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.
