“YOU’VE REALLY GOT A COLLECTION in the raw here,” the librarian of the university archives in the basement of Pusey Library said, smiling, when he rolled a cart carrying Karl’s papers next to me. “It really hasn’t been processed,” he said.
In May 2016, fifty-one years after he began at Harvard, Karl Lamberg-Karlovsky retired. When he left, the papers in his office were sent to the archives. I’d found out in the summer, and in October 2016, my date at the library had finally arrived.
The archivist said some of the documents in Karl’s file had been removed because they contained university and student records that were too recent, but this was everything else. He showed me how to turn the delicate papers without damaging them—from the middle, not the corners—and then left me to my own devices.
At the top of the boxes was a sheet that described where the materials had been found in Karl’s office. Box 1: Large cabinets on right side of room. Box 2: Loose on large table in study. Box 10: Letterboxes on shelves above desk. I wondered briefly if Karl had left in a rush, but I thought it more likely that he had just left everything for some archivist to deal with.
I spent the next four days in the archives reading through every single paper. Old lectures he gave, blue aerogram letters from Iran, typewritten museum correspondence, his calendars, book reviews, notebooks, and syllabi from his undergraduate and graduate years. In one undated photo, I saw, unmistakably, the seductive Count Dracula who had captivated the graduate students. In the dead center of that photo was the same pinkie signet ring whose emblem I hadn’t been able to make out in class. It was still hard to believe that Karl’s reign in the department was over––that legends have ends.
Photo of Lamberg-Karlovsky looking similarly debonair in 1983, next to his wife, Martha, and former graduate student David Freidel. (Gift of the Estate of Gordon R. Willey, 2003. Courtesy of the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology, Harvard University, PM 2003.14.28, by permission from Alexandra Guralnick.)
In the files, there, again, was the Karl quick to injure, easy to anger, hot-tempered, even a touch paranoid. The funniest letter was from Victor Mair, a professor at UPenn, who, in reply to Karl’s “petulant diatribe,” wrote facetiously: “A copy of a strange letter attacking me and appearing over your signature was anonymously sent to my Department by fax. […] Since the charges in the letter are so fallacious and illogical, the language so intemperate and semiliterate, my first thought is that it must have been forged by someone else who wanted to tarnish your reputation.”
But there, too, were glimpses of a Karl who was a supportive mentor, a daring academic, a dedicated professor. In 1970, he came to the defense of students in the Organization for Black Unity who were facing disciplinary action for occupying University Hall. Karl had been in the building at the beginning of the takeover, and he wrote in support of the students’ good behavior. In ’73, he penned a recommendation letter for Richard Meadow that praised Meadow as the rarest of academic finds: a great teacher, scholar, and person. And the span of Karl’s impact was hard to miss––from the “ecstatic appreciation” of two students on the 1967 Yahya survey expedition, to the undergraduate in 1999 who thanked Karl for supporting her interests to an extent no other professor had.
There was also a draft of the textbook he co-wrote with Jerry Sabloff, a former graduate student who was several years older than Jane. In the text, Karl explained that Sumerian and Akkadian, the languages of ancient Mesopotamia, lacked the word for “history.” But this absence, Karl wrote, “does not indicate a disinterest in history or in the past, for numerous inscribed clay tablets indicate the contrary to be true. The absence of the word history signifies a wholly different approach to the past, or to that which we call history.” If we insisted on our conception of history in analyzing their attitudes, we would miss the importance they placed on the past. It was a similar point he had made in that first class I sat in on, and the main thesis of that foreword to the Tepe Yahya monograph that troubled me: The historical gaze is inextricable from the biases of the historian. Even if we think we’re uncovering the past, what we are really doing is reconstructing it, adding our own flesh to old bones.
By the end of my time in the university archives, I had one group of materials left to go through. I had purposefully saved Karl’s college and graduate school notebooks for last. Karl was a doodler—the margins of his notes were filled with crossbones, skulls, skeletons. A few cartoonish self-portraits were instantly recognizable because of an exaggerated bouffant. One was a man with almost a demonically pointed tongue and sharp teeth, about to lick a set of breasts, drawn on a headless torso.
Doodles in Lamberg-Karlovsky’s notebook from graduate school, 1959. (Courtesy of the Harvard University Archives)
But Karl’s margins were also often filled with his signature and the years and institutions of his schooling, as if rehearsing his biography. Over and over, he would write his name. Sometimes it was just his initials, sometimes Cliff, but most often it was his name: Clifford Lamberg Karlovsky, both with and without a hyphen.
