Xeric

 

1.

It was a hot dig at Texas Boys Rock Shelter in more ways than one.  The scoop of stone over the trenches radiated heat that made the site unbearable by early afternoon.  The stratigraphy in the test pits was blurred by previous excavation and the crew quarreled over documentation and context, disputes that boiled over when the sun scalded the workers under the big shield of crumbling limestone dike.  At first, the Rodent Girl was carrying on with the Cultural Coordinator – although this was before her work with packrat and gopher bones put that nickname on her.  In general, things didn’t go well and, even before noon, the sun got into your brain and confused your thoughts into a sort of boiling stew with odd fragments of lust or rage or simple indignation bubbling up to the surface. And as it turned out, there was even a curse on the place.  

The team bunked at a Basque rancher’s place 14 miles down a four-wheel drive track.  Beyond the ranch in the other direction from the rock shelter, a gravel road bucked up and down where it crossed the basin’s flash flood chutes, ending at a half-abandoned mining town where there was a brothel in a cottonwood grove, a disco ball on a pole marking the place’s bar, the girls receiving clients in Airstreams scattered along the banks of a gravel bed that flowed with water only during snow-melt in the mountains, that is, a period of six weeks or less.  Two taverns in sheds decorated with neon edging stood on the town’s only asphalt road where there was a small bank and a café next to the cinder-block post office.  On the hillside, among the black, crouching head-frames, a small supermarket stood on a terrace leveled into the ramped heaps of tailings.  The Tribe had offices near the supermarket, modular buildings atop another embankment of tailings, and there was a women’s clinic on the barren hillside and a pre-school.  We spent weekend nights in the town, drinking at the bars, and, then, bouncing back in the moonlight over the ten miles of bad road to the ranch where the team’s support trailer was located among the caravan of campers in which we slept.  We bought fire-wood at the grocery, expensive stuff because the land was treeless for a hundred miles in each direction, and, after dark, built bonfires at our camp.  The Basque sheepherder dragged a folding chair from his ramshackle bungalow and drank with us in the orange glow of the flames.  He was married but his wife lived in Reno and he saw her only every other weekend.   

Isolation of this kind isn’t healthy.  Particularly, when its hot and the team is ill-assorted.

For obvious reasons, the location of Texas Boys Rock Shelter shouldn’t be disclosed and, in fact, you will find the site’s GPS coordinates redacted on the Registry of Historic Places.  If you are interested, here is the Smithsonian trinomial: 26PP4509.

2.

An owl lived in a niche in the rock shelter.  When we arrived in our pickups before dawn, the air was still surprisingly cool and, even, seemed damp: dew made the stones slippery and the sage was moist, breathing its perfume into the air in a woozy gush.  The basin was grey and the distant mountains were the color of blue gun-metal.  

The owl could abide the first vehicle.  But the second was too much and the bird, round as a cannon-ball, flew from its roost, big wings hollowing out a way through the cool air.  The sun’s rays came through the comb of the peaks an hour later.  Then, it warmed-up.

3.

Before we called her “Rodent Girl,” Debbie was just a graduate student at the State University at Reno.  She had a silver nose ring clipped to one nostril.  Her hair was short and blonde, no-nonsense and low maintenance, you might say.  Debbie was good-natured.  In the cool of the morning, she wore a sweat shirt with a hood until the sun established itself.  Then, she removed the shirt and worked until noon, when we knocked-off, in what seemed to be the upper half of a two-piece bathing suit.  Debbie wore cut-off jeans and her legs were long and brown.  

Of course, she was a favorite with all the men at the site, the sole woman working this excavation.  And, she caught the eye of Jason, the cultural coordinator and liaison with the Tribe.  Jason drove a new Jeep Grand Cherokee and, after the first week, he generally reached the site mid-morning after lounging around at the tribal offices in town.  In the afternoon, he and the Basque rancher hiked the dry gulches hunting rabbits.  We heard their shotguns barking as we tried to nap 

But it was too warm to sleep.  So, when the shots sounded, we got up and sat in the shade of our camper-trailer, a novel or scientific paper opened on our lap, although sweat dripping into our eyes blurred the print and, then, unwittingly, we fell asleep, an unintentional slumber from which we awoke with an aching head, thirsty and irritable.

