“Gob” alludes to the mouth as the source of spit. Shoved up against “smacked,” it’s an in-your-face term for the stunned feeling that comes from being punched in the mouth.
The 76-year-old Linn used it to describe how he felt in January while in San Diego when he finished counting the 160 people who were to be presenters at the annual meeting of the American Archaeological Institute (AIA) – at the 160 whose names started with A.
Stunned – and pressed for time before going to a lecture — he didn’t bother to count the presenters listed under the other letters. He was a kid with a sweet tooth in an archaeological candy store.
A member and past president of the Springfield Society of the AIA, which celebrates its 100th anniversary this year, Linn is one of 10 trustees in the national organization whose job is to advise the AIA which of the hundreds of presenters should be sent out on the road to address societies like Springfield’s.
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Each year, each of the AIA’s 110 local societies host four lectures, all by experts in their fields. (Among the world-class researchers who stopped in recent years was the director of the project at Stonehenge.)
Linn’s first contact with the organization came through lectures he attended for some intellectual enrichment during a 20-plus year career at Security National Bank in which he averaged four hours of sleep a night.
“It was a good run for me. I loved my job. Damn near killed myself, so I retired when I was 60 in 2002. That’s two years after my heart attack.”
At his first meeting, he was pleasantly surprised, if not gobsmacked, to discover “I knew almost everybody there, including (the late) Jim Kenney, arguably one of the most intelligent people I’ve ever met.”
The late Ken and Mary Rush and the late Betty Raup were among the “lovely, lovely people” in the regular gathering.
A few years later, he joined and eventually became president of the Springfield Society, where he’d always felt at home.
As a free-range child growing up in Zanesville, Ohio, his meanderings took him to Flint Ridge, a center for the cutting-edge technology of tool knapping during the stone ages (paleolithic and neolithic).
In addition to being surrounded by arrowheads, he was born to a mother whose formal education was blunted by the poverty of the Great Depression but whose native intelligence made her a free-range reader. Her favorite subject was archaeology.
It is no accident, then, that Linn’s favorite archaeological lecture among the more than 100 he has heard told the story of the unearthing of a mastodon with a head as big as a table by a crew digging out a pond at the Mound Builders Country Club just south of Newark, Ohio.
The lecture was given by Bradley Lepper, now curator of archaeology for the Ohio History Connection, who went out in single-digit temperatures in December of 1988 to survey the scene, only to get the cold shoulder from the property owner.
Told it would take six months to properly excavate the site, the owner told Lepper “You’ve got a week, starting today,” Linn said. When Lepper protested, he was told, “You’ve just wasted an hour. You’d better get on it.”
The remains, as it turned out, were in a bog of the sort prehistoric people used for refrigeration, which was stroke of luck number one.
Once the mastodon meat was heaved up on the ground, researchers discovered cutting marks that indicated the beast had been slaughtered and butchered.
Although tossing the remains on the ground horrified members of the team, the sub-freezing temperatures proved to be stroke of luck number two. The cold weather immediately froze the samples, preserving them for analysis in a Michigan laboratory – analysis that discovered evidence of 14,000-year-old bacteria in the animal’s gut.
Since “there were not supposed to be any people in Ohio” at that time the mastodon was butchered, said Linn, that was big news.
For a different reason, Linn was just as surprised by another Lepper lecture about trails linked prehistoric human communities in Marietta, Chillicothe and Newark.
Trails connected all three communities, and the one between Chillicothe and Newark was two being “straight as a laser,” Linn recalled. “It does not go around hills, it goes over them. It does not deviate.”
Indeed, while Linn has enjoyed learning the stories of the archaeological digs and the research they’ve harvested, he’s been fascinated by questions they raise that no one seems to be able to answer.
One of those involves how people at the time of Stonehenge managed to move the 20-ton stones five miles and put them in an arrangement that marked the summer and winter solstice, but how they did so in such a way that the whole formation still stands 3,500 years later.
Although its initials include two A's, ancient aliens is a term people in the AIA distance themselves from.
On the other hand, as believers in science, many are now keenly interested in ground-penetrating satellite imagery that has revealed thousands of ancient sites in Guatemala indicating it could have been the site of city that “would have equaled the population of Rome” at roughly the time of the Roman Empire, Linn said.
Imagers that scan spectrums and accumulate data in terabytes “can see things we never saw before,” Linn said, much as the microscope introduced people to a world we’d not been aware of.
One result of this has been a sharp increase in local AIA societies’ interest in lectures about tools that are revolutionizing the field and what they’re revealing – an interest Linn has passed along to those who set the lecture series.
One year into his three-year term as a trustee, the boy who grew up in a cutting-edge region of the stone age is hyped-up about the explosion of knowledge about to be unleashed.
He’s fully expecting to be gobsmacked again.
For more information on the local society, go to www.springfieldarchaeological.org
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