launches to search the deep reef slope off Nutiran on Nikumaroro.  Absent some utter disaster (piracy, sunk by a rogue wave, etc), it will produce one of four outcomes:

1. A definitive, no-doubt-about-it, smoking-gun Electra-part.
2. A probable/maybe Electra-part that requires more study and/or a return trip to recover.
3. One or more ambiguous items or other phenomena requiring more study, in situ or elsewhere; or
4. Nothing.

As I've argued on this site before, even a "4" result would in no way disprove the Nikumaroro Hypothesis; it would only indicate that with the technology now in hand, given the likely reduction of the wreck by the forces of nature, we haven't been able to find it.  But the inevitable reaction by TIGHAR's one or two naysayers will certainly be to trumpet the negative data and insist that it DOES show that AE and FN never made it to Niku.  That will undoubtedly have a chilling effect on fundraising for further research. 

It's hard -- even impossible -- to predict the effect of a "2" or "3" result; it depends on what's found.  But either would probably generate pressure for more underwater work, to verify or disverify whatever has been found.

A "1" result could have either of two quite different results.  It might unleash a great wave of support for more work to flesh out the story of the castaways and what happened to them.  It might generate pressure to turn Nikumaroro into a tourist destination, with all the tricky environmental, social, and political consequences such a transformation would entail.  And/or people might simply say "OK, that mystery's solved; let's go on to (Insert your favorite mystery)."

I think we ought to be discussing, in at least preliminary terms, what TIGHAR ought to do in the event of either a "1" or a "4" finding. 

If "1," I think our prime obligation will be to protect the island.  Work with the Kiribati government and anybody else who'll help to make sure the place isn't overrun by treasure hunters or just plain tourists.  One obvious thing to do might be to negotiate an arrangement with one or two responsible cruise ship operators to take tourists on carefully controlled visits to the island -- satisfy the demand (assuming there is a demand) in a way that doesn't injure the island, its plants and animals, its air and water, or its archaeology.  Such tourist visits might be coordinated with an ongoing program of research at the Seven Site, perhaps at the Aukaraime Shoe Site, the putative Camp Zero, the Village, and other locations, in which visitors could participate under supervision.

If "4," the problem will be to continue research at all; there will be a natural tendency to see the Niku Hypothesis as discredited, and funding is likely to dry up.  But there are relatively low-cost ways to get to Niku and spend a reasonable amount of time doing reasonable and useful research.  We still have the Seven Site to finish excavating.  There's still the Village to search, and the neighborhood of the Shoe Site, and the putative Camp Zero.  We could use some comparative studies at the Loran Site.  Last year I was able to estimate that we could put a dozen and a half or so people on the island for close to a month to do a range of archaeological projects for about $200,000.  The accommodations wouldn't be swanky, but they'd be livable, and there's serious work to be done.  This work might or might not yield smoking guns, but I continue to think that we do ourselves a disservice, and participate in the dumbing-down of the population, by focusing on smoking guns; we ought to be showing people how real research is done.  The real research we have done, and are doing, is building up a body of evidence that I think makes a convincing case for the Niku Hypothesis -- regardless of whether we ever find a definitive Electra-part or scrap of Earhart DNA.

Besides the fieldwork, there are a number of analytic avenues to be pursued.  Did the ointment pot really contain freckle creme?  What sizes of shoes did Earhart have on the plane anyway?  Who built the fire at the Shoe Site, when, and why?  What else can we glean from the various archives, from the recordings in the Solomons, from the faunal remains?  What about some of our head-scratcher artifacts?  And where the devil are the bones and artifacts that went to Fiji in 1940?  There's lots to do, and we ought to be thinking about how to do it, if this year's expedition is a success or if it comes back empty-handed.   

That Freckle Cream Jar

The media have been all over the story of “Amelia Earhart’s freckle cream jar” (eg. http://news.discovery.com/history/amelia-earhart-freckle-creme-jar-120530.html), and several people have asked me about it, so here’s a little information and a bit of grumping about the perceived and actual nature of archaeology.

