What’s Left on Nikumaroro?

Somebody asked me the other day: “Why do you want to go back to Nikumaroro? What’s left there besides (maybe) the airplane at the base of the reef?"  The question kind of surprised me, but it made me wonder if the perception is widespread that we’ve squeezed the island dry of information pertinent to the Earhart mystery. So let me take this opportunity to explain what I think is “left.”

1. The Airplane. Setting aside the question of plane wreckage at the base of the Nutiran reef – on which others are fixated, which will cost a lot of money to seek, and which I think is unlikely to be found (See http://ameliaearhartarchaeology.blogspot.com/2010/12/why-i-dont-think-well-find-airplane-and.html), there are other ways in which definitive piece of pieces of the airplane might be found. The colonial villagers were obviously collecting airplane parts to make into things. Some of these are clearly from a B-24/PB4Y, probably the one known to have crashed on Kanton Island, where some Nikumaroro residents worked during the War. Others are not, and are consistent with a Lockheed Electra. Somewhere in the village there could well be a piece or pieces with part numbers or other distinctive characteristics that could be tied directly to Earhart’s plane. We’ve done a good deal of searching in the Village, but Walt Holm has proposed a more detailed, focused search, perhaps using the ethnohistorical data we’ve compiled to focus in on most-likely locations, like the homesites of early (1939-42) residents, and such congregation areas as the sites of the two maneabas (meeting houses).

2. The Seven Site. Though we made a very good run at the Seven Site in 2010, there’s one portion of it that needs more examination, and could yield a real payoff. This is the area extending from the WR feature (where the two standing bottles, the snap (which, by the way, is a size match for snaps on a First Aid Kid acquired on EBay by Art Carty, of a type identified in the Luke Field inventory) and some of the probable rouge were found) to the southeast through the vicinity of the SL feature (where bottles, possible rouge, suspicious pieces of ferrous metal, buttons, pencil leads, the “gidgies” and other artifacts were recovered. We’ve never probed the area between the two features, and we should; plus, as Meg Lickliter-Mundon has argued, we need to explore the SL area itself more thoroughly, with probes to the north, southeast, and southwest, while Bill Carter has argued eloquently for Scaevola-slashing in all directions, notably toward the sea, in case the area on which we've focused is, in effect, a product of our focusing on it. Any of these initiatives might or might not produce smoking guns, but we’d almost certainly get data to help build on the evidence we’ve already acquired, and nail down just what happened at the site.

3. The LORAN Station. We suspect that some of the artifacts at the Seven Site that tend to confuse us may have come from the 1944-46 LORAN station, but we don’t really know what sorts of bottles and other such objects were there. I think we’ve figured out where the station dump was (It’s buried). An excavation there could give us useful comparative data.

4. The Aukaraime Shoe/Bivouac Site. We worked in 1997 at the site where the Shoe parts were found in 1991, which corresponds with Bevington’s 1937 “Bivouac” site. I’m not convinced that we’ve looked there carefully enough. This was a point that Kent Spading insisted upon and I rejected for a long time, but the more I think about it, the more I think he was right; this could have been an intermediate castaway camp en route to the Seven Site, and it merits a closer look.

5. Other possible campsites. The prime target here is “Camp Zero,” the location on northern Nutiran where – assuming we’re right about the landing place, and about the “Nessie” image – Earhart and Noonan would most likely have camped after getting off the plane. I’ve not been enthusiastic about this site, thinking it had been worked over pretty thoroughly both by the colonists and by storms, but studies by Art Carty have indicated that the vegetation depicted there in 1937 may essentially still be there today, suggesting that the site may not be too badly disturbed. I still think it’s a long shot, but it could reveal something. There might be other campsites “intermediate” between the landing site and the Seven Site – though Tom Roberts and Mark Smith demonstrated in 2010 that one can walk from one to another at a leisurely pace in only about four hours. If there are such sites, we don’t know where they are, but serendipity has struck before, and might again.