4.  

Helmer, an archaeologist at Berkeley, had trenched the site in the fifties.  He botched everything about the excavation, although this wasn’t apparent from the crisp, misleading prose in his field report.  You don’t get any second chances when digging a site – the process is intrinsically destructive and the Berkeley archaeologist wrecked everything he touched.  Helmer found some obsidian flints and an infant burial, the little mummy resting in a sort of wicker tray, more or less completely carbonized.  On the first day, we discovered that his elevations were all untrue.  He had measured the site setting a grade at 2025 meters.  Our level showed that his reference elevation was actually 2067.  Therefore, all of his findings had to be transposed to the new grade.  Since Texas Boy’s Rock Shelter once rose as a stony spine above the waters of glacial lake Lahonton, Helmer’s errors had consequence.  The highstand of Lahontan’s waters was a full 32 feet higher than where Helmer had placed his reference.  Although the shelter has been bone-dry for five-thousand years, before that time, the place was periodically inundated, floods depositing a cobble of small round stones and sand on ancient beaches under the ear-shaped curl of limestone rising above the water.  

Helmer’s measurements were all wrong and, at first, our test pits didn’t locate the disturbed strata where he had dug.  Then, one of our trenches cross-cut a pit made by Helmer and we were able to orient ourselves with respect to his diagrams and photographs.  This was important.  The Tribe didn’t want us digging in the area where the infant burial had been found.  When Helmer found the burial, the mummy fell apart in situ and the carbonized wicker basket also decomposed, leaving fragments of grave goods and corpse still embedded in the sandy soil.  It’s always a nuisance when human remains are discovered on a site.  You have to consult with the tribe and a NAGPRA plan has to be drawn-up and approved and everything is delayed while due reverence is shown to the shards of uncovered bone.  It’s best to stay well away from places where a skeleton might be found.  

5.

A couple hundred yards from the foot trail leading up to the Rock Shelter, the four-wheel drive track out to the site slipped down into a sandy ditch, a flash flood channel that dragged cobbles and other debris down from the base of the cliffs.  On the third morning of the dig, Debbie misread the apron of loose sand in the ravine and spun her tires.  Her pickup’s wheels sank to the hubcap in the sand.

At that time, Jason was still anxious to supervise and restrict our work in the Rock Shelter and, to establish his authority, came out to the dig bright and early.  So, he was only a half-mile behind Debbie when she got stuck in the draw.  Jason drove a bright red Jeep Cherokee and he had his windows open, blasting out hip-hop.  Debbie heard the throb of bass approaching and saw the jeep thudding over the ruts and rocks on the trail, driving too fast for the conditions and kicking up a small, fatal-looking cloud of dust behind him.  He stopped on the spine of stone overlooking the sand pit where Debbie was standing next to her pickup.  

The sun was just rising and put a halo around Jason and Debbie found him impressive, particularly since he promised to rescue her. Jason was wearing sunglasses tinted onyx and his long black hair was neatly braided and, around his throat, Debbie saw a turquoise medallion, a Zuni bear totem.  His cowboy boots were shiny, crafted from fine leather decorated with an elaborate silver pattern pricked into the shafts.  There was more silver and turquoise at his belt buckle.

Jason didn’t want to get dirty and, so, after surveying the situation, he invited Debbie into his red Jeep and they drove up to where the jagged outcropping loomed over the desert, a shark’s tooth biting into the dawn sky.  The rock shelter hung overhead, a gloomy-looking socket in the stone at the end of the uphill foot path.  

Jason was courtly.  He opened Debbie’s door for her and, then, talked with the rest of us squatting in the shadow of the cliff.  I volunteered to tow Debbie’s pick-up out of the sand trap and took the Suburban with the come-along cable-puller down to where the vehicle was stranded.  It didn’t take too long to free the pick-up. 

