Roanoke Times, New River Current, March 16, 2008

Love and death:
Radford University anthropology professors Cliff and Donna Boyd
 have built a life around other people's bones.
By Tim Thornton,  381-1669 


Husband and wife and colleagues in Radford University's anthropology department, Cliff and Donna Boyd are comfortable with other people's bones.
Alan Kim | The Roanoke Times

RADFORD -- Her bones lay on a table, ordered almost as they had been in life.

But the table was shorter than she had been, so her skull was down by her left elbow.

No one knows the woman's name, but we know she was a slave and we know that her grave was disturbed by development in Northern Virginia.

At the next table, Cliff and Donna Boyd were having lunch. Husband and wife and colleagues in Radford University's anthropology department, the Boyds are comfortable with other people's bones.

"We've had skeletons in our home," Cliff said. "We've worked on projects where we've had skeletons laid out on our kitchen table."

Last month, Cliff was honored with the Outstanding Faculty Award from the State Council of Higher Education for Virginia at a ceremony that included Gov. Tim Kaine. Donna won that award and a national professor of the year award last year. They are co-directors of the Radford University Forensic Science Institute and passionately devoted to learning and teaching and introducing undergraduate students to anthropology, forensic science and the tales the dead can tell.

"Let them talk to us," Cliff said. "They can tell me their story just through their bones."

Age, gender, diet, traumatic events, how they worked and lived and died -- clues to all that are hidden in a person's bones. Decoding those clues change skeletal remains from an artifact into a person.

"I look at them as people," Cliff said, "but as people who can tell me something about themselves through their bones. I feel fortunate and privileged to be able to deal with them in that fashion."

Both Boyds' parents were teachers. Growing up, Donna saw her English professor mother's long hours and short pay and how educators are undervalued. "I thought, 'Why would anybody do that?' "

Now she knows.

"Honestly," she said, "there's nothing better than coming out of a class that went well."

Some married couples might cringe at the thought of sharing workspace, collaborating on projects, traveling to conferences together, presenting papers together, bringing work home together -- doing virtually everything together. Not the Boyds.

"It's wonderful," Donna said.

"We love it," Cliff said.

"We complement each other," Donna said.

He said she's much better at evaluating teeth and trauma in their subjects. She said he has an uncanny ability to identify bones from the tiniest fragments.

"I put together a lot of model airplanes as a kid," Cliff said.

The Boyds grew up in Tennessee, children of East Tennessee State University professors. Her mother taught him English. They both went to the on-campus school that was something of a lab for the education department.

"I was in the fourth grade and he was a senior. So I remember him," Donna said. "We weren't dating then."

After high school, Cliff earned a degree in sociology and art from East Tennessee State. He'd grown up on a cattle farm. He'd never flown. He'd never seen the ocean.

He saw an ad.

"It said, 'If you're a liberal arts graduate with experience in agriculture, the Peace Corps is interested in you,' " Cliff said. "I said, 'That sounded like me.' "

He spent two years on Colombia's Caribbean coast, helping farmers take care of their cattle. He did vaccinations, castrations, branding. He traveled between farms on a motorcycle, a bright orange Honda Trail 90. He lived in a city with 200,000 people and no traffic lights.

"I don't think it would have mattered if they had traffic lights," Cliff said. "Basically, the rule was the bigger the vehicle you had, the more right of way you had."

His puny motorbike put Cliff at the bottom of the right-of-way pecking order.

He lived with a Colombian family and made about $165 a month. That put him squarely in the Colombian middle class. Cliff called his time in the Peace Corps a defining experience. He still keeps in touch with people he met there.

There was more culture shock on the trip home than on the move from East Tennessee to South America.

A kiosk in the Miami airport was selling pet rocks.

"I came back at the height of the disco era," Cliff said. "That was scary."

When he left, people were listening to the Eagles. When he came back, they were listening to Donna Summer and wearing leisure suits. Fortunately, he had a few months on his parents' farm before beginning graduate school -- time to decompress.

