Fort Eustis Cultural Resources Department

06/05/2026

We found this yesterday while monitoring one of our sites. It's a blue triangular bottle marked "McCormick & Co. Balto" and at the bottom, "Patent Applied For." This bottle once contained laudanum, an addictive but widely used drug, and the unusual color and shape were intended to keep it from being mistaken for a more benign substance. This particular bottle dates from sometime between 1890, when McCormick began manufacturing this type of bottle, and 1902, when the patent was obtained.

06/01/2026

BURIAL GROUND by Malcolm Shuman involves an archaeologist and a mystery. The archaeological angle is critical to the story, but overall it’s mostly a mystery.

Alan Graham is the owner of a small contract archaeology company in Louisiana in the late 1990s. The time period isn’t that important, but occasionally there are mentions of something like Alan signing paper paychecks that remind you it’s not taking place today. But people do have cell phones. Alan also has some dated attitudes along the lines of women being mysterious creatures he can’t understand.

Alan is hired to survey some land, where there are rumors of a second Tunica Treasure (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tunica_treasure), a cache of artifacts from the Tunica tribe. Soon after hiring Alan, the landowner is killed in what looks at first glance like a car accident, but there are some questionable aspects, not least of which is that there’s an extra tooth in the car that can’t possibly have come from his mouth. The landowner’s son still wants Alan to complete the survey.

Complicating Alan’s life is that there’s a new archaeologist in town, P.E. Courtney, who comes from New England, fresh from her Ph.D. She wants to collaborate with Alan, but he sees her as an unwelcome competitor. Still, they’re drawn together into the mystery of the rumored treasure and the suspicious death.

There are various incidents and accidents and strange characters in the area. Alan’s coworker David is missing overnight and then is found in the woods with a broken leg. Alan and P.E. are attacked by an unseen assailant in the woods who throws branches and logs at them. The previous owner of Alan’s client’s land is weird and obsessed with the idea that the local nuclear plant caused his wife’s cancer. A native youth resents Alan’s existence, or at least his profession. All (or at least most) of these come together in the end for a satisfying resolution to both the archaeological inquiry and the murder mystery.

05/08/2026

05/01/2026

THE ARCHAEOLOGICAL ADVENTURES OF I.V. JONES by Heidi Roberts is about the early life of archaeologist I.V. “Ivy” Jones, whom we previously met (at a later point in her life) in THE PAST IS MURDER (https://www.facebook.com/CRMFtEustis/posts/pfbid0ckESGJDiNEaJ2hPWTsaRcGGHQ68zuvkWSwvKfG2KGxjgBTkfVkayhyh73CnL6Jdbl). This book is about Ivy’s entrance into the archaeological field in the late 1970s and early ’80s.

Ivy is a student at Utah College who just needs a field school to graduate with a degree in anthropology. Unfortunately the gatekeeper for the field school is Dr. Maxwell Johnson, who is sexist and so difficult to work with that people call him the Dark Lord. (He’s probably based on archaeologist Jesse Jennings.) Ivy makes it into field school, where she witnesses Johnson dismiss the ideas of a female graduate student, but she successfully completes field school and starts working in the then-new field of cultural resources management archaeology.

CRM archaeology in Utah in the seventies seems a lot wilder and more dangerous than it would (hopefully) be today. The crews routinely camp in the middle of nowhere for a week, and once Ivy and a coworker have to spend the night camped by their vehicle which is stranded on a washed-out road running down a steep slope. They climb up rocky cliffs where it seems like one misstep is going to end up with someone having to be carried miles back to the vehicle with a broken ankle. Luckily nothing happens to Ivy, though a coworker confesses to having an urge to jump off a cliff. Notable to eastern archaeologists, Ivy and her coworkers spend their time surveying for sites by hiking endlessly and seeing artifacts on the ground, or sometimes in caves. No digging required.

Ivy encounters a variety of humanity as coworkers. She works with a supposedly reformed pothunter (who later turns out to not be so reformed), people who have no experience and don’t know what they’re doing, people who let their biased expectations dictate what they find, and people who are threatened by her competence exceeding their own. Sexism permeates everything, maybe not quite to the degree of Alice Kehoe’s GIRL ARCHAEOLOGIST, but still incredibly bad by today’s standards. Since Ivy lives in that time, she just accepts it as the way things are. She objects to academic sidelining of women’s ideas but powers through sleazy bosses and coworkers.

Eventually Ivy tires of walking around outside all the time and gets a job at the Land Management Agency, which is more office-based, though she has to work with a boss who has no boundaries and has several girlfriends plus a wife. She attends a meeting of the Society for American Archaeology with the boss and a girlfriend (one of the few times the SAAs appear in fiction). Like the rest of Ivy’s world, the SAAs are also more unhinged than they are today, with random nudity and naked hot-tubbing after hours.