Jason shadowed Debbie.  The Field Supervisor was distracted and didn’t pay much attention to the work.  He was an old man wearing a sort of canvas bonnet to protect his skin cancer scars from the sun and he sat on a camp-stool in the shade of a big table-sized rock fallen down from the shelter’s overhang.  One of his knees had been recently replaced and the other joint was sore and arthritic.  The purpose for the dig wasn’t clear, at least to me and the students working in the shallow trenches seemed to regard the experience as a resume builder but nothing more.  No one expected anything publishable from the excavation and the Field Supervisor’s primary objective was to refute and criticize Professor Helmer’s work done at this place almost seventy years earlier.  The field supervisor was delighted when we found that Helmer’s elevations were all wrong.  With a tear in his eye and a catch in his throat, he said that Professor Helmer had been his mentor and was very dear to him, but it was obvious to me that the work at Texas Boys was designed as some kind of obscure revenge.  

At our mid-morning break, Jason and Debbie sat apart from the rest of us.  Debbie ate a granola bar.  Jason poured tea from a thermos into a cup that he shared with her.  The rest of us all drank coffee.  Jason was a tea-drinker.  

When we returned to work, Jason told Debbie to be careful driving back to the Basque rancher’s place.  He said that she should call him if there was a problem and handed her a business card on which phone numbers were printed.  Then, he slid down the sandy path to his big red Jeep and we heard his sound system pounding out a bass beat as the vehicle bounced over the rough parts of the access track.  A writhing cloud of dust followed his vehicle all the way out to the horizon and, even, when he had vanished, I thought I could hear low notes sounding over the desert like a heart beat.

A few hours later, it was too hot to work and the field supervisor limped to his van.  I told Debbie that I would trail her back to the ranch but she told me that everything was under control and that she wouldn’t get stuck again.

6.

It was pretty clear that something was going on between Debbie and Jason.  At the end of the week, Debbie was scuffing up dirt in a part of the rock shelter that was supposed to be off-limits.  But Jason was watching her and, it seemed, that she was working with his permission, even guidance.  The Field Supervisor wasn’t well that day and had remained back at the camp and, nominally, I suppose, I was in charge, but really, for all intents and purposes, it was Jason’s dig since he was the Tribal liaison and  the site was the cultural property of his people.  

After an hour or so, Debbie uncovered a small cache of olivella beads, fragments of seashell that had once been threaded together as a necklace.  She recorded context and we took photographs, although this made me uneasy since the beads were located outside our authorized grid.  Olivella beads were trade goods, made from molluscs collected on the northern California coast, and it was unusual to find them so far from their origin.  The presence of the tiny beads attested to trade routes extending over several hundred miles and had some importance in reconstructing the early Holocene economy in the area.  The little beads were probably worth a publication and there was a buzz on the site after they were found, some of us shaking hands with Debbie to congratulate her on her discovery.  Jason stood by, a slight smile on his lips.  He had beautiful straight and white teeth.  Out on the desert, where the heat shimmer was dissolving sage and stone into wavering blurred mirages, a couple of vultures circled in the sky.  

7.

If you were paying attention to such things, the relationship between Jason and Debbie, whatever it was, didn’t last.  On the third weekend, something went wrong.  Jason spent less and less time at the dig and, on some days, didn’t come at all.  Debbie didn’t say anything and isolated herself, taking her breaks alone, sitting at the bottom of the slope in the shade of her pickup truck.

At the beginning of the fourth week, a conference was called at the Tribal offices in town.  Jason was present with the field supervisor and a lawyer representing the tribe together with a couple representatives of the Council.  After the meeting, the field supervisor announced that there was a problem with the provenance of the olivella beads and that the artifact had been repatriated to the Tribe.  

The next morning, Debbie became the “Rodent Girl”.  The field supervisor told her that it would be very helpful if she would devote her efforts at Texas Boys to developing a small mammal assemblage.  In the short term, at least, she should avoid involvement with cultural artifacts.  I don’t know if Debbie questioned this decision.  She never told me.

8.

You want to help someone.  You want to rescue them.

Debbie had been working on the small mammal study for a couple days when I talked to her.  The Field Supervisor was having some medical problems and was in Reno for tests.  Debbie sat on a blanket, next to the wheel-well of her pickup, eating a granola bar and drinking Sprite in the vehicle’s shallow shadow.  In those days, I vaped on my breaks.  Beyond the dark patch cast by the truck, the landscape was melting in the heat, doing all sorts of funny things with mirages and quivering columns of thermal updraft.  

“So what do you think about this deal?” I asked.

“What do you mean?” she said.

“The pack-rat project,” I replied.

“Oh, it’s okay,” she said.  

