For the reasons I stated in my previous post the clambake features seem to be more likely the residue of Coastie activity than of Gallagher's castaway and thus I don't think this particular line of evidence supports the contention that the Seven Site encompasses the site where Gallagher's castaway was found.
Anything is possible. As much as I'd like to think the 'dog that didn't bark' has the answer, guys like our coasties have also often been known to go off and do crazy stuff with a little time and few resources. Just like we may have notions of what a good ol' Coastie clambake should look like, so we have notions of what a castaway 'camp' ought to resemble. I'm not sure how reliable such notions are. Gathering and cooking clams in an impromptu way might not be so wild. I've shucked many an oyster with whatever I could devise myself - and often not so neatly.
I'm not discounting these things as interesting 'markers of some sort', but while they may seem to 'point' in a desirable direction in a search for Earhart, they are not certain signs of a castaway either.
The Seven Site isn't a point, it's an area covering a thousand square meters or more, no?...
I've never been to Nikumaroro, but I can tell you from reasearching the website that it's not a thousand square meters. Dr. King's
project plan for the 2010 expedition called for an initial clearing of 10x30 meters. One point of friendly debate has been just where the boundaries of the site lie for purposes of defining where the castaway lived and left remains.
But the size of the site is a discussion I will leave to the experts. One of your earlier points above was how you didn't see the
Tridacna (clam) valves from the Seven Site as evidence of castaway activity.
I know we've been talking about the dog that didn't bark, bottles that don't seem readily attributable to Coasties, and we should. But remember as well there's a dog that did bark, or, to borrow your analogy, an FBI man who yelled. To read the assemblage as depicted here, the only faunal evidence recovered from the Seven Site were the 2 clusters of Tridacna clam valves. That's far from the whole story.
Sharyn Jones, Ph.D., an assistant professor of Anthropology at the University of Alabama, inspected and classified some of the faunal material taken from the Seven Site. One of her reports from 2008 (attached) states: "The 2007 Seven Site faunal assemblage contained a total of 1,401 bones, including 1,168 fishes (shark and boney fishes), 78 fragments of turtle bone, 155 bird bones, and one highly fragmentary bone of a medium-sized mammal (likely a dog or small-medium sized pig)."
(This report has been on the TIGHAR website for many years; I've merely attached it for ease of reading because I think it's an excellent report. Keep in mind this report doesn't even represent all of the faunals found at the site.)
I've also attached a database I built from Dr. Jones' results. It's surprising to note the variety of fish in this database, which conveys the idea that whoever was catching, cooking and eating these species was indiscriminately selecting whatever could be raised by hook, spear or net. What kind of fish are we talking about? Here's a
photo from fishbase.org of the Myripristis species (soldierfish), cooked at the Seven Site. Full-grown it was about 6 inches in length, but Jones' database lists these and numerous others as small-bodied or very small-bodied individuals, probably baby fish. If this was a Bushnell or Coastie clambake, they were very diverse eaters, seemingly not caring what they ate or how they cooked it, or how appetizing or large the fish might be. Most of the bones leave evidence to Dr. Jones of simply having been "likely just thrown on hot coals and fire." This seems a rather uncivilized way of cooking in front of our putative distinguished clambake guests.
There is a tendency to put pressure on single points of evidence (i.e., "The clams must be isolatable to the castaway or we can toss them out") until they either break or magically become smoking guns. It's far more realistic to look at the broad array of species ostensibly used as food at the site and make educated guesses about the individual who might be consuming them. Once one has done this, envisioning the tridacna (clam) valves as castaway food sources becomes somewhat less difficult. A closer study of the condition of these valves would show also that, as Dr. King observes, "Seven of the valves were broken, typically with single breaks across their midsections, shattered into multiple fragments ... some apparently smashed with heavy objects (breakage patterns radiating inward.)" This would seem to indicate some degree of desperation, fitting in perfectly with the method of cooking observed in the fish, bird, and turtle bones.
It may be a surprise to some that I view the database of fish from Dr. Jones as ranking with the most persuasive evidence I've seen, other than perhaps the Western Pacific High Commission's correspondence regarding the finding of human remains on Gardner, for a castaway's presence on the island at the Seven Site. It was this evidence that led Dr. Jones to conclude, "Based on the condition and frequency of the faunal remains from the Seven Site I agree with the interpretation of this site as an encampment and one that was likely created by castaways who were not Pacific Islanders."
Having looked at this with the slant I've given to it (and I admit it is a slant, i.e., an argument attempting to persuade and any errors or omissions are mine), I pose the question: do the clams begin to take on a slightly different character? How do we isolate these other 1,401 bones in such a way as to exclude them from the castaway or even to make
all of them more likely to be eaten by someone else than a castaway?
Joe Cerniglia
TIGHAR #3078ECR