Eventually Ivy decides to go to graduate school, and the book ends with her hopeful for the future.

The author states that she experienced archaeology much as Ivy does, which may be why it doesn’t feel like there’s an overarching plot to the book. Ivy moves along through life and that is the story. Although the book isn’t presented as someone looking back at her past, once or twice Ivy speaks to the reader with knowledge she can’t have yet at the time. Most notable is “user -friendly laptops were only a glimmer in Steve Job’s [sic] eye” (p. 172).

As part of Ivy’s adventures, there are little nuggets of information scattered unobtrusively through the story, explaining things like archaeological features and dendrochronology in an unobtrusive way. In a more subtly educational way, events in the story also showcase the damage looting does to archaeology.

This is not the most exciting book about archaeology, but it’s an interesting look at a time in the history of archaeology. It’s nice to see non-academic archaeology depicted so thoroughly, and authenticity somewhat makes up for the plot shortcomings.

04/22/2026

Calling all archaeologists! Any ideas what this could be?

Our staff found this mystery object while performing a monitoring visit to a site that was recently subjected to a controlled burn (hence the charring on the outside of the object), and we are stumped as to what it is. There appear to be metal components inside the glass underneath the white circular part, and the base in the ground looks like a metal lid. (Note that we did not touch it to get a closer look as there is a risk that it is an unexploded ordinance).

If anyone has any insight, let us know in the comments!

04/01/2026

STRONG HEART by Charlie Sheldon is this month’s book.

Tom is preparing to go on a camping trip in Olympic National Park with his indigenous friends William and Myra. While they’re packing, his ex-wife shows up with a granddaughter Tom never knew existed. (His ex-wife had custody of their daughter, who ran away from home at 15.) The granddaughter, Sarah, acts like a stereotypical sullen teenager who does NOT want to go on this trip, but, after some debate among the original campers, Tom decides to take her. He’s going to tend his grandfather’s grave, and it’s important.

At the park, they encounter surveyors for Buckhorn, a mining company that has mineral rights to the area where Tom’s grandfather is buried. Once they’re deeper in the wilderness, Tom shows his friends a carved atlatl that his grandfather had given him, which he wants to leave at the grave. Tom isn’t sure if his grandfather found this himself, or if his own grandfather had given it to him, and he isn’t sure exactly where it came from. The surveyors pass by their camp, and they may have seen the atlatl. If so, the group knows they’ll want to suppress any knowledge of it in case the existence of an archaeological site would derail their mining plans. Sarah, who is an artist, sees a bear in the woods, but when she shows the group her drawing of the bear Myra identifies it as a short-faced bear, which has been extinct since the ice age.

Then Sarah disappears and is missing for a week. Tom et al. refuse to stop searching even after official search and rescue efforts end, though he doesn’t really expect to find her alive. And then she reappears during a thunderstorm, injured in several ways, including missing part of her little finger. She relates an amazing story: while she was gone, she woke up on a shore somewhere and was captured, along with six other similar-aged girls. Their captors took them to trade for obsidian (“razor stone”) with a group who periodically came to trade for wives. Sarah, soon called Strong Heart by her new people, traveled by giant canoe (something like those used among Northwest Coast peoples in recent centuries) for months. Along the way she learned to throw with an atlatl and became quite proficient. Unfortunately the travelers suffered a series of misfortunes, both from predators and from each other jockeying for position. Just as they were about to arrive at their home, Sarah returned to the modern world, led by a short-faced bear.

Back in the present day, Tom and Myra are skeptical of Sarah’s story (William is more inclined to take things like visions seriously), but they focus on healing her injuries and getting things back to normal. Sarah has to return to her grandmother’s house, but a few months later she runs away to get away from her step-grandfather, and the gang returns to the wilderness to try to retrieve the atlatl (lost during the first adventure). But the Buckhorn employees are back too, and they won’t let an artifact stand in the way of their plans…

The story is intriguing and keeps you engaged. It would have been nice to get a little more into the heads of the main characters. It feels like there’s always some distance between the reader and the viewpoint character. It’s also disappointing that Sarah leaves the past just as they’re reaching her new people’s home. It would have been interesting to see how they lived when they weren’t traveling.

The author seems to have written this book partly to advance the coastal migration hypothesis (that humans moved along the coast from Siberia into North America rather than entering the Americas through an ice-free corridor from Beringia). Sarah’s journey, the group decides, probably started in Kamchatka and ended up in Washington state. In an afterword the author talks about having thought about this idea for decades (he worked in the Pacific Northwest with tribes and with sea-related matters). By this point in time, this idea is fairly well accepted by archaeologists. The public awareness of ideas often lags behind the archaeological community, but fiction is an effective way of getting ideas out there (for good or ill, depending on whether the ideas are serious science or crackpot pseudoarchaeology). The author also clearly knows what he’s talking about when it comes to sailing in the northern Pacific and traveling through the forest.