“So, you don’t –“

She interrupted: “It’s valuable work.  Someone’s got to do it.”  

I nodded and blew smoke from between my lips.  Maybe, I felt helpless, but she didn’t seem to share that sentiment.  

9.  

Owls eat pack rats and pocket gophers and other small mammals.  The bones of those creatures are deposited in their pellets.  To create a small mammal assemblage, the researcher finds a site where owls have roosted, then, excavates carefully, making a ditch cut to establish a stratigraphic sequence.    

Debris from the ditch is sieved to isolate owl pellets that are, then, tagged according to the sediment level from which they were recovered.  In this way, the pellets can be dated.  Once the age of the pellets is established, they are dissected and bones enclosed in the owl excrement are examined under a microscope at 40x to 60x resolution.  The bones are compared with images in reference works to establish species.  Most of the bones extracted from owl pellets are tiny mandibles.  Jaw-bones are readily diagnostic as to species.  Owls have a limited territorial range and, so, we know that what they are eating lives within a radius of 4 kilometers from the roost.

Establishing a small mammal assemblage is tedious and time-consuming.  But the results may be helpful in establishing the environmental context in which cultural artifacts are found.  In the Great Basin, time is parsed according to xeric (hot and dry) and mesic (moist and cool) periods.  Certain species of small mammals are indicative of xeric or mesic ecologies.  Therefore, analysis of rodent mandibles, painstakingly establishing absolute chronology and species identity, may be used to define the climatic conditions during past epochs.  This knowledge can be applied to material culture, providing context as to the conditions in which past people lived.  

I suppose that the Field Supervisor expected Debbie to quit when he assigned her to small mammal assemblage.  

10.

Debbie spaded down though the tufa deposited at the base of the outcrop.  She used a rocker sieve to isolate owl pellets and, then, tagged them in Ziplock sandwich baggies marked according to strata.  She worked slowly, drowned in dust as fine as flour from the disturbed tufa.  The rest of us worked ten yards away, sifting through sediment hauled out of the trench crosscutting Helmer’s excavation.  Slabs of limestone overhanging Debbie’s pit seemed loose and unstable and, sometimes, pebbles drizzled down on her.  By mid-day, we were all coated in grey dust smeared in the sweat on our faces and arms.  Staggering down to our vehicles in the blinding heat, we looked like ghosts or freshly unearthed corpses.

Nothing much came to light in our trench: we found a couple of tiny obsidian flints knapped from a larger tool that was missing.  Some of the cobbles were sooty – probably evidence of ancient hearths.  A nondescript tangle of fibers extruded from the side of our pit.  Perhaps, this was the remnants of a wicker moccasin.  

Ironically, the only person who found anything significant was Debbie.  A dark oval stone, unlike the surrounding gravel, emerged from the terminal Pleistocene-early Holocene strata in her trench.  She called us to examine the find.  After the context was photographed with a marker to establish scale, she lifted the peculiar-looking rock from where it was embedded among volcanic ash sediment and smooth pebbles, presumably the edge of ancient beach.  The stone looked like a dusty chunk of coal.  But when we poured on canteen-water to wet it, the rock shone dense and black, with glazed cutting edges.  It was obviously a biface skillfully knapped from obsidian.  (Later, the source stone was identified as the obsidian deposits at Bordwell Springs in Washoe County.)

Each of us took turns holding the biface in our hands and feeling its cool, arrogant weight.  

“That wasn’t supposed to be in your hole,” someone said.

“Well, it was,” Debbie replied.  

The Field Supervisor shrugged.  “It’s obviously cultural,” he said.  “Not supposed to be in this part of the site.”

Debbie’s trench was under the niche where the lone owl perched each morning before fleeing our arrival.

“I suppose it’s got some kind of curse on it,” Debbie said.  “That would be just my luck.”

“The curse of the mummy,” I said.  

It was too hot to laugh, almost too hot for anyone to comment.  A feeble-looking dust devil was spinning up alkali salt on the playa a mile away.  

11.

