Steve Tem - Excavation

Hector felt himself falling toward the woman with flaming hair, and suddenly he was under water, sputtering and flapping like a fish. Houses tumbled by along the bottom. A child’s doll made out of cloth, its one button eye staring. Chickens and pigs and dogs and cats all screaming watery screams in hideous slow motion. Then a dead girl child, her face seeming to melt in the distorting turbulence of the stream. The Taylor man who lived up the hollow: his face big and bloated, black and ugly like some huge beast.

And the woman with flaming hair, bending over to tuck him into bed, slip him down into a deep, blue sleep.

The bear stopped at the opening of the old house. Something… felt wrong. Something irritating in the back of his mind. He could not find the irritation, and he growled in anger. Something he knew about this place. He pawed at the broken boards and dug at the mound of silt outside the boards, uncovering more and more of the old house as he dug.

Then he stopped digging. No humans lived here. He knew. But something was here. He was here… and something like him was here.

He shook his head and growled. Something brown flashed in the woods to his left, and he broke away to stalk the animal. He was hungry, and for a time would be able to ignore the irritant at the back of his mind.

Something that had to be done…

Reed had changed his mind twice about whether he should return to Simpson Creeks. He was tired and disgusted with his own indecisiveness. Carol was too. She’d taken the kids with her to her aunt and uncle’s farm out in eastern Colorado. He was to call her when he made his decision.

He was only six months away from his doctorate in archaeology with some of the highest grades in the graduate program. He grinned self-consciously at his success. But he wasn’t interested in that kind of excavating at the moment.

Concentrating on his Mesa Verde project had become next to impossible for Reed. Fist-sized balls of paper lay scattered like hail over his desk; he’d suddenly find himself pulling one apart, shredding it with stiff fingers. He’d been poring over site reports, feature and survey reports, data records, photographs of artifacts, correspondence with participants in the digs, his own notes from trips down to Cortez… and the sameness, the repetition of observation that was always so much a part of the paperwork relating to archaeological digs seemed especially irritating now.

Most archaeology is boring, hard work. But there are those moments, those sudden discoveries and realizations, that make it all worth it. Reed remembered the first time he ever visited Mesa Verde, on a special summer class with Dr. Simms. They’d camped out on the grounds for a month, visiting the sites during the day and attending additional lectures around a campfire at night. He and Carol had been married a year, and the students had been allowed to bring their spouses along. They’d both had a wonderful time for a while.

Reed found the landscape startling. The great escarpment that contains Mesa Verde dominates the Montezuma Valley region between Cortez and Mancos, Colorado, the result of a great uplift taking place during the Cenozoic era twenty-five million years ago. That, in combination with steady downcutting by the river, created deep, narrow canyons that peeled away at the original block of stone until a series of fingerlike projections were created. On the surface of these mesas and on the cliffsides of the intervening canyons, the ancient Anasazi made their homes.

Reaching the top of this escarpment around sunset, the canyons adrift with rich browns and reds, had been like stepping backward into the past. Dr. Simms’s talk about the “spirit of a place” suddenly came alive for Reed. This place was a living, powerful presence. Looking down from the top of the escarpment, past two thousand years of human history arranged in strata on the canyon wall, to a far more ancient, prehuman history lying secretively in the shadows below, Reed knew he would never be the same.

Carol had been quite taken with the place as well; she’d shown a great deal of interest in the peoples who had lived here, from the Basket Makers contemporaneous with Christ to the Pueblo builders hiding from as-yet-unknown invaders in their fortified cliff houses.

Reed really enjoyed her interest—few of his friends had ever shared his obsessions. “You know at one time early archaeologists thought there had been two types of people living here,” he explained to her. “The Basket Makers, and then a race with a slight deformity—unusually broad heads, flattened in the back. Then later archaeologists discovered it was merely because of the introduction of a new type of cradle during the eighth century. Originally the cradle was a basket with a pillow to protect the baby’s head. But then someone invented a wooden cradle board without a pillow whose repeated use caused the baby’s head to deform. Everyone started using them, and soon almost an entire generation grew up with heads of that shape.”

Her eyes were shiny from the campfire. Maybe that had made her seem more interested than she actually was. But no… she did find the surfaces of archaeology fascinating. It was just when they went deeper…

“You know, it’s amazing to think about,” she said. “I mean, how different styles of parenting can affect the future. Here these people chose one style of cradle over another, and it affected the actual physical appearance of the next generation of their people.”

“And think about how someone from our future might look at us,” he’d said. “This outsider will look at the distant past and conclude, ‘See here… these were humans, but there were always these alien elements in their culture… which finally took over.’“ He’d thought it thrilling to think about, but the look in Carol’s eyes as she thought about it, and looked at him, and obviously thought about what Reed had told her about his own upbringing—it showed that the conversation had obviously unsettled her. That night Reed had seen the beginnings of Carol’s discomfort with his chosen field.

Her unease had become obvious when Dr. Simms and the class began examination of Site 1453, the Badger House area. At one time there had been an enormous trash mound here, whose excavation had yielded a great number of interesting data about its people. One of Reed’s first great interests in archaeology had been the whole idea of ancient trash piles. Farming groups who had lived in one place for a long time—the spiritual forebears to his own ancestors in Simpson Creeks, he supposed—left wonderful garbage piles for the archaeologist. There was nothing more delightful to Reed than a big garbage dump. Each piece told part of a story.

The trash pile at Badger House had yielded corrugated pottery, pendant disks, scrapers and hammerstones, choppers, knives, projectile points, bone awls, the discarded bones of rock squirrels, badgers, porcupines, gray and red foxes, wolves, coyotes, dogs, bighorn sheep, mule deer, turkeys, and even an occasional horned owl. Rare finds included various unfired animal effigies and clay balls, fetishes, and a whetstone. And finally, after stripping away most of the mound, they’d found evidence of even earlier buildings, pit houses and the like. These people often built on top of the ruins of even earlier people, so that layer upon layer of houses, of lives lived out undramatically before ending in fire or drought or old age, were not uncommon.

“I can’t go near that thing,” Carol had said. “I won’t go in there, Reed. It’s just too much.” So she’d left the trash pile and returned to camp, and didn’t go to any of the sites after that, just stayed in their tent and read. That’s what finally got to Carol. The layers. Death upon death. To dig beneath someone’s house and find the skull of someone who had lived there before. To find the ghost of someone else’s last meal mixed in with your own garbage. To find the central artifacts of someone else’s dead life drifting up through the ground into your living room. She’d talked about those things at the time, and Reed had thought she shared his obsession with it. Later he realized she only shared his occasional fear of it.