The first hole that morning was a bust, just a rocky outcropping buried under two feet of dirt. Brenda tossed aside her shovel and sat down to suck on her water bottle. Harry bent to shovel the dirt back into the hole. The Park Service demanded that their digs be as unobtrusive as possible, and that meant not leaving holes everywhere. Briefly he envied the great archaeologists of the past who had excavated places like Troy and Assyria, hiring native laborers for pennies a day to do their digging for them.
It was only nine in the morning, so they moved to the next spot on the list. The radar had revealed a large mass with no protrusions. Not promising, but the grant contract required a visual inspection of every possible object.
An hour crept by as they dug down three feet. Though they weren’t passing the dirt through a sieve to make absolutely sure, they found no artifacts. No pottery shards, no obsidian flakes, and no rocks that might have once been some sort of tools. The sun had risen far enough to make digging an ordeal in sweat and dust. Brenda’s shovel hit the rock first.
They both dug in rhythm, avoiding each other’s shovels as they widened the hole. Harry exhaled in frustration. Just another damn rock. An annoying piece of basalt, black and porous with gas bubbles formed when it had cooled from lava millions of years ago. Sand was firmly embedded in its pores.
Brenda announced the obvious conclusion. “This shouldn’t be here. Almost all the rocks around here are from the Menefee Formation and the Cliff House Formation, mostly sandstone, some shale, a bit of coal. All seashore deposits. No basalts at all. That requires volcanic activity.”
Harry was weak on geology, preferring to read history books and science fiction novels. Brenda often sat up late and pored over textbooks by lantern light, marker in hand, hair hanging down, lips moving as she crammed every last scientific nugget into her mind.
“So it doesn’t belong here,” he said, encouraging her, remembering that this dig was part of her education.
“That means that it was brought here by someone. Probably the Chacoans. That makes it an artifact.”
They dug all day, taking time out for a siesta during the hottest hours. By sunset they had enlarged their three-foot-deep excavation to the edges of the square-shaped dark rock, about six feet on a side.
Brenda was excited, and even Harry was intrigued. The shape was not natural. Why had the Chacoans taken the time to chip away at a piece of basalt and form it into a square, and then buried it?
“Maybe it’s a tomb,” Brenda suggested as they ate their dinner. “Though it’s not like anything else the Chacoans ever made.” She had taken the time to cook hamburgers for them. Harry lathered enough mustard on his to make small beads of perspiration break out on his forehead as he ate.
Harry shrugged. “Maybe. If we were somewhere else, like Egypt, I’d agree that it was a lid to a tomb.”
“Very curious. I’ve always been disappointed with how the Chacoans buried their dead. I mean, they apparently didn’t fear their dead, not like the Navajo, so we do have some burials. But they usually buried the dead in shallow graves in the midden, as if they were part of the other garbage. Does that mean that they saw the flesh as not important, once the spirit had flown?”
“Not all burials are in middens,” Harry said. “Some are in cists. Those chambers were normally made of stone and used to store food. It cost them something to give up that sort of useful construction to make it a burial site.”
“There must have been social value to the burials. They were often buried with everyday tools.” She pursed her lips in annoyance. “And we see gender boundaries there—food preparation items for women, hunting tools for men.”
“Would you prefer to be a hunter or a gardener, Brenda?”
“I don’t like hunting, so I guess a gardener.”
“But you object to Chacoan women being gardeners, not hunters?”
“I object that they didn’t have a choice, not what they did. They provided most of the food through their farming.”
“It’s true,” Harry said. “But we have only artifacts, so we can only guess about how their social structures actually worked.”
“Women have always gardened, and men have hunted. That’s the way it’s been for thousands of years.”
“True,” he said. “But back to the main topic, which is Chacoan burial customs.”
“Okay. No tombs have ever been found. And few graves have been found with valuables, like jewelry, or what we would recognize as high-value items.”
“Do you buy into the interpretation that this means that the Chacoans had a relatively egalitarian society, with shallow social classes?” Harry asked.
“No, I don’t. I mean, it could be true, but most societies have a strong hierarchy. Maybe we just don’t see it in their burial customs.”
“Maybe there aren’t so many graves because they just ate ’em.”
She slapped his shoulder. “You always have to bring that up, don’t you? It’s disgusting.”
“There’s been lots of evidence of cannibalism found,” he said. “And we know that the Aztecs practiced it.”
“It’s racist to think that the ancient Indians ate each other. Besides, that evidence is all disputed.”
“Calling something racist just shuts down the conversation.”
“The Pueblo people think cannibalism is one of the worst sins that anyone can commit.”
They had argued over this same topic so many times that the conversation had taken on the nature of a script. “Yes,” Harry said, “but maybe they think that because they are so horrified by what their ancestors did, and they just want to keep it a secret.”
“That kind of argument can’t be refuted because you want to have it both ways,” she said. “If the Pueblo people thought cannibalism was okay, then you would use that fact as evidence. Since they despise cannibalism, the exact opposite attitude, you use that fact as evidence instead. What would convince you that the Chacoans and other ancient Pueblo peoples didn’t eat each other?”
“I don’t know the answer, but I try to not love the people of the past so much that I blind myself to their more unsavory aspects.”
The argument continued and they both enjoyed it immensely. The moon rose, half-lit by the sun and half in shadow, and Brenda finally announced her intention to go to bed. Harry quickly cleaned the dishes and the conversation wound down.
“What are we going to do now?” Brenda asked.
“First thing tomorrow, drive into Bloomfield and rent a brace and hoist. We’re going to lift that sucker up.”
CHAPTER TWO
When he woke the next morning, Harry went through the simple ritual that pushed the fog of sleep away. He sat on the end of his cot, shook his boots to make sure that no scorpions had found the residual warmth of the leather too tempting, and shrugged on his clothes. He appreciated the simple things of life, like clean socks, a warm cot, not being shot at.
He brushed his fingers along his scalp. He had shaved two days ago and the fuzz was not long enough to justify the razor again. When his hair had started to thin in his