Cliff started work on a master's degree in anthropology at the University of Tennessee in Knoxville. Donna, who graduated high school a year early, was there as an undergraduate, studying to become a veterinarian.

"We just met on the street one day," Donna said. "I didn't even know what anthropology was."

But she knew it was something that interested Cliff. So she took an anthropology course.

"Sort of as an elective and sort of as a way to talk to him," Donna said. "To get a date."

That was four academic degrees, one marriage and three children ago. Now they share a lab and a career.

"We look at bones as fresh as a few days ago all the way back to 10,000 years," Cliff said.

Indian burial sites, Civil War battlefields, old graveyards -- they've all been the subject of the Boyds' studies. As adjunct members of the medical examiner's office, they've identified remains of bodies that have been buried, weathered or burned beyond recognition. Sometimes the mysteries behind the bones are never solved.

Once, a hiker found a skull at the base of Mill Mountain and the Boyds and their students were called in to find out what happened.

"We searched that hill from top to bottom," Cliff said.

They never found the rest of the body.

In 1996, the specter of death -- so much a part of their daily lives -- came to the Boyds in a different way. Cliff was diagnosed with cancer -- adenoid cystic carcinoma of the soft palate.

"You think, 'Oh my, I'm going to die,' " Cliff said.

He was depressed at first. A song could set him to crying. They stopped making long-range plans -- and one year became long range.

Then something changed.

"I decided you can't sit in a corner and worry about everything," Cliff said.

He went through surgery and radiation treatments. The next year, doctors found more cancer. There was more radiation and three more operations. Nine years after the first diagnosis, doctors found more cancer. That meant more radiation.

Twice a week, Cliff had radiation treatments at 8:30 a.m. in Charlottesville, then drove to Radford to teach a class in theory and another about American Indians.

"I loved those classes so much I didn't want to give them up," he said. "I could be sitting around twiddling my thumbs and worrying about things or I could be preparing for class and grading papers."

Cabinets line one wall of the Boyds' lab. Inside are drawers of bones and fragments of bones. Cardboard boxes are stacked three high along the opposite wall. There's a human skeleton in each one. Surrounded by what death leaves behind, Cliff seems to have come to terms with the tenuousness of life -- including his own.

"I do respect and love life," he said. "I respect death."

Birth and death provide boundaries for life, part of a natural cycle, he said. But death -- and the contemplation of it -- can also be a teacher.

"Just as medical examiners and forensic anthropologists like Donna and I learn about an individual's life and death from his or her autopsy or skeletal analysis, so too do we learn about ourselves -- who we are, what is most important -- by facing our own death," Cliff said.

His daily contact with human remains constantly refreshes those lessons for Cliff. He doesn't put things off like he might have before. He's more dedicated to enjoying life. And he's given himself more freedom to speak his mind, perhaps a little more frankly than he might have spoken before.

Anything else would be wasteful.

"Time," he said, "is of the essence."

Archaeologist seeks to uncover region's history: RU professor Cliff Boyd is one of the busiest public archaeologists in Southwest Virginia.

