On Oct. 6, 2001, Dr. Richard A. Gould found himself amid the herd of mourners, tourists and gawkers shuffling past the smoldering ruins of the World Trade Center.
The crowd's focus was on the mountain of rubble and twisted steel, but Gould's eyes fell toward objects on the ground, scattered in a blanket of dust, lying in the alleys, on Dumpsters and fire escapes.
What he saw changed the course of his life. Over the following months, he would return again and again to New York, bearing urgent messages to the city officials directing the recovery effort in Lower Manhattan. He and his colleagues would invent a new field of endeavor -- "disaster archaeology" -- that they would eventually put into practice months later, in the ashes of The Station nightclub fire.
What Gould saw that day, he says, were tiny bits of human beings -- bits of bones small enough to put in your pocket.
Gould, a Brown University archaeologist, once spent three years among the Australian aborigines, studying tomb making and rock art. Early in his career, as one of the first practitioners of the field of ethnoarchaeology, he watched the aborigines in their daily lives and compared it to evidence culled from archaeological digs.
In recent years, he has been writing books on underwater archaeology. Now 63, the Barrington resident spends much of his free time underwater, examining shipwrecks, or in the air, flying aerobatic airplanes in competitions.
In Manhattan that morning, Gould looked around at the other onlookers. No one seemed to notice the remains that he saw. People were grieving, their thoughts far away. A foul-smelling smoke hung in the air.
The more he looked, the more remains he saw.
Gould started asking questions that an archaeologist would ask: How did the remains get there? Why were the bits of flesh and bone gray, the same as the dust they rested in? Were they badly charred, or had they become stained by the dust?
He wanted to investigate as he would an archaeological site, noting where the remains had come to rest and sending them to a lab for analysis. Maybe they could be used to identify victims, he thought.
But Gould had no authority to handle the remains. He thought about taking pictures, then thought better of it; he didn't want to draw the attention of the grieving crowds to the bits of flesh and bone.
In the following months, Gould lobbied city officials to let crews of archaeologists study the remains that lay outside the pile of rubble known as ground zero.
When Gould called an archaeologist he knew in the city, she told him she had noticed a similar phenomenon. Blood-stained papers had floated on the wind past her office -- in Brooklyn. She helped organize a roster of archaeologists who volunteered their services to search for the remains.
Police and emergency-management officials were sympathetic to the archaeologists' plea, Gould says, but they were bent on returning the city to normalcy. City cleaning crews were sweeping the streets; power-washing crews cleaned off building rooftops. Evidence that Gould thought might be useful to the process of identifying victims was literally going down the storm drain.
An invitation from the chief medical examiner's office finally came in March 2002. Gould and a team picked an apparently undisturbed area outside of ground zero, on Barclay Street, and sifted through the material they found there.
Before long, they found office papers and other objects that might have come from the towers. One object was particularly spooky: a piece of microfiche that contained the serial numbers of every Boeing 767 built before 1991. Gould says someone fed the microfiche into a machine and found the numbers of the two planes that hit the towers.
For the most part, though, the search was disappointing, Gould says. The only biological remains they found were a handful of battered bones; it wasn't clear if they were even human bones. They sent the bones on to the authorities and went home.
But Gould says that if teams of trained volunteers had scoured the rooftops and alleyways of Lower Manhattan earlier, before the street cleaners moved in, many more victims could have been identified. Even without such an effort, the authorities continued to find remains scattered through Manhattan throughout 2002.
To date, the remains of only 54 percent of 2,645 people who died in the towers have been identified.
AFTER NEW YORK, Gould continued training a team of volunteer experts, called Forensic Archaeology Recovery, that could be dispatched within hours to the site of any catastrophe in the Northeast.
Less than a year later, on Feb. 20, 2003, a shower of sparks ignited the walls of a crowded nightclub in Gould's home state of Rhode Island. One hundred people died in the fire.
On the day the last victim was identified, Gould's 23-member volunteer team got its chance. Mostly Brown graduate students or off-duty Providence police detectives, they came to West Warwick two days later with white Tyvek suits, sieves, and plastic buckets.
The team has a "humanitarian" mission, Gould says. The aim is to find human remains and personal effects as an aid to the grieving process. Team members didn't focus on finding evidence for police work, but they had to be trained in handling evidence so they didn't impede criminal investigations.
There was some resistance when the team showed up, Gould says. People such as Catherine T. Ochs, a hard-nosed West Warwick detective captain, asked a lot of questions, Gould recalls. But eventually, the team members were allowed to proceed. "We got a lot more information than anyone thought we would get."
The team eventually excavated debris from over half of the area of the building, filling 340 buckets with material that was sieved through screens. They found more human remains and 88 personal objects, including wallets, cell phones -- some still functional -- even supermarket scan cards. Those cards turned out to be practically indestructible, Gould says, and by taking them to supermarkets, the medical examiner's office was able to figure out whom they belonged to.
With temperatures hovering in the single digits, it was too cold for wet sieves, so the team poured the buckets of ash and rubble through mesh screens looking for evidence. Although Gould is preparing an article for a professional journal on his work in West Warwick, he says he is not ready to release the details of his work there, as his notes are being used by the agencies investigating the fire.
"Regardless of the success of the recovery effort," Gould wrote recently in a draft of the article, "victims' families and friends find it reassuring and supportive to know that there are people willing to engage in this kind of effort on their behalf. They could see it for themselves through the fence, and it made a difference."
Eventually, Gould said, the objects found their way back into the hands of victims' families.
