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	“Wanting to know what a plant is has been a constant for me,” says Mimi Carre, who has been on the UMass Amherst French faculty since the early ’70s. (photo by Ben Barnhart)

THE COUNTLESS UMASS STUDENTS WHO have known her as Professor of French may be surprised to learn that Marie-Rose Carre spends part of each summer in a small corner of Turkey working on-site with a crew of archaeologists. For four weeks, from mid-June to mid-July, Carre’s day begins and ends with the archaeologists’ – that is, from dawn till dark. A self-taught botanist, Carre is compiling a comprehensive pictorial study of the flora of the archaeological site. Her work will eventually be published as part of the official record of the dig, now in its 11th year.

The excavation site, a mound 30 yards high, 220 yards long, 120 yards wide, overlooks a broad plain at the Turkish-Syrian border, 400 yards inland from the Mediterranean. On this plain, in 333 B.C., Alexander the Great defeated King Darius of Persia in the Battle of Issos. Today rural in character and irrigated by artesian wells, the region is known for its oranges, tomatoes, eggplants, green peppers, watermelons and figs. But on the nearby coast, the modern world has arrived with a vengeance: The natural gas pipeline from Iraq empties into the Mediterranean at this spot and enormous sea-going tankers load up at off-shore docks.

What is now a landlocked mound of earth was once part of a small port town, Carre says, and its lively history is being – literally – unearthed by an archaeological team headed by Carre’s daughter, Professor Marie-Henriette Gates of Turkey’s Bilkent University. Once upon a time, “This was a great corner of the world for piracy,” Carre says. So far different strata of the dig have yielded up varied cultural treasures dating from as early as pre-recorded history and as late as the Crusades – that is, a span from about the 6th millennium B.C. to the 12th century A.D. There are, for instance, jars still smelling faintly of the olive oil they held in the 17th century B.C. And three large stones used, presumably by slaves, to crush wheat for flour. In a layer of burned wood, the archaeological team has found a cooking pot with the bones of a piglet “complete from head to tail,” Carre reports, “no doubt being cooked for dinner when the pirates set fire to the town. This was a minute event in historical terms,” she notes wryly, “but drastic for those who took part in it.” There are 12 clay bowls of elegant shape that could grace any contemporary dinner table and, almost miraculously, a saucepan with the shells of six eggs intact – the insides of the eggs having, of course, long since disappeared.

While the digging and sorting of shards goes on in the blazing summer heat, Carre has developed, over 10 years’ time, her own routine at the mound, in the earliest, coolest part of the workday. Like her hero, the philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau, she explains, “I do my botanist’s walk. I look down. I bend over. I pick up a specimen. I observe nature.” The botanist’s walk is not a ramble, not a hike. “People thought Rousseau was crazy, too, you know.”

With specimen held in her left hand (“I never take the roots!”), Carre sketches with her right. Her medium is watercolor pencils, dipped in water. A perpetual challenge, a constant frustration with the medium, is to reproduce on paper the exact shades of green that nature has made. At the top of the mound workers have rigged up for Carre a makeshift shelter covered with blue plastic. Here, as the day progresses, Carre repairs from the intense heat to work on her drawings at a small table. Sometimes her shelter becomes a temporary infirmary for workers suffering from dehydration. “It’s usually in the hundreds,” says Carre of the local mid-summer temperature, “and very humid.”

So far Carre has executed 120 botanical drawings. The dig is scheduled for completion in 2006 – leaving two more summers for floral observation, identification and drawing. “When my daughter closes the dig, there will be no more sketches. Most of my plants have been classified, but there are still some I will need to identify. Then I will organize my drawings for publication.”

Carre says, “I have always wanted to participate in an archaeological study, and when Marie-Henriette got her site, I said, ‘I would like to come to study the flora.’ She said, ‘How original! Of course.’ So I was delighted to come, and I was here for the christening” – in 1992, when her daughter doused the site ceremonially with champagne at the beginning of the dig.

As a child born in Tunis, Carre was taken several times a year to visit the nearby ruins of the ancient city of Carthage. She recalls sweeping away the sand to look more closely at mosaic floors in Roman houses of the 2nd century A.D. At the lycée, she studied Roman history and ancient civilizations. As for botany: her parents, both teachers, gave her a splendid book for identifying plants on a family holiday in the Swiss Alps when she was 11. Carre dates her passion for identifying flora from that time. She’s had the book, in three editions, near at hand throughout her life. “Wanting to know what a plant is has been a constant for me,” she says.

Carre never imagined being a botanist or an archaeologist. As a university student in Algiers her specialty was French literature. She married an American professor, Jeffrey Carre, and came with him to the United States after World War II. The couple eventually settled in the Valley, he to teach at Amherst College, she at Smith College. Mimi Carre was recruited to UMass in the early 1970’s, when the university was creating a new program in French graduate studies, and she has been on the faculty ever since.

Being part of the dig satisfies many of Carre’s lifelong aspirations. “These are the roots of my interests,” she says, surveying a pile of completed drawings. Her place at the small table under the blue plastic is assured. “If I’m not there, people ask, ‘Where is Mimi-Hanem?’” she says, hanem being a sign of esteem and respect for women.

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