Arc 3 on The Approximate Mind

The Backward Ear

Tue, 26 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000

TAM-MDN.3-01 · The Midden · The Approximate Mind

Antonio Piaggio was a Genoese monk who could draw anything, which is how a calligrapher and conservator from the Vatican library came to spend the second half of his life in Naples, bent over the most exasperating objects in the kingdom. In 1752, workmen tunneling into a buried villa at Herculaneum had brought up what they took at first for lumps of charcoal, cylindrical, crumbling, good for nothing, and some were burned for light before anyone noticed the letters. They were papyrus scrolls, an entire Greek library, carbonized in the heat of the eruption that sealed the town in the year 79, preserved by the same event that made them unreadable: the fire had saved them from rot and fused every layer to the next.

The Informant

Tue, 26 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000

TAM-MDN.3-02 · The Midden · The Approximate Mind

In November of 1987, an eighty-six-year-old woman named Fa’apua’a Fa’amū gave sworn testimony in American Samoa about some conversations she had taken part in sixty-two years earlier. In 1925 and 1926 she had been a taupou, a ceremonial village maiden, and one of the two closest Samoan companions of a small, nearsighted, ferociously energetic American in her early twenties named Margaret Mead, who had come to the islands to ask the young women about their lives. Fa’apua’a testified that when Mead’s questions turned to the girls’ nights and their lovers, she and her friend Fofoa had done what Samoan girls did with such questions from an outsider: they had teased. They had pinched each other and spun tales, in the recreational lying that Samoans call taufa’ase’e, never imagining the earnest visitor was writing it down. Mead’s book, Coming of Age in Samoa, published in 1928, became the most widely read work of anthropology ever printed, and its portrait of an easy adolescence in the South Seas shaped half a century of American argument about nature and nurture.

The Unconsenting Stratum

Tue, 26 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000

TAM-MDN.3-03 · The Midden · The Approximate Mind

In the spring of 1971, a highway crew widening a road near Glenwood, Iowa, cut into an unmarked pioneer cemetery and uncovered twenty-eight burials. Twenty-six of the dead were white settlers, and they were treated the way the dead of one’s own are treated: gathered up, given a service, reburied nearby. The other two, a Native woman and her child, identified by the trade goods buried with them, were boxed and sent to the state archaeologist’s office for study.

The Perishable Stratum

Tue, 26 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000

TAM-MDN.3-04 · The Midden · The Approximate Mind

In February of 1970, a winter storm came off the Pacific and tore at the bank above the beach at Cape Alava, the westernmost point of the contiguous United States, and when the storm passed, the ground had opened. Out of the exposed face of the slope came house planks, whalebone, and woven things, and hikers walking the coastal trail began carrying pieces of them away. Ed Claplanhoo, chairman of the Makah Tribal Council, knew what the slope held, because his people had never stopped knowing: the village of Ozette had stood there for two thousand years, and somewhere around the year 1700 a slide of liquid clay had come down the hill and buried several of its great cedar longhouses with their contents in place. Claplanhoo picked up the telephone and called Richard Daugherty, the archaeologist who had taught him at Washington State, and asked him to come.