T
WO DUST DEVILS—THE CHINDI OF THE NAVAJO—danced in the flats to the west of the site. Dusty watched them as he planted a foot squarely in the soft back-dirt pile and supported the wooden-framed screen with his thigh. Digging, like anything else, had its moments. This wasn’t one. The temperature had topped out at one hundred and four just after noon. Dust-caked perspiration had dried to a white stain on his T-shirt.
The sounds of the site surrounded him. The hollow metallic song of a trowel being scraped across hard sand, the clang of the flat shovel as it encountered a random rock tumbled from one of the pueblo walls. A symphony of
shish-shishing
came from the screens as they separated the tan sandy loam from bits of pottery, flakes, and the occasional stone tool. The idle chatter of the field crew had dropped to a bare mumble as the heat pressed the last vestiges of energy out of their dirty bodies.
That, more than anything else, gave Dusty a definite understanding of how the heat was affecting his people. Even the word games, the final resort of field archaeologists in the middle of a dig, had dribbled to the essentials of communications—and most revolved around motel rooms in Gallup, iced drinks, cold showers, and air conditioners.
Dusty ran his callused fingers through the pebbles, bits of root, and insect shells in the screen. He came up with a big, fat zero. Not a single artifact. He artfully lowered the back of the screen, and flipped the junk onto the back-dirt pile.
Bending down, he reached for his half-empty thermos—the iced tea had turned tepid hours ago—and nodded to Bruce Thompson, who tossed another shovelful of dirt into the screen.
“Hey, Dusty!” Michall shouted. “There’s a truck coming! Swing
lo, sweet chariot, coming for to carry me to Santa Fe and cold beer, I hope!”
“Dream on,” Sylvia countered. “It’s probably some Park Service control freak coming to ensure our tents are in the right order before he goes to measure the depth of the contents in the Sanolet.”
“Shows what she knows,” Bruce muttered as he pitched another shovelful onto the screen. “No bureaucrat measures smelly stuff. They order the seasonal temporaries to do it.”
Dusty straightened and looked. The truck bobbed and lurched down the dirt track, trailing a thin yellow plume of dust. “Okay, Dr. Thompson, the pit is yours. Don’t exceed a ten-centimeter level, and don’t pocket any golden idols while I’m a co-principal investigator.”
“Right, chief.” Thompson gave him a crooked grin. The kid was still working on his B.A., couldn’t tell ten centimeters from ten feet unless his eyeball was stapled to the tape measure, and probably wouldn’t have recognized a golden idol unless it stood up and announced the fact. Fortunately, so far “Four north, Eight east,” the two-by-two meter square that Thompson was digging, had been a “sterile” pit, meaning it had produced no artifacts.
Dusty walked along the line of stakes that made up the site grid. The datum line ran north-south, the baseline, east-west. Any artifact located would be mapped in according to its Cartesian coordinates, the distance from those two lines. When the site had been excavated, it would look something like a waffle: big empty squares separated by narrow walls of dirt.
Dusty ran a grimy forearm over his sweaty brow. The dirt on his arms streaked his forehead. As he walked out to the road, he slapped dust from his Levi’s and brushed at the sweat stains on his T-shirt.
The approaching truck clattered and growled, its diesel idling along. The vehicle, a big Dodge extended cab pickup, sparkled, rich metallic red paint gleaming as it pushed through the gnarly greasewood.
It looked new, which meant it didn’t belong to a dirt archaeologist. They generally made do with older, ragged out four-by-fours that left greasy puddles wherever they parked. The Dodge’s hot metallic red also excluded Park Service personnel.
The big truck rolled to a stop, the chrome wheels catching the sunlight. Dust boiled up from the huge knobby all-terrain tires. The dark, tinted windows obscured any hint as to who the occupant might be.
Dusty stepped around as the door opened, and he could almost imagine the cool air-conditioned air puffing out and dissipating in the heat.