By Tonia Moxley   tonia.moxley@roanoke.com 

RADFORD - Radford University professor Cliff Boyd sat in 109 Reed Hall preparing for his afternoon class. Beside him, lining a wall and rising to eye level, were a dozen white boxes that could have held a year's worth of office paper.   But they were full of bones.   Human bones, actually, all exhumed from an unmarked cemetery in Maryland. Construction workers developing a piece of property had run into something unexpected but not uncommon: a collection of graves, probably of German immigrants who died in the 1700s and 1800s.   Boyd and his physical anthropologist wife, Donna Boyd, are charged with identifying the remains as specifically as possible. Their names may never be known, but their life histories are written on their bones.   From those bones, the Boyds can determine how many were male, how many female. How many were children, how many adults. What diseases afflicted them. How much they had to eat. How hard they worked.   The pair will meticulously record that information and ship it, along with the bones, back to Maryland. The bodies may be reinterred or may take up residence in a lab. It all depends on whether or not someone claims them.   "It's like telling a little bit of their story. It means they are not lost. It shows us how we've changed over the past 150 years," Cliff Boyd said.   Boyd is one of the busiest public archaeologists in Southwest Virginia. Public archaeology, also referred to as "cultural resource management," seeks to preserve historical sites and information for the sake of public education and to encourage public interest in that preservation.   Boyd works on sites in Saltville, Radford, Blacksburg, Montgomery County and Hillsville, to name a very few. He also brings grant-funded projects - from $5,000 to $10,000 annually - to Radford University's combined department of sociology and anthropology, according to chairwoman Peggy Shifflett. The Maryland identification project, for instance, is funded by a grant.   As a boy growing up in eastern Tennessee, Boyd developed an interest in history while listening to his grandmother's stories of Civil War veterans she had known as a girl. While he was working with South American farmers during a stint in the Peace Corps, a visit to the Inca fortress city of Maccu Picchu in Peru solidified his interest in ancient people and their cultures.   "They had no written language, yet they built an incredible culture. They built roads, forts, temples," Boyd said. Exploring the ruins of a great indigenous population sparked Boyd's interest in the American Indians of his native Appalachia.   Today he works to answer basic questions about the first Southwest Virginians: Where did they come from? When did they develop agriculture? And why did they abandon the area after the 1650s, before white settlers moved in? He also studies sites important to the Civil War and slavery, including the Smithfield Plantation in Blacksburg and the Kentland Farm property in Montgomery County.   In addition to his grant-funded and public work, Boyd teaches several undergraduate classes, including introduction to archaeology, world pre-archaeology, method and theory in archaeology and summer field schools where students actually dig at sites.   On Tuesdays this semester, students in Boyd's method and theory class get to the hands-on laboratory work, identifying and analyzing broken pottery dug up at Saltville during last summer's field school. These pottery sherds are the remains of clay pots made 500 to 1,000 years ago by American Indians.   The students must determine what materials were used in the pots and what method of decoration the potter used. One group of students finds what Boyd thinks is a fingernail marking on one of the pieces. Other pieces were decorated by pressing a net into the wet clay or using other tools to stamp the surface. The pots can tell the students about old technologies and even trade routes.   Garrett Smythe, a senior anthropology major, helped haul these sherds out of an American Indian trash pit.   "It was a blast. You're in the sun all day, but there's a sense of satisfaction," Smythe said.   After graduation, Smythe hopes to go on to graduate school and work as an archaeologist in the Southwest. There are more job opportunities for archaeologists out there, he said.   Other students in the class also hope to follow in Boyd's footsteps, including Kat Ward. Ward has studied biology, geology, chemistry and anthropology at Virginia Tech and Radford.   "Archaeology is the synthesis of everything I've done. I can apply it all in one place," she said.   And studying under Boyd has its advantages for an archaeologist-in-the-making.   "When I go to conferences and mention him, I can see his colleagues really respect him. He's low-key, but he knows his stuff," she said.   John Kern, director of the Roanoke regional preservation office of the Virginia Department of Historical Resources, has worked closely with Boyd for 15 years. He is impressed with how hard Boyd works for the preservation of the region's historical treasures and with his tireless efforts to educate the public.   Boyd not only arranges for his students to help with public research projects as part of their classwork, he also donates his own time to projects, Kern said. He has in the past served as president of the Council of Virginia Archaeologists and works closely with amateur archaeologists. He speaks at gatherings of local historical societies and his students go on to jobs in public archaeology.   "He plays a statewide role," Kern said.   Boyd just sees himself as a public servant.   "The public pays our [archaeologists'] salaries, so the least we can do is give them back as much as they give us in terms of education. Every archaeologist should be a public archaeologist," he said.   Historical preservation can also have an effect on the economy. According to the Virginia Tourism Corporation, tourists added $12.9 billion to the state's economy and employed more than 211,000 people. Three of the top 10 Virginia attractions were historical sites: Colonial Williamsburg, Mount Vernon and Monticello.