So I think there’s lots remaining to be done on Nikumaroro – plane search or no plane search. And while I understand that our sometime media underwriters don’t think they need any more footage of people hacking through Scaevola and scratching in the coral with Marshalltown trowels, I’m sorry, folks; that’s what we do. Archaeology is a painstaking process (my dear colleague Indy to the contrary notwithstanding), and the payoff comes in piecing together little bits of evidence – seldom in the form of obvious smoke-puffing pistolas.

Upcoming Presentations on the Project

Tomorrow evening (11 January 2012: 6 pm Eastern, 3 pm Western), I’ll be interviewed on my old friend Joe Schuldenrein’s on-line radio talk show: “Indiana Jones: Myth, Reality, and 21st Century Archaeology (http://www.voiceamerica.com/show/1975/indiana-jones-myth-reality-and-21st-century-archaeology). Gary Quigg may join me if he can get to a land-line – he’s in the field doing archaeology. Joe is an accomplished geoarchaeologist who’s worked a good deal in historical archaeology as well as in forensic burial studies of Saddam Hussein’s victims in Iraq; he’s followed our project for a long time, and should be able to ask some good questions.  Maybe I'll have good answers.

I’ve also submitted a detailed paper on our evidence to Pacific Studies, an interdisciplinary peer-reviewed journal published at Brigham Young University. Titled “Amelia Earhart on Nikumaroro: a Summary of the Evidence,” it’s a build-out from the summary posted on this blog on December 18, 2010 (http://ameliaearhartarchaeology.blogspot.com/search?updated-min=2010-01-01T00:00:00-08:00&updated-max=2011-01-01T00:00:00-08:00&max-results=17). Not accepted yet; I’ll keep you informed.  I'm grateful to EPAC members for helping me refine the paper and make it accurate.  IF YOU'D LIKE TO REVIEW THIS PAPER IN DRAFT, DROP ME A NOTE AT TFKING106@AOL.COM, AND I'LL SEND YOU A PDF.

Results of the Fiji and Solomons Projects

The last few months have seen the completion of fieldwork on two important TIGHAR projects: the search of the Colonial War Memorial Hospital in Fiji and the Solomon Islands Oral History Project. Results are under study now, and reports will be forthcoming, but some preliminary observations may be in order.

 

Hospital Search

 

With fantastic support from the U.S. embassy and Fiji authorities, Gary Quigg and his team were able to go through the whole huge rambling hospital complex in Suva with sufficient thoroughness to come away reasonably sure that there are no nooks or crannies they missed. In a nutshell, they did find human bones in some of these nooks and crannies, that had been tucked away and more or less forgotten, but based on comparison with Dr. Hoodless’ metrical data and in one case based on DNA, none of these bones appear to be the ones found in 1940 on Nikumaroro. Whose are they? Well, all over the world, human bones are found from time to time that can’t be identified, and they don’t always wind up in places where they’re carefully logged in and recorded. Presumably the bones found by our team were brought to the Hospital by people who found them in the bush, and when they couldn’t be matched to any known person and disposed of in accordance with that person’s known wishes, or returned to his or her family, or processed as evidence in a crime investigation, they got tucked away and forgotten.

 

The team also collected a few stories about other collections of bones that they weren’t able to locate; we’ve not exhausted Fiji as a place where the 1940 bones are hiding, but it seems like we’ve exhausted the most likely specific location – the Hospital.

 

Solomon Islands

 

The team in the Solomons – Gary Quigg again in charge, with Nancy Farrell, Baoro Koraua, John Clauss and Karl Kern, visited Rawaki and Nikumaroro Villages in the Solomon Islands and interviewed people who lived on Nikumaroro Island in the 1940s and 50s. The team didn’t go in expecting to get information on the 1940s bones discovery; it was very unlikely that anyone living today would remember it. Instead they sought a better understanding of the Nikumaroro colony in general, recollections of how aluminum was used and where it might have come from, and how the vicinity of the Seven Site was used. They brought back a substantial collection of audio recordings, which I’m just starting to work through and transcribe, video that I haven’t seen yet, and field notes; we’ll be working over the coming months to get all this in order and make the data usable. In a nutshell, though, they got:

 

   --  Information about aircraft aluminum – no specifics on where it came from, but stories about its use and about, in one case, the discovery of an interesting piece (possibly an aircraft door) at a more or less specific location.