For as flashy as the truck might be, the old man who clambered stiffly out stood in stark contrast. He wore a battered, thirties-style fedora over a mat of steel-gray hair. His bushy eyebrows puffed out from his brow, and the thick mustache might have been tightly packed bristles. Seventy-plus years of sun and wind had turned his age-lined face into something resembling leather. About average in height, he hadn’t gone either to a pot belly or bones, as the elderly were wont to do. In fact, the term elderly just didn’t apply—especially not if you gazed into those sharp brown eyes. He’d stuffed his brown pants into the tops of old hiking boots, and wore a blue plaid western-cut shirt, the snap-down kind with fake pearl buttons.
Dale Emerson Robertson, the grand old man of southwestern archaeology, stroked his gray mustache as he looked Dusty up and down. Robertson had lived as a giant among peers, as a boy working with Neil Judd, A. V. Kidder, and Harold and Mary Colton. He had carved out his own niche along with Lister, Haury, and John McGregor. Unlike so many of his colleagues, Dale had jumped into the “New Archaeology” of the sixties, and made the most of “Cultural Resources Management” in the seventies and eighties. For the nineties, he had taken to remote sensing, the electron microscope, and other advances in technology.
“William! Good to see you.” Dale glanced sidelong toward the site. “All’s well, I hope?”
“Hello, Dale.” Dusty rubbed the hot hood, feeling the fresh wax. The dust had settled on it in mottled patterns. “What’s this? A new truck?”
“The scout was getting a little old. Have you tried to find parts for an International recently? It’s easier to find Folsom points in England.” He glanced at the archaeologists working in the sun, their lower halves hidden by the brush. “Find anything interesting?”
“Not yet, but we’ve named the site. ‘10K3,’ for ten thousand and three. We recovered some potsherds. Nothing diagnostic. We’ll get a better handle on it in the lab. Meanwhile, I’ve got master scientist Thompson digging his second sterile pit. I can’t believe a kid with a four-point-oh grade point average can be such a klutz when it comes to fieldwork. He’s crumbled the pit wall twice. His idea of level makes the Himalayas look flat. In all my years of digging, I’ve never seen anyone who couldn’t get the hang of a line level, but young Thompson is baffled by it.”
Dale grinned. “So, the site’s that dry, eh?”
Dusty grinned back. “It’s only the second day. It’s there, I feel it.”
“You and your gut. Not exactly science.”
“My gut proved right in New York two years ago. I demonstrated that the achrondoplastic dwarf was Iroquoian, didn’t I? And really miffed that Seneca witch—”
“I wish you wouldn’t refer to Dr. Cole that way. She’s a rather special lady.”
“Of course, she is. She was just born fifty years too late for the Nazi party.”
Dusty and Maureen Cole had reacted like vinegar and baking soda. As the excavation near Buffalo, New York, progressed, his intense dislike of her had transformed into out-and-out contempt.
As though reading his mind, Dale exhaled wearily. “I always thought you’d outgrow this irrational fear of women, that you’d find someone who would cause you to reevaluate your opinions. Not every woman is your mother, you know—”
“What my mother did to my father has nothing to do with the fact that Maureen Cole is a viper.”
Dale pursed his lips. “Only Freudians—and rodents—fear snakes. Are you a rat or a mouse?”
Dusty stamped on a low greasewood bush. The brittle stems snapped satisfyingly under his boot. His father had killed himself over the worthless woman he’d married. Dusty hadn’t gotten over it. He
couldn’t
get over it, but he hated to have anyone point out that failing. “If I didn’t love you so much, I’d break your neck.”
“Well,” Dale said and shoved his fedora back on his head. “We archaeologists are a murderous lot of misfits. I suppose I should
have turned you over to an accountant to raise. You would have been better off.”
“It so happens that you were an excellent father,” Dusty said. “You took me to every major archaeological site in the world. Every time you went off to a conference, you dragged me along. I grew up using a trowel during the day and listening to the best archaeologists in the world argue at night. Any sane kid would give his left arm to have a childhood like that.”
“Maybe, but it stunted your social development. Archaeology doesn’t exactly draw people with a ‘normal’ psychological composition. We drink too much. Infidelity and short-term relationships are the norm. Minor academic squabbles become blood feuds that last decades, and few of us ever demonstrate any kind of long-term responsibility.” Dale’s bushy gray brows lowered. “Do you realize that when you weren’t living in a tent in the middle of the desert, you were stuck on a reservation?”
