Page 14 THE VILLADOM TIMES II • December 18, 2013 Archaeology while there is yet time Every once in awhile, I find something that is worth reading. Usually, it is a story about archeology. A few months ago, “Ultimate Tut” gave us a Tut for our times. When I was a kid, the young pharaoh was said to have died of malaria. A purported mosquito bite on his cheek was cited as evidence. When I was a young man, in the heyday of conspiracy theories and suspicion of power figures, Tut was said to have died of a skull fracture from behind, murdered, it was said, by agents of his own father-in-law who wanted to be pharaoh. Later, the poor kid was said to be so inbred -- Egyptian pharaohs often married their half-sisters to keep the bloodlines pure - - that one leg was drastically shorter than the other. Tut supposedly tripped over his own feet while walking with two canes and fractured his skull, an ignominious end if ever there was one. “Ultimate Tut” gave the kid back some posthumous self-respect. The theory now is that 19-year-old Tut, already the father of two stillborn children with his half- sister, was killed while personally leading his army into battle. Some believe he fell head-first out of his speed- ing chariot and was run over by both wheels, which explains the broken leg, the fractured skull, and the fact that his sternum was missing from the hastily embalmed mummy. Give the kid a break: He died with his face to the enemy and not due to imperfections due to incestu- ous marriages or the predation of mosquitoes. Neanderthals in the days before DNA research were said to have been wiped out by homo sapiens. Wil- liam Golding, a prescient author in many ways, wrote a book in which, as I remember it, a Neanderthal child was captured and adopted by a family of Cro-Magnons and presumably lived to have kids with a Cro-Magnon spouse. DNA tests of modern youngsters proved Gold- ing had something going for him, just as he did in “Lord of the Flies,” where the kids fling off their choir robes and everything goes to you-know-where. The DNA tests show that most Europeans and some Asians have a small quotient of Neanderthal ancestry, generally about one to four percent, with the heaviest concentrations in moun- tainous areas of Europe where there were limited social opportunities. Tut and the Neanderthals owe modern science some thanks. Think, however, how hapless the scientists will be to recapture the more immediate past: department stores, libraries, and other public buildings that are more inaccessible than those lost cities Edgar Rice Burroughs used to write about. The library in my hometown was a beautiful build- ing from the outside. George Washington rode past on his way from Fort Lee to Pennsylvania. Inside, the books were often archaic and some of the librarians did not like kids, which is not surprising considering some of the kids. I did not like some of them either, and I was a kid at the time. The hometown library was not a user-friendly place. My real library was Modell’s on Route 17, which had a bookshop near the entrance that featured paperback classics at a price even a teenager could afford. (They also had a liquor department where I could pass for 21 with a phony French accent, particularly when I made rude faces over the prices on the bottles and shook my head.) The paperbacks I bought at Modell’s for pocket money let me coast though literature courses in college because I knew what was in the books they wanted me to read. Sometimes they even ordered special books for me. Last time I looked, that particular Modell’s was no longer there and had not been for many years. As a summer job during college years, I worked at Alexander’s at the intersection of Route 4 and Route 17. I knew the place inside and out. The store closed years ago. Right after I got out of the Army, when I was work- ing on my first (unproduced) screenplay, I worked in Bamberger’s on the far side of Route 4 from Alexander’s. I knew that place, too. I could show you the secret loca- tions -- the rectangular hidden nests made out of card- board boxes where the stock boys took naps when they were supposed to be working, and the tunnels where the security guards loaded stuff into the trunks of their friends’ cars for a discount price until they got caught and fired. The mechanical baling machine that turned crushed cardboard boxes into blocks of iron-shod card- board figured in my unproduced screenplay. The good bad guy in the screenplay used one like it to get the bad good guy out of circulation, as in permanently. People who read that screenplay were often very afraid of me. I assured them it was all entirely imaginary. They said that made it worse. The central figure was some- thing like Rambo, except at the end you knew he was nuts. Shooting people or disposing of them in balers was shown in all its negative implications and not as heroic. It was a very moral work of art if you managed to get through the first seven-eighths of it. If somebody with a social conscience dusts off that screenplay, they will not be able to shoot on location. Bamberger’s is also long gone. The previous libraries in many towns have also van- ished. I remember the “old” Ridgewood children’s room and the annex where they kept the foreign language children’s books that hardly anyone read. My kids did. Granted, they had no choice, but they could read French, German, Italian, and Spanish from the time they were in middle school. Had I ordered all the books they read from France, Germany, or Italy, I would still be digging myself out of the financial hole. There were books in that room by Hansi -- Jean-Jaques Waltz, a patriotic Alsa- tian children’s writer with a charming style of art. Those books disappeared even before it somehow became patri- otic to hate everything French. You could meet Tin-Tin before he became a movie star. Again, those books are gone. The northern European languages are becoming extinct in the school systems. The trouble with eradicating a somewhat modern building is that it is so quickly replaced by another even more modern building, or by a parking lot, that there will be nothing left to go by some thousands of years hence when scientists wonder how we lived. In mid-career, David Macaulay, having toured the first U.S. Tut exhibit in the late 1970s, weighed in with “The Motel of the Mys- teries” in which archaeologists 2,000 years from now excavate a suburban motel crushed in an environmental catastrophe and try to figure out what the artifacts were. They get almost everything wrong, sometimes with hilar- ious results. At least the fictional cartoon archaeologists had something to start from. In my dreams, I sometimes roam long but well-lit and reasonably clean corridors that can only be the department stories of yore, and the librar- ies before they were refurbished, substantially improved, but weeded sometimes injudiciously and changed for- ever. When the dreams end, where will archaeologists go to reconstruct history? Glen Rock Sweet diversion Festive packages of homemade cookies were among the items for sale at the annual mini Christmas Boutique at the Com- munity Church in Glen Rock. Pictured are JoAnn, Caroline, Robin, Janet, and Cheryl at the Saturday morning set up.