The records ended in early 1942, with the bones being held for government by Hoodless. Needless to say, we immediately launched a search for them, with the aid of the
Fiji Museum. At this writing, we’ve not located either the
bones or the shoe, bottle, and sextant box. And a comparison of Gallagher’s description of the sextant box with such boxes in historical collections around the world has produced
only one with similar features. Interestingly, however, that one--now in the Museum of Naval Aviation in Pensacola, Florida--belonged to Fred Noonan.
If we can’t find the bones in Fiji, we thought, perhaps we can find some on Nikumaroro. Unfortunately, Gallagher left no map--or at least we haven’t found one--showing where on the southeast end of the island the bones were discovered. But the Seven Site is near the southeast end, and we began to wonder about those colonial-era artifacts on it, and the water tank, and a hole in the ground. Did the debris represent stuff left during Gallagher’s search? Had the tank been set up to supply the searchers? Gallagher had written that the original discoverers of the skull had buried it, and he was poised to excavate it. Did the hole in the ground represent where the skull had been buried, and then dug up? Might there be teeth--excellent reservoirs of mitochondrial DNA, left in the hole?
So in 2001 we attacked the Seven Site, clearing a lot of Scaevola and very, very carefully re-excavating the hole. We found no teeth, but nearby we did find a whole series of locations where there had been fires, associated with Frigate Bird, reef fish, and Green Sea Turtle bones. And we found some clusters of giant clam (Tridacna) shells, and a few artifacts. It’s clear that someone spent time at the Seven Site cooking birds, fish, and at least one sea turtle. Someone also hauled at least thirty or forty Tridacna clams up to the site, probably from nearby clam beds, and opened some of them in odd ways. Island people typically sneak up on giant clams while they’re sitting with their shells open, siphoning microscopic food particles out of the water, and quickly slice the adductor muscle that allows them to close their shells. With the clam immobilized, the harvester can then cut out the meat or safely bring the open shell ashore with the meat aboard. The clams at the Seven Site, however, had been brought ashore closed, and then someone had tried to pry some of them open by jamming a sharp piece of metal (which we found) through the hinge. When this didn’t work, they’d taken the clam in one hand and used the other to smash it open with a coral rock. The way you open an oyster in the eastern U.S. is by jamming an implement through the hinge. Was whoever tried to open Tridacna at the Seven Site more familiar with eastern U.S. oysters than with giant Pacific clams?
Most of the artifacts found so far at the Seven Site are probably of colonial origin, or associated with the Coast Guard (M-1 rounds, for example), but a few may be something else. There's the little metal implement that someone tried to use to open the clams--a pointed chunk of ferrous metal, perhaps a piece of a hatch from the Norwich City, a 1929 shipwreck that lies on the reef off the northwest end of the island. There are three pieces of glass--one piece of plate glass, one fragment of a drinking glass, one fragment of a fishing float--found together in a cluster, as though they’d been in a bag or pocket, perhaps picked up on the beach and held for use in cutting things. There are two littleâ€"things--made of aluminum, punctured with wood screws, with scalloped edges. They look like perhaps clips of some kind, but several other uses have been suggested, and we really just don’t know. And there’s a lot of corrugated iron that someone spread over much of the site at some time in the past--all reduced to rust now. What on earth, we wonder, is that all about? Ric Gillespie speculates that whoever camped there dragged it in to catch water; I think he’s nuts, and speculate that Gallagher had it brought in to cover up the area he inspected to impede vegetation growth.
We estimate that we cleared and inspected only perhaps twenty percent of the Seven Site in 2001. We found five fire areas, and excavated only three of them. We need to do more work at the site, and until we do, we’re reserving judgment, but it certainly looks like we may have found the site where Gallagher and the colonists found the bones--a place near the southeast end of the island, associated with fire, bird, and turtle bones. Perhaps--just perhaps--more archaeology at the site will tell us whether the human bones were Earhart’s.
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