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1 INTRODUCTION “The Things Left in the Ground” Introducing Archaeology to Arukwa We found the bomber after a few days of walking, lying quietly in five or six large pieces in the flittering shadows of the trees on the ridge of Wakayri Mountain, attended by a troop of spider monkeys that chased us away with large rotten branches that they aimed with alarming precision from the treetops. Greening over with moss, the silver body lay apart from the two buckled propellers attached to clay ant colonies in what once were engines. The tail gunner’s turret was intact enough for someone to have survived, as local stories had suggested. Fragments of a Us army air Forces insignia and a number on the tail marked the start of a trail to an archive in Washington, DC, which told us that it was a B-26 bomber that had crashed on January 25, 1945. The stories that we had heard about it from the Palikur elders Kiyavwiye Paulo, Kiyavwiye afonso, Kiyavwiye Lohai, Kiyavwiye Xele, Kiyavwiye Uwet, and Kiyavwiye Uwakti told of a misty day in which the plane, “she who walked above the day,” had lost its way. Uwakti, who had first found the wreckage with his father when he was a young takweye of sixteen, sang a song of the crash, in which the two mountains, Wakayri and Karumna, called out to one another about the explosion. Much as falling leaves and ant trails continue to fold the airplane’s aluminum and iron into the jungle, the stories themselves of the B-26 bomber that we heard from Uwet and Xele and Lohai and Uwakti in this corner of the Brazilian amazon were folded into many archives and archaeologies . The archive of yellowing official documents was maintained by the Us military in Washington, DC. an archive of family photos and 2 Introduction letters was in the new Orleans homes of the sisters of George Bodin, who had been the radio operator on the B-26, and whose older sister Janet had kept her surname when she married into the Catholic Church as a nun. There was the puzzle of two graves for the five crewmen.1 and there was an archive of Palikur stories about wars of other times: wars of Carib and arawak over a daughter who had fled here after marrying the enemy, stories of wars in which shamans had blown on bone flutes in order to win, and stories of anacondas and stars and Palikur cosmological wits pitted against the strengths of wave after wave of invaders. Those stories stretched far: some to French Guiana, some to France, some to the venezuelan Orinoco river in Warao; tales that were invested in landscapes and sounded so similar to those that we were hearing.2 some stories made trails to the mouth of the amazon, where relatives had been taken as slaves, and their sons had followed story tracks all the way home, decades later. There were trails from africa in the stories of runaway slaves who had come to this region at least as early as 1623,3 and others who in the 1790s sought the liberty that they had heard the French revolution had brought to French Guiana. some of them had married into local indian families; some had been killed for stealing crops. Other story trails stretched to China in the arrival of a Chinese trader called Chinua, and to the city of Brasília, whose officials had forced him to leave when the area was declared indian. Tales of hunting led to the stories of the Gahawkris, the master spirits of different animals, who lived in different parts of the forest, and whom hunters both feared and did not believe in anymore. Those tales, tantalizingly, seemed to have trails all the way to siberia, where stories of animal master spirits were so similar.4 One of those stories even trailed back, it seemed, to the stories that geographers and climatologists tell of a time when sea levels were higher, and Wakayri Mountain was said to have been out at sea—a tantalizing hint that stories in this area might indeed extend 8,000 years or more, when sea levels were higher and early coastal fisher-gatherers made a shell mound at a place that is now quite far inland. surprisingly, the paper trail led to england and to sir Walter ralegh. in 1595 he had persuaded elizabeth i to let him out of the Tower of...

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