There are a few strange ideas, mainly that the Pacific Northwest was where modern humanity began. The characters talk about early humans mixing with Neandertals and Denisovans (and some of Strong Heart’s fellow captives seem to be coded as Neandertals, described as having heavy bones and red hair). This lets William and Myra be right that their ancestors came from the same place they still live and their people have always been there, but it’s a muddled version of the real data. Modern humans did interbreed with Neandertals and Denisovans, but not, as far as we know, all together in the greater Beringia region. In fact, to date no Neandertal remains have been found that far east. This is a minor point in the book, though.

There are other fictional depictions of populating the Americas, but not like this one. It’s worth a look.

03/11/2026

CRM Courtney Birkett showing you what the inside of a Civil War redoubt looks like at 44NN117 looks like.

03/06/2026

03/05/2026

Throw back to the old days. Sit back and watch as we take you on a three part series as we cross the marsh to see one of the most well preserved Civil War earthworks.

03/02/2026

THE CAHOKIA CONSPIRACY by Howard J. Schwach begins with a prelude in which Thunderbird Who Flies, the ruler of Cahokia, loses a chunkey game to a Ho-Chunk chief, partly because illness keeps him from doing his best. Unfortunately, he had bet his life on the outcome, and now he and his whole family are put to death and buried in a mound.

In 2023, archaeologists are excavating Mound 72 and find an intriguing burial. The discoverer, Moishe Landau, is an Orthodox Jew who is looking for evidence that Native Americans were descended from the lost tribes of Israel. Moishe begins to feel unwell, but he has to go to New York for a funeral. Then he dies, and other people in his community get sick too.

Finally we get to the real protagonists of this book. Dave and his wife Linda are health investigators for the state of New York. They figure out that Moishe was patient zero of a new and serious illness, a virus that came from the burial he was excavating. They go to Cahokia to investigate.

Meanwhile the site’s forensic archaeologist has figured out that a virus came from the burial Moishe was excavating, and she partners with a sleazy businessman who wants to suppress knowledge of the virus until his company has a vaccine ready, so that he can profit. He arranges for a hit on Dave and Linda, who are run off the road by a bulldozer but not killed. The businessman’s assistant has been recording his phone calls, and when he fires her she goes to the authorities. This leads to a series of crimes, people being targeted, people getting beat up, people being found dead, people trying to escape to Cuba… Disappointing if you hoped ancient Cahokia or archaeology would play a bigger part in this book. After the beginning of the book, there is almost nothing about Cahokia (other than a few incidents taking place within the park) or archaeology until the very end in a kind of epilogue, where it’s revealed that one of the excavators at Cahokia has discovered a menorah, thus proving Moishe’s idea about the lost tribes of Israel in North America wasn’t so farfetched after all. This is a pretty big discovery to be treated by the narrative as an afterthought.

Some things in this book work better if you assume it’s an alternate universe. The most obvious difference from the real world is that Mound 72 was excavated decades ago, not in the 2020s. In this alternate universe, attitudes toward excavating native burials are also quite different and much more cavalier. On a more minor note, Dave and Linda pay an entrance fee upon entering the park (currently, no fee is required but you can give a donation), and also the visitor center is open in 2023. In our world it closed for renovations in 2022 and is still not completely reopened. Not closely related to the story, but more major, there are “western mountains” visible from Cahokia.

Although it takes place in 2023, the book was published in 2021. It's interesting to see the period attitudes toward illness and covid. At times they belong to the time of writing, a time closer to the depths of the pandemic, than to the time when they’re supposed to take place. Of course authors can’t predict the future.

The book could have used better editing. There are small things like “report” for “rapport,” but most amusingly, more than once the sound coming from a phone is described as a “disemboweled voice.”

Unfortunately this book does not contain reliable information on the Cahokian past – or the past of Judaism, for that matter. There’s enough to sound plausible, and the author has clearly read SOMEthing, but there are various errors (dates, the purpose of Mound 72, the reason why some Orthodox women shave their heads, the lost tribes repeatedly referred to as dispersing after the Romans destroyed the Second Temple, when it was really after the Babylonians destroyed the First Temple, “the Mississippian culture appeared suddenly in Meso-America” around 70 CE – no to all of that) and of course the aforementioned irregularities regarding the archaeological excavation.

If you want an archaeological story, you’ll be disappointed. If you want a thriller, this might be more what you’re looking for, if you can overlook the sometimes amateurish quality of the writing and you’re not a nitpicker when it comes to archaeological facts.