A week later, we gave up on Texas Boys Rock Shelter.  Back in the lab at Reno, Debbie used a microscope to identify the rodent mandibles soaked out of the crumbling owl pellets.  Grayson’s authoritative volume, Mammals of the Great Basin, exists in only a few print copies, but circulates widely among local archaeologists in a PDF.  Debbie compared the mandibles (mostly occlusal surfaces) that she examined under the microscope with the plates in Grayson’s manual and, then, entered stratigraphic and species information as data points in her computer.  

After six months, she finished her study and submitted it to her supervising professor.  He was impressed with Debbie’s work and, after accepting her research in support of her Ph.d, asked that several colleagues peer-review her paper.  Copiously illustrated, a shortened version of her study was published in the Journal of Southwestern Archaeology.  The full report, printed as her doctoral thesis, now circulates widely also in PDF.

 

Debbie’s survey of cranial and mandibular fragments, mostly meadow voles, desert woodrats, pocket gophers, and chisel-tooth kangaroo rats, established that Texas Boys Rock Shelter reared up over a Xeric (or hot and dry) landscape in the terminal Pleistocene. The terrain was Mesic (cooler and wetter) in the early Holocene and initial middle Holocene.  The site was generally Xeric after the middle Pleistocene, although slightly cooler and better watered between 3000 to 1500 years before the present.  Hot and dry traded places with cool and wet four or five times as the Basin lakes filled with water and, then, evaporated.

12.

A year after her rodent assemblage study was published, Debbie was invited to present her findings by ZOOM lecture sponsored by the University of Nevada at Reno.  I attended by computer.  The lecture, organized by Power Point, began mid-afternoon.  Debbie spoke too fast and she was sometimes hard to understand.  She also used a sing-song patter that was a little disconcerting, although the content of her talk was excellent (at least in my estimation) although a bit technical and dry.  I poured myself a couple of drinks mixed with Diet Coke and whiskey while she spoke and became a little intoxicated to the extent that I didn’t notice her confusion during the last five minutes of the three-quarter hour talk.  Somehow, she missed a slide toward the end of her Power Point, or, perhaps, one of the images was out of place.  She raced ahead of her pictures, sometimes fluttering forward and backward among the bullet-pointed images, and, then, had to repeat herself when the slides illustrating her words, finally, appeared on-screen.  At the end of the talk, she told her listeners: “I’m sorry – I’ve completely messed-up the end of this lecture.”  One of the ZOOM interlocutors told her that it was okay and that the gist of her presentation was clear enough.  Debbie sounded distraught and said that she didn’t know what had gone wrong.  Computers, as you know, can be inscrutable.    

I sent her a chat message on the ZOOM application: Good talk. Fine and impressive work.  I didn’t notice the screw-up.  She replied, thanking me, and typed: Mummy’s curse, right?

13.

A month ago, I drove up to Reno for a conference.  Debbie was teaching, although by remote, and I waited for her to finish, sitting on a chair in the corridor outside her office.  Looking down the hallway, I saw chairs positioned outside each door – apparently, students waited for their professors sitting on those chairs during their office hours.  It was early afternoon and no one else was around.  Indeed, the whole campus was silent and the parking lots near the big brick buildings were empty.  Outside, the only sound was a mower cutting grass on a lawn far away, the click of automatic sprinklers, and the faint white-noise of the air conditioning fans.  

I felt like I had many things to say to Debbie.  

She welcomed me into her office.  “That really sucked,” I said.  She looked at me quizzically.  “What?  The mess-up on my Power Point lecture?”  

“Oh no,” I said.  “That was fine.”

“So what sucked?”

“What happened out there at the Texas Boys’ dig,” I said.

“Not at all,” she said.  “I earned my doctorate on that work.  It all turned-out just fine.”

I noticed that her name was hyphenated on the plate on her door.  There was a picture of man with red hair and a red beard, stoop-shouldered as he pressed himself through one of the tee-shaped doors in the ruins at Chaco Canyon.

“It was hot there, though,” she said.  She still sported the silver nose ring clipped to right nostril.

“Damned hot,” I replied.

15. 

Of course, I was in love with her.  I recall the heat, the shimmer of a playa across the basin.  In those days, I vaped, a bad habit.  I was hunkered down in the shadow of a big limestone slab fallen a thousand years ago from the eroded arch of the shelter overhead.  If a rock like that crashed down while we were working in our trenches, it would be fatal.   I inhaled smoke and, then, blew it into a blue shroud that covered my face.