Anasazi Exile. Eric G. Swedin

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      Harry turned his head toward her and opened his eyes, blinking to adjust his vision. Her hair was pulled back into a ponytail and her face had that aching smoothness that came from youth. In another few years, especially if she spent enough time on digs or other outdoor activities, lines would start to carve their way over those freckles.

      “Okay, let’s go,” he said. “It’s your turn to cook and mine to clean.”

      “Wheaties, then.”

      “I think that cooking means that you actually have to turn on the stove. Besides, we’re out of milk.”

      “Okay,” she said. “Dry Wheaties and sausages.”

      “You’re lucky that I remember too many MREs. Wheaties and sausage are good enough.”

      * * * *

      Their camp had five tents: one for Dr. Bancroft, one for Harry, one for the three male graduate students, one shared by Brenda and a female graduate student, and the last—a huge ten-man Army surplus tent with floorboards, used as a common area for eating, meetings, and work. The green canvas sides of the main tent were rolled up to let the breeze pass through. No one complained about the camp, or how sand and dirt got into everything, since everyone but Brenda had already lived in worse conditions on digs, and Brenda was not the type to complain.

      This dig was a curious affair. An obscure foundation from New York had paid for an earlier survey team to take soundings using ground-penetrating radar all over Chaco Canyon, seeking buried formations and larger objects. Dr. Bancroft had been hired as the principal investigator to dig at the more promising soundings. She was the grand dame of Chaco Canyon, having scraped at the ground and dutifully cataloged every detail ever since arriving in the 1950s as part of her father’s team. As always, the dig served as a way to train her students. Harry was the only post-doc on the dig and acted as supervisor.

      It was obvious that her heart was not in digging at the whim of some distant foundation and Dr. Bancroft had used some of the grant money to fly with the other students to a conference in Scotland. Harry could have gone, but then they would have had to shut down the dig. Harry had spent two tours in Europe and only slightly envied the sight-seeing of castles, grassy highlands, and the like that the professor and students were certainly touring between conference panels. It would have been nice to look up some old pals, but if he had gone then Brenda would have been forced to return to Maine because she had some odd passport problems that prevented her from flying to Europe. So he had chosen to stay and keep Brenda working.

      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, СКАЧАТЬ