THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1996, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Wednesday, April 3, 1996 TAG: 9604020124
SECTION: ISLE OF WIGHT CITIZEN PAGE: 06 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Cover story
SOURCE: BY LINDA McNATT, STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: RESCUE LENGTH: Long : 155 lines
CURTISS PETERSON stops time, reads bones and searches for old air.
And he does it all surrounded by his dogs, his plants and his bird feeders in a small workshop brimming with bags and boxes of bones, metal, wood and vats of other objects - soaking.
Peterson, 54, is an independent anthropologist who works mostly by contract. He calls his company simply ``Rescue.''
He left the ``bureaucratic'' world of universities six years ago when he felt it was time to allow his wife, Dina Hill, to follow her career. Hill is educational coordinator for the Monitor National Marine Sanctuary, working out of an office at the Mariners' Museum in Newport News.
Peterson, a free spirit in the world of work, is employed mostly by contract, and he isn't somebody you would expect to find in a quiet fishing village like Rescue, but he's made a place for himself.
``This house is mine,'' he said as he gazed around his environment. ``Now, the tradition is mine. Things don't float in time, just as they don't float in space. They're all connected.''
Connecting time, people and things to their proper places in the universe has been Peterson's life's work since he graduated from the University of Florida with a degree in anthropology, the scientific study of human beings and their physical, social, material and cultural development.
It's not a glamorous job, he maintains. He doesn't get excited, since he's seldom around at the point of discovery. He takes over when it's time to identify, preserve, speculate.
``Dishes, bottles, bones, shoes, metal of all descriptions, wood - it all goes to the state of Virginia,'' Peterson said as he looked over a mammoth collection of artifacts unearthed when the city of Richmond recently built a flood wall near the James River. ``It is significant in its entirety. It shows what was going on. Even in early Richmond, mostly domestic animals were eaten. They weren't doing a lot of hunting.''
And they, residents of the city, that is, were making tin cans, probably as early as the Civil War era. Scraps of cloth were used as toilet paper.
``It was a large, complex, urban site. I tell them what they have, and I preserve it from deteriorating further.''
What they have can be as much of a mystery to Peterson as it is to the archaeologist who discovered it. A piece of sheet metal soaking in a tub of baking-soda water with small surges of electrical energy running through it may have been a blade of some sort or part of a machine.
With his knowledge of metals, Peterson can stop the corrosive process, but the metal may always be little more than rusty metal, perhaps a part of a historic community, perhaps not. The identification of some objects, he said, never results in anything more than a best guess.
Peterson spent several years in the U.S. Navy and served in Vietnam before starting his career. In the service, he was a supply officer.
When he got out of the Navy, he said, he went to work for the state of Florida and helped to establish a laboratory to study old shipwrecks. He has worked for universities in North Carolina, South Carolina and Maryland. The many moves were what led to landing in Rescue.
``My wife had an opportunity to advance in her career,'' Peterson said. ``And the business of administration often means you don't really do what you want to do.''
Now, he's doing what he wants to do, frequently taking advantage of bidding on government road projects. Whenever federal funds are involved in excavating an area for any reason, like the Richmond project, Peterson explained, archaeological studies are mandatory. He recently bid on identifying, perhaps conserving, whatever may be discovered when a portion of the beltway around Washington is widened.
Shipwrecks seem to have followed Peterson throughout his career. He was working on a project involving a shipwreck off the Delaware shores when he moved to Rescue. It was Peterson who preserved the anchor, now in the Mariners' Museum, of the Civil War ironclad Monitor.
The Monitor also took him down one route in the everlasting quest for old air. If scientists, he said, never find pure air from centuries ago, they will never have a measure to determine just how badly the atmosphere has been polluted by modern man. That's why they were so bent on the air search in the lead coffins discovered several years ago in St. Marys City, Md.
One clue to pure air, he said, is the absence of refrigerants invented in the 1960s. Atmospheric scientists at NASA had high hopes for air trapped in old mustard bottles found aboard the Monitor.
``We know that the earliest assayed air was in the 1950s,'' Peterson said. ``We don't know what the atmosphere was like before we started making changes. We're looking for a base line.''
They didn't find it in the Monitor bottles.
``Air may have been air at one time, but after sitting for a hundred years over mustard, it was definitely something else,'' he said, chuckling.
And air trapped in time capsules, something Peterson has had lots of experience with, is never a good indicator, either, since most cornerstones or capsules buried and unearthed in more recent years have been sealed with lead-based solder. The mixture of the chemicals in the solder tended to accelerate the deterioration of the contents.
``It's been traditional in the South for the Masons to do cornerstones,'' he said. ``I got involved in doing public buildings in Florida. I've recommended more durable plastic. And don't put in things that would be available elsewhere. The interest will be in the people, not so much the time or the structure.''
Libraries, for example, save old newspapers on microfilm. It's likely those records will be around for a while, making newspapers, in time, unnecessary trappings.
So, Peterson recommends filling the capsules with more personal items and wrapping everything in plastic.
``Incompatible materials should be physically separated. If you put in the mayor's pocketknife, you wouldn't want it to rust on the letter from the preacher.''
If time capsules are properly prepared, it's likely the items inside will be better preserved and more interesting, more easily read, by anthropologists of the future, Peterson said. He's simply trying to make the job easier for his colleagues down the road.
Reading bones will be one of their easiest jobs, just as it's an easy job for Peterson.
``You write on yourself,'' he said, grinning as he held up two examples of hog bones unearthed at the Richmond site - one healthy, one suffering from severe arthritis. ``If you eat a traditional Southern diet of grits, greens and fatback, we'll know it. If you're deficient in vitamin A, you don't fix iron well. It'll be obvious.
``All of this,'' he said, waving a hand across his workroom, ``is the fabric of peoples' lives.''
Since moving to Isle of Wight, Peterson has been weaving the fabric of his own life through his community of choice.
He's active in the local chapter of the American Legion and in the Veterans of Foreign Wars. He has searched for information about the man who built the house he lives in with his wife, his animals and his collections.
He tied some of that research together by talking with neighbors who remember the man - a boat builder, a waterman and a carpenter. Another piece of the puzzle was found at the library. And, for once, there may have been a little excitement involved in that discovery.
``When the library had a book sale, I found a copy of an old book about Colonial gardens, and I picked it up,'' Peterson said.
When he opened the front cover, Peterson said he found that in 1959 the book had been donated by nieces in memory of the man who built his home.
And since then, the old book has attained a special place in his collections.
It has become another fiber in the fabric of the life of an anthropologist living in Rescue, one who believes he may have found his proper place in the universe. ILLUSTRATION: Staff photos by JOHN H. SHEALLY II
Curtiss Peterson works in his lab in Rescue.
Peterson takes a break to pet one of his three dogs.
Peterson removes an old saw blade from one of the vats he uses to
discover the origin of metals.
Peterson studies the bones of humans and animals to figure out the
facts of history.
KEYWORDS: PROFILE BIOGRAPHY ANTHROPOLOGY by CNB