Karl also tried on different names. Once it was Karl von Lamberg, and then for a series of pages, it was nothing but: Clifford A. Rockefeller. Over and over and over. As if he were not only rehearsing his story, but adopting a new identity.
Lamberg-Karlovsky’s signatures in the same graduate school notebook. (Courtesy of the Harvard University Archives)
* * *
At night, I’d go home to Eliot House, where I was staying with friends from college. It was my first time living back in the dorms since graduation. I was even able to sneak in to eat in the dining halls. I felt like no time had elapsed since college until I would catch a reflection of myself in a store window and do a double take, startled by the passage of time reflected back at me.
* * *
“Pencils only,” the Peabody Museum archivist reminded me.
For my last day of research, I moved from the university archives to the museum’s to look for Jane’s expedition notebook. My suspicion was right: There was a whole cache of Tepe Yahya material that hadn’t appeared on Harvard’s library website. I had requested the expedition notebooks from 1967, 1968, and 1969, and now the cart in front of me was full of flip-top boxes.
I opened the first carton. It was neatly organized with dividers, each one containing a field notebook from a different trench. One jumped out at me: “Field notebook: Site E, J.S.B.” Jane Sanders Britton.
I pulled the notebook out from the divider. It was moss green, fabric-covered, and discolored around the edges.
I opened it to the first page: “Tepe Yahya 1969 Site E Field Notebook. By: JSB / [ ].” The second name had been taped over with a piece of paper.
Nineteen sixty-nine? By the summer of 1969 Jane was dead. Why was her name on a field notebook six months after her death? I knew some poor archivist had had to put that piece of paper there before the file reached me because it pertained to a student who was still alive. I rifled through my Tepe Yahya research to see if I knew who dug Site E in 1969. “J.H.” a note said. Jim Humphries.
Going on a hunch, I quickly opened the other boxes until I found what I was looking for: the 1968 Site E notebook. Just as I’d guessed. Site E had been Jane’s trench.
That meant Jim had been put in charge of Jane’s trench the summer after her death. And when it came to writing up his expedition notes, he had given her credit. It was so different from the tales of hyper-competitiveness in academia I had grown used to. It was a gesture that felt all the more beautiful for how silent it was. No fanfare, no celebration, no calling attention to himself. In a field where everyone was fighting to get their names on things, he’d added hers. First.
I skimmed Jane’s notebook. It chronicled her day-to-day, just as I had hoped. Her handwriting was neat and in all caps like an architect’s, but it lacked any personal dimension. Instead, it was filled with dozens of to-scale drawings, and tiny handwritten recordings of the features and finds from her trench. The entries were detailed descriptions of where and what she dug on any given day. For example, on the first day of excavation that summer: “30 June 1968: Removed surface sherds; wash + dust cover entire area of trench. Large number of sherds in sandy brown soil.” On August 21, Jane wrote that she found “traces of red ochre” in the hearth she was unearthing. It was startling to see “red ochre” in her handwriting.
I looked through the rest of the notebooks. Phil’s was the least neat. Arthur Bankoff’s included a note to self: “First day of digging. My technique is a bit rocky. I don’t think I would know a wall if it bit me.”
Richard Meadow’s was meticulous. I scrutinized every page. There on blue millimeter graph paper was Richard’s to-scale drawing of where he’d found a Neolithic figurine, which was to remain the find of the season. It was made of green soapstone. Along with it were numerous flint chips and worked-stone tools, three soapstone shaft straighteners, and two bone razors and a bone spatula. The figure had a belly button and a round dot for its mouth, which left it in a permanent state of surprise.
At the bottom of the page, Richard had written “Red ochre under and around bone.” It was possible that the bone tools near the figurine might have been what Karl was referring to when he told reporters that “there are relics which show that the bones of decomposed bodies were coated with a red material.” But I was surprised to see, as I read on in the Tepe Yahya reports, that a human burial with red ochre had in fact been found at Tepe Yahya: In 1970, a body was discovered lying on its left side, its skull crushed, with red ochre on the ulna of one of the arms. Even though this body was only unearthed after Jane’s death, it was an eerie coincidence; Karl had been quoted as saying that a composed corpse with any type of powder spread over it had never been found in Iran. Yet, just six months later, there it was, at his very site. And far from a fluke, that burial turned out to be characteristic of those in the oldest layer of the mound. Thomas Beale, a graduate student who had joined the Iranian expedition the year after Jane died, wrote in his monograph on the Tepe Yahya expedition: “In Period VII, Yahya inhabitants painted the bodies of their dead with red ochre.”
I pulled my hands away from the notebooks and realized my fingertips were coated in the fine sand from the Tepe Yahya desert, and for an instant the years collapsed.