The jar was found in several pieces, fairly well dispersed over the Seven Site on Nikumaroro, during our major excavation there in 2010. TIGHAR researcher Joe Cerniglia has been particularly persistent in trying to nail down exactly what may have been in it when it was whole and in use. It most likely dates to the twentieth century no later than the 1930s and was manufactured in the U.S., but Dr. Berry’s Freckle Cream is only one of several cosmetic lotion-type products that Joe and others have identified as having been marketed in such containers. The freckle cream association is particularly intriguing, because Earhart had freckles and is said to have been sensitive about them.

The catch, though – not mentioned much in the popular press – is that all the genuine Dr. Berry’s jar’s that Joe and others have been able to locate are made of opaque white glass, presumably to protect their contents from the sun. Our jar is transparent. Was Dr. Berry’s ever packed in clear jars? We don’t know, though Joe and his bottle-brethren are trying hard to find out.

What tends to be lost in the hype, though, is that the jar is only one of several pieces of mutually reinforcing evidence suggesting that an American woman camped at the Seven Site for a time in the years before World War II. Besides the jar, we have:

A broken bottle that appears to have contained Campana Italian Balm, a popular American skin care product in the 1930s;

Two pieces of flat, beveled glass that match the shape and size of the mirror in a 1930s rectangular compact; and

A number of pieces of red substance whose chemical composition suggests that it is rouge, possibly from the same compact.

Less gender-linked items include:

A fragmentary Mennen’s Skin Bracer or baby oil bottle, again American and (to judge from its embossed Art Deco lettering) from the ‘30s;

A pre-war beer bottle and a smaller bottle that probably contained St. Joseph’s Liniment, again from the U.S., which had been set upright in a campfire, perhaps in an attempt to purify water by boiling;

An assemblage of fish and baby turtle bones that’s consistent with the more or less random foraging of an inexperienced castaway, and not with the subsistence practices typical of indigenous South Pacific populations.

A feature made up of giant clam (Tridacna) shells, some of which show evidence of attempts to open them from the hinge side (like oysters in the eastern U.S.), and others of which have been opened by smashing with a rock – neither behavior typical of indigenous Pacific populations.

Historical, archaeological and photographic data also suggest that the site is where a partial human skeleton was found in 1940, associated with a sextant box and parts of a woman’s and man’s shoes. The sextant box was marked with numbers indicating that it held a Brandis sextant acquired by the U.S. Navy toward the end of World War I and probably disposed of as surplus thereafter; some sextants in this series were modified for use in aviation.

The Discovery News item in which the freckle cream story was broken mentions some of these pieces of data, but most of the other press has focused on the jar as though it were an isolated find. This may reflect an understandable but unfortunate belief on the part of the public that archaeology is all about finding definitive artifacts – and moreover, THE specific definitive artifacts that one sets out to find. A la Indy Jones, we go looking for the Ark of the Covenant or the Holy Grail or the Crystal Skull of Whateverland; we have all kinds of adventures, and eventually we find it, proving whatever it was (if anything) we set out to prove. Based on this kind of perception we're expected not just to find a smoking gun, but the precisely right smoking gun, I had a note the other day from a fellow who said he wasn’t impressed with the jar because if Earhart had been on the island, we should have found her briefcase.

That’s simply not how archaeology works, folks. We rather seldom find definitive individual artifacts, and when we do, we’re wise to be wary of them; they can be faked (See, for instance, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drake's_Plate_of_Brass), and even if they’re real they can be misleading. It’s far more common in archaeology, and more trustworthy, to base our conclusions on a pattern of clues – artifacts, faunal remains, the organization of sites, and so on – that collectively give us a plausible story, a reasonable picture of what happened in the past. I know that kind of research is hard to present in screen shots and sound bites, but that’s how we actually piece the past together. And that’s that kind of a reasonable picture we think we’re seeing come together at the Seven Site. It’s still murky, and it’s still possible we’re misperceiving it, but if we are, it’s because we’re misinterpreting the patterns of evidence, not because we’re missing some specific definitive artifact.