Diablo Mesa(14)

She went on to describe the plan for that first week in some detail. “But,” she added, “there’s a small issue we have to deal with immediately. If you look at the excavation plan, you’ll see that five hundred yards due west of the target area is a small archaeological feature, a seven-by-four-and-a-half-foot rectangle containing what appear to be human remains.”

Papers were shuffled as everyone located the feature.

“When I first saw this yesterday, I speculated that it might be a prehistoric Pueblo burial. I say this because the archaeological survey map of New Mexico indicates a thousand-year-old Pueblo seasonal campsite at the edge of Diablo Mesa, two miles west. There’s also a Spanish watchtower, apparently, so these might be historic burials. By law, we have to determine if there’s a grave, and if so, take steps to protect it. And we have to do that right away—before anything else.”

“Can’t we just rope it off and stay clear?” Tappan asked.

Nora shook her head. “It’s the law. But it won’t take long: we only have to open it enough to identify it as a burial, and then we can fill in the hole and leave it alone. It won’t take more than a few hours.”

“Good!” Tappan said. “Let’s get it out of the way, then.”



An hour later, Nora stood observing while the two postdocs, Scott and Emilio, hammered pins into the ground and gridded out the possible grave with Day-Glo string. To her dismay, everyone had come to watch this first breaking of ground. But she wasn’t surprised: the discovery of a grave on a dig, it seemed, always aroused a level of morbid curiosity.

“We’ll open grid one-A first,” said Nora. “I think that’s where the heads would be oriented.”

It was often easy to determine if a cranium was ancient Pueblo Indian or not, because most prehistoric Southwestern skulls had flattened backs, deliberately deformed in infancy by binding the baby’s head to a cradleboard. If so, all she had to do was uncover one cranium, establish it as prehistoric because of the deformation, and then they could bury it again and get on with the real work of excavating the target site. If it were Spanish, that might require a more extensive excavation, but they would undoubtedly find Spanish artifacts. Carbon dating would quickly establish the age.

She had decided to do the actual excavation herself, as there was only room for one in the meter square, and she wanted to show everyone she was going to be a hands-on director. In addition, since this was almost certainly a prehistoric site, she wanted to make sure it was done properly. Scott and Emilio seemed competent enough, but they were young and she suspected they might need guidance.

Laying out strips of canvas around the area to be opened, she donned knee pads and knelt, using a trowel to remove the bunchgrass and a scattering of purple locoweed and set them aside, to replace when the hole was refilled. According to the GPR, the bodies—if indeed they were bodies—lay roughly three feet deep. As she troweled off the sandy topsoil, inch by inch, she filled a bucket placed in one corner, which Skip periodically picked up and dumped on a screen, while the two assistants searched it for artifacts. This went on for close to an hour, as Nora went down inch by inch. Nothing was showing up on the screen but pebbles—until Skip abruptly cried out and held something up.

“Hey, take a look at this rare and ancient artifact!”

There was an initial stir of excitement until people saw he was laughing, an old brass bullet casing between his fingers.

Nora took it from him. It was a deeply tarnished Remington .45 ACP that had been fired. Odd, she thought, to find it in a layer a foot down. But then she considered there was a lot of wind and sand in the area: stuff could get buried pretty quickly.

She handed it back to Skip.

“What should I do with it?” he asked.

“Trash.”

She continued digging until she reached the three-foot marker. She paused and, taking a slender bamboo probe, poked it into the sand. Sure enough, there was something a few inches deeper, the right size and shape to be a cranium.

She proceeded now with palette knife and paintbrush. She could feel everyone above her, hovering, looking down. It was irritating—she didn’t like being watched while she worked—but she knew from prior experience they eventually lost interest and went away. Archaeology was deadly boring 95 percent of the time, an endless moving of small piles of dirt from one place to another. Rarely was anything of note found.

She slowly deepened the layer, brushing the sand to one side and scooping it into the bucket, whisked away by Skip with less frequency now.

She paused again and probed with the bamboo. The object was now just below the surface.

A few more swipes of the brush revealed a wrinkled surface the color and texture of a morel mushroom. This was odd—prehistoric burials were normally fully skeletonized, but this looked desiccated, mummified. More brushing revealed what appeared to be a dome-like forehead. The color turned out to be from dried skin, partially covering the skull. And where there was no skin, the skull itself looked oddly smooth, with what appeared to be faintly etched, regular grooves…as if it had been polished on a grindstone with a burr on it. This was strange, like nothing she’d ever seen before—not even the desiccated body she’d found six months ago in the Jornada del Muerto. She could feel the pressure of the eyes above as she worked.

More brushing revealed the edge of an eye socket. She uncovered it, whisking away the sand with short, quick strokes. She could hear a murmur rising in the peanut gallery as the head came into view.