Agrarian Archaeology

Victor Davis Hanson
As a classics student at the American School of Classical Studies at Athens some 45 years ago, in the latter 1970s, I was assigned to excavate at ancient Corinth. There I learned a lot about strata and how to detect the rise and fall of Myceneans, the Greeks of the Dark Age, and on into the Archaic, Classical, Hellenistic, Roman, Byzantine, Frankish, and early modern Greek periods. As we dug deeper and deeper in our trenches, each civilization revealed its peculiar pottery, bones, and stones, and we could more or less chart years back in time by the inches we descended.

I learned the same sort of stratum is true here on the farm. It was settled by my great-great-grandmother Lucy Anna Davis sometime in the mid- or early 1870s. But there was really no one here before her arrival, given Native Americans of the Valley lived to the south around Tulare Lake or the east in the Sierra foothills.

There were no water or people here during the Spanish regency, only scorching heat, an occasional artesian pond, millions of jack rabbits, and I was told at one time venomous snakes (all of which were more or less made extinct by “rabbit” drives—140 years ago phalanxes of farmers over many miles hit clubs together to make racket and advanced in all directions en masse toward a predetermined death zone, where all the rabbits rushed to their collective death by clubbing and apparently a few rattlesnakes as well).

So over the last 50 years, when we dug trenches for conduits, drilled holes for telephone poles or vineyard end posts, tore out ancient plum and walnut trees that exposed huge craters, “ripped” the vineyards and orchards with huge six-foot blades, or had contracted CAT drivers to refashion slopes and ponds, I always grew curious about what turned up.

In the top 6 inches I often found familiar relics. So this summer when I dug a trench for a 4-inch sewer line through the garden into a new annex, all sorts of things appeared, all recognized in this “first” layer by the half-century of my own remembrance.

Aside from my children’s tiny toys, I found a beautiful porcelain doorknob. Then I remember instantly how my daughter in the 1980s used to pull off these ancient fixtures and play with them in the yard. One apparently was lost (although I’ve replaced the rest 30 years ago) and here it was under a loquat tree I dug through.

Mostly the shallow levels give up tools I’ve dropped—pliers, screwdrivers, saws, chain saw-chains all recognized from remembrance of my 20s and 30s. Sometimes pieces of glass turn up, such as blue bits from old medicine bottles. And then there are shards of warped, wavy glass (Is it called cylinder glass, as I recall from my grandparents?) from windows that have shattered over the last 150 years (of 50 some windows in this ancient house, about four still have the single pane wavy glass, some with a few bubbles in them).

When I venture out from the yard into the barnyard and fields, the finds are different. Things appear like horseshoes and bits, and occasionally strange tools of the horse-age I look up on the Internet to see what in the world they were. Invariably, they are certain types of horse implements or fixtures from harnesses and plows. Tiny 8-inch disc blades and spring tooth teeth sometimes appeared, but not designed for tractor implements, but rather instead made of iron, not steel, and pulled by horses.

I always envisioned my grandfather in his 20s (1910) or his father in his teens (1880) losing a disc or harrow blade while tilling (a few of their hay rakes are still intact, but slowly stolen from the barnyard by nocturnal metal scroungers.)

Square nails are common too. On one or two occasions I’ve found rotten redwood dowels. A wagon “hubcap” once appeared too. It matches the wheels of what’s left of my great grandfather’s wagon of the 1890s half rotten out by the shed. (Yes, I know I must find someone to restore it.)

There was a “magic” spot in the vineyard that all of us struck when ripping each fall. Bam—the ripper’s break-away bolts would fly off. And the blade would hop into the air. A brother or cousin would tell us he hit “the treasure again” (Under the house once I found “treasure” in the crawl space dirt: “Indian-head nickel” and twenty or so Mercury-head silver dimes.)

At family festivals, some would talk about “digging up that treasure someday.” (Alas, when I pulled out the ancient vineyard in 2014, the renter’s huge D-10 cat with its mega-ripper that crisscrossed the field hit it—and easily yanked out the treasure stone. And alas, it was only a shiny boulder. How it got here, much less five feet below the soil no one knew.

But otherwise below three feet down, there are not much of anything, other than a horse thigh bone or a cattle jaw from the ancient days when the Davises first arrived. And beneath that? Nada.

In all the wells, trenches, and holes I’ve dug or had dug, the soil beneath three feet is pristine. In archaeological parlance, I suppose that means an absence of any continuity of culture—an ancient California of sparse demography, and sparser still in the 105-degree summer San Joaquin Valley in the era before irrigation.

So in a strange way, I know the human history of this small chunk of America—from what is and what is not in the dirt. On this tiny piece of ground recorded history began when one family arrived 150 years ago, given there were no settlements here prior, or at least that is what the silent earth has told us.