“I do. I learned Hopi, Navajo, some Zuni, and even a bit of Arapaho. How many white kids are initiated to a kiva when they turn thirteen?”
“That’s the point.” Dale sighed. “You never had a chance to be a normal child.”
“Thank God.”
“Yo! Massa!” Steve Sanders called out. He stood up, dust caking his ebony face. “Y’all wanna come see this?”
From the corner of his mouth, Dusty said, “I wish he wouldn’t do that.” To Steve, he called, “If it’s another utilitarian potsherd, you can toss it with the rest.”
“No, suh, Massa,” Steve said. “I got bones.”
Dusty glanced at Dale. “If he’s right, you arrived just in time for the first excitement. Come on.”
As they walked, Dale said, “Steve just made my point. The man received his master’s degree summa cum laude, has an IQ of one hundred and seventy-six, and is leaving next week to pursue his Ph.D. at the University of Arizona. But he thinks it’s funny to talk like Uncle Remus. I tell you, William, that’s not normal.”
Work stopped across the site. People gathered over Steve’s excavation unit. Dusty elbowed his way through the dirt-caked bodies to peer over the pit wall. Steve was on hands and knees, sweat
beading his neck. With the trowel, he dexterously pulled dirt back from the bones.
“What have you got?” Dusty asked.
Dale put a hand on Dusty’s back for stability and moved up alongside him.
Steve looked up thoughtfully. “I cut the scapula first.” He pointed to the shoulder blade; it had a white nick where the shovel had shaved the acromian process. “I put it back in place, and started troweling around it, figuring I’d pedestal it. That’s when I uncovered this.” He used the point of the trowel to indicate a row of bony protrusions sticking up from the pit floor. “Looks like the vertebral column to me, Massa boss.”
“And the rock?” Dale asked, pointing to a flat slab of sandstone that canted at a slight angle where the head should be.
Steve glanced up, “Hey, hi, Dr. Robertson. Welcome to Feature One.”
“He arrived just in time for the jive talk,” Dusty said disapprovingly.
Steve grinned. “Being the smartest, best, and
only
African American on this project, I have decided not to report myself to the NAACP.”
“Politically incorrect wretch,” Sylvia said. She brushed her shoulder-length brown hair back from where the wind teased it. A sparkle animated her bright green eyes. “Are you going to pull the dirt back from that rock or wait until we all die of sunstroke?”
Steve moved with a careful grace, his trowel carving the sandy soil back from the rock.
“Whoa,” Dale called. “Watch it. That’s a discoloration.”
“Whoops,” Steve said. He followed around the lighter dirt with his trowel. “You’re right. Looks like this was dug out, and filled back up. Want to take bets that the discoloration runs around the body?”
“A burial?” Sylvia said. “Why the rock on his head?”
“First things first,” Dusty said in measured tones. “Somebody hand Stevie Wonder here a Ziploc. I want a soil sample.”
Dusty watched as Steve troweled fresh dirt into the plastic bag, measured in the location, and pulled his line level out to take a depth from the pit datum stake. Then he handed it up for Sylvia to label.
Dusty glanced at Dale. “Are you thinking what I’m thinking?”
Dale shrugged. “Steve, trowel down around the cervical area, see if you can follow the spine up to the back of the skull. If you have to coyote under the rock for the moment, it’s all right.”
Sylvia frowned. “What are you thinking, boss?”
Dusty just shook his head, waiting.
Steve carefully positioned himself so that he wouldn’t crush the fragile bone, and scraped the dirt away from the neck area, chiseling under the rock. “All right, race fans, I’ve got cervical vertebrae here, and … yes, I can feel the skull.” Steve glanced up. “Okay, the guy’s definitely got a rock on his head. What’s it mean?”
Dale gave Dusty a warning look, followed by a slight shake of the head.
Taking the cue, Dusty said, “Well, in the Anasazi days, the cemetery commission didn’t make you set the headstones in concrete. You’ll have to take it up with the local 10K3 undertaker. In the meantime, make sure you’ve got everything mapped in, photographed, and recorded. You are not to remove a single bone. Got that? We’re in NAGPRA land now. This unit has just been removed from the rule of science and placed under the rule of law.”