Word: archaeologist
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...Archaeologist Timothy Kendall was leading an expedition in northern Sudan earlier this year when one of his diggers came across a slab of intricately carved stone hidden in rubble. Soon after, another slab turned up, and then another, until there were 25 in all, laid out in the sand like an archaeological jigsaw puzzle. Fitted together, the pieces formed a dazzling tableau: golden stars set against an azure sky, with crowned vultures flying off into the distance. Flying where, precisely? Kendall, an associate curator at Boston's Museum of Fine Arts, thinks he knows. And if his hunch is correct...
...letter m was an eagle owl, the letter a a white Egyptian vulture. Such curious jewels pop up on every page of Susan Brind Morrow's first book, The Names of Things (Riverhead; 232 pages; $25.95). Taking herself into the Egyptian desert, Morrow works as a kind of archaeologist of the living world, digging for meanings as she watches cranes, catches "sundogs" and learns that the saddle-bill stork in the first hieroglyphs represented the soul. Language, she recalls, quoting Emerson, is "a sort of tomb of the Muses... Language is fossil poetry...
...Simon Tucker, the attraction to digging began at age 3, as he watched Sesame Street character Bob's Uncle searching for a golden cabbage in Snuffleupagus' cave. Then Simon discovered Indiana Jones, and so began his mantra: "I want to be an archaeologist...
...chance would have it, Simon's parents, Dale and Jolene Tucker of Lewiston, Idaho, met an archaeologist at a dinner party. Privately thinking their son would find the reality of excavating to be, well, the pits, they asked her where Simon might be able to look in on a real dig. She told them about Passport in Time (PIT), a USDA Forest Service program established in 1988 that invites the public (at no cost except for providing your own food, camping gear and, at some locations, water) to join in excavations at its sites. Jolene took Simon on his first...
...unschooled, 20-year-old part-time illustrator and amateur archaeologist in 1933 when she met the man whose name she would help make synonymous with the study of human origins. Louis Leakey was a famous scientist, 10 years her senior, married with two children, a Cambridge University researcher. They fell in love, created a scandal, got married and moved to Africa. She worked for decades--painstakingly, methodically--in his shadow, but by the time Mary Leakey died last week, at 83, in Nairobi, Kenya, her scientific reputation had surpassed that of her more famous husband. "Louis was always the better...