  --  Information about the Seven Site, which is going to be – already has been – tremendously helpful in interpreting that site’s archaeology. Notably:

 

            *  The place was known as “Gallagher’s camp,” though no one remembers why Gallagher had a camp there. There was a small house and a water tank.

 

            * Men and boys sometimes stayed there while hunting turtles, and the boys climbed trees to catch birds.

 

            * They chopped off the birds’ wings, skinned them, and chopped off the feet before, in most cases, taking the carcasses to the village. Turtles were taken to the village whole.

 

            * They sometimes made fires and cooked food on the site – presumably birds and fish.

 

What this tells us – and there’s doubtless much more detail in the recordings – is that some of the fire features and a lot of the bird bones on the Seven Site are not associated with the castaway-who-may-have-been-Earhart. But the big fire features like WR and SL, with their strange associated artifacts, are something else again.

 

The Solomons data, in other words, will help us sort out what is probably castaway-associated from what is not, and that’s going to be a big help in interpreting the site and planning further work.  More insights will doubtless be forthcoming as we get through analyzing the data.

Both teams did fine work and brought home useful data.  We owe a great debt of gratitude to all the team members, and especially Gary, who was responsible for overseeing both projects and bringing them to successful conclusions. 

 

Karen Burns

We’re all mourning the unexpected passing of our good friend and colleague Karen Burns.  Her work as TIGHAR’s chief physical anthropologist on the Earhart Project was among the least of her contributions to humanity; what was really inspiring about Kar, to me at least, was her human rights work.  She made a career of forensic anthropology – sometimes with financial support, sometimes without – on cases of genocide in places like Iraq, Guatamala, Haiti and Colombia, and on terrorism and disaster cases like the 9/11/01 attack on the World Trade Center.  Not only did she do the excavations and analyses (often very unpleasant and not infrequently dangerous) to identify victims and determine how they died; she also delivered the testimony needed in court to seek justice for them and their families, and retribution for those responsible.  Perhaps most important, she taught the people of the countries in which she worked to carry out their own forensic studies, building a cadre of indigenous experts whose very existence should give pause to those contemplating genocide.  Her work on pure research cases – not only the Earhart case but also the identification of Revolutionary War hero Kazimierz Pulaski’s bones in Savannah, Georgia – was of the highest quality as well,  and as a colleague and shipmate on trips to Nikumaroro, she gained the respect and affection of us all – TIGHARs and ship’s crew alike.  We will all miss her greatly.

Wisdom of the Solomons

Welcome home to TIGHAR's Solomon Islands team, back from archival and oral historical work in the Solomon Islands.  I understand that they've brought back a wealth of audio and video records as well as extensive notes on interviews with veterans of the Nikumaroro colony, including a good deal of information on how the colonists used the vicinity of the Seven Site.  Special thanks go to Gary Quigg for leading the group, and to Baoro Koraua, who made local arrangements, provided transport, and translated. 

Solomons Sojourners Set to Sail

In less than a week – on August 17, TIGHAR’s Solomon Islands team will head for Honiara. The team is headed by Gary Quigg, and includes Nancy Farrell, John Clauss, and Karl Kern. In Honiara they’ll rendezvous with Baoro Koraua, who lives in that city (capital of the Solomon Islands) but was born on Nikumaroro in the early 1950s. With Baoro in his boat, the MV Temauri, they’ll motor up the New Georgia Sound (known in World War II as “The Slot” and “ironbottom Sound”) to the villages of Nikumaroro and Rawaki, where the Nikumaroro colonists were resettled when the colony was abandoned in 1963. That’s the plan, anyway.

The purpose of the trip is oral historical recording – talking with veterans of the Nikumaroro colony and recording their recollections of the place. It follows up on a very short visit made to Nikumaroro Village by Dr. Dirk Ballendorf of the University of Guam back in 1995 (http://tighar.org/testhtml/Publications/TTracks/12_1/solomon.html). Dirk collected stories of human bones being found on the island, but these didn’t mean much to us until two years later when Peter MacQuarrie found the Western Pacific High Commission files on the 1940 bones discovery in the Tarawa archives, and Ric Gillespie and Kent Spading uncovered more in the WPHC archives in England (they’re now in Auckland, NZ).

It would be nice if the Solomons Sojourners could get more information on the bones discovery, but we’re not really expecting that. Anyone who was, say, ten years old at the time of that discovery would now be in his or her 80s. What we’re mostly hoping for is information about what the Seven Site was used for in the 1950s, and what (other than Earhart and Noonan) might be responsible for the strange assemblage of artifacts and building material (corrugated iron, etc.) we’ve found on the site. Recent research by Bill Carter and Ric Gillespie in the Tarawa archives has revealed that the site was known in the late 1940s as “Gallagher’s camp,” and that coconuts were being cultivated there without much success. Why the site was associated with Gallagher almost a decade after his death is another thing we’d like to find out. We feel pretty confident that some of what we’ve found was left by the castaway-who-was-probably-Earhart, but it’s essential that we find out what else went on at the site so we can sort out castaway-related evidence from the leavings of others. The interviews will also give us the opportunity to flesh out our general understanding of the Nikumaroro colony, which is fascinating in its own right.

The team is well equipped to do the work. Nancy has been collecting oral history for decades, and Gary has experience in the field as well. Baoro should be a knowledgeable colleague and translator, while John and Karl can do just about anything. They’re armed with audio and video recording devices and plenty of pens and paper for backup. If all goes well they’ll spend two or three days interviewing in each village (which lie on opposite sides of the sound, about 200 miles from Honiara), and a day or two checking archives in the capital before flying home on August 30.

Yes, I wish I were going too, but I’m not. However, Kris Tague is serving as the Sojourners’ Stateside point of contact, and she’ll be passing information to the rest of us.

Bon Voyage, Sojourners; here's hoping you make interesting and voluble new friends in the Solomons.

Tom

Spam:  See http://www.otpshow.com/ for Part One of my summary of the Niku Research

Bon Voyage (almost) to the TIGHAR Hospitalers!

Just a week now till the next TIGHAR "expedition" launches: this one to the Colonial War Memorial Hospital in Suva, Fiji.  This is where the human bones found on on Nikumaroro in 1940 were last reported, just before World War II broke into the Pacific.  The hospital is a great old colonial structure, renovated and added to many times, and there's a good possibility that stuff like old unidentified bones could be tucked away in crawlspaces or attics.  In our first Bones Search in 1999 we were denied permission to search it (and wouldn't have had time anyway); the 2003 Fiji Bones Search focused on records research and interviews.  This project will focus on physical inspection.

The team is headed by Dr. Jon Overholt of Sacramento, CA, a medical doctor with lots of hospital experience.  Team members include architect Lonnie Schorer of northern Virginia, archaeologist Gary Quigg of Indiana, and Arizona's Karl Kern, who has proved able to do virtually anything, including squirming into small spaces possibly infested with small cuddly animals.  The Hospital administration is cooperating, and Richard Pruett of the U.S. Embassy is coordinating things and smoothing the way.  The team is equipped to search, document, recover anything discovered, and do ancillary historical and oral-historical research.  D-Day is May 7, with a return to the U.S. on May 22. 

Best of luck to all, and enjoy Fiji while you're about it!

Tom

Colonial War Memorial Hospital, Suva, Fiji