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Authors: Roger MacBride Allen
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was her first attempt to peer into the ground and the past. It was the first stage of her quest, the first clue that led her down the trail she was still on, tracking the endless mystery of life and its history, the great questions of how and why humanity, and life, and the world itself, were here.
As an adult, she had often wondered what would have happened if she had found Fuzzball, if some series of chances had mummified his body, had hidden it from scavengers and insects, had led her to dig in the right place to find the grisly little souvenir. It was altogether possible that success, digging up such a smelly and grotesque little carcass would have disgusted her, made her throw the little body into the leaves, run away to wash the cooties off and forget all about digging up yucky things from the ground. Or maybe such an easy win would have bored her, and she would have gone on to find some other, seemingly greater challenge. Certainly success would not have inspired her to go back to the library and get out better books on paleontology and archaeology. Success would not have goaded her into asking her science teacher how bones vanished, how fossils were born, how to tell one bone from another; would not have led her to learn more than her teacher knew and go in search of more knowledge; would certainly never have pointed her toward archaeology and anthropology as a career, a life. The challenge of failure, the fascination of a whole little body being magically swallowed up by the earth, was what drove her on. Until the magic died out of it, she would never turn back.
She had once held a three-million-year-old skull in her hand, had seen the marks left on the fossilized bones by the folds and convolutions of the long-vanished brain, had seen the seat of a mind that had smelled, looked, touched, tasted, listened, perhaps even thought thirty thousand centuries before. She had peered through a microscope at the marks on ancient hominid teeth and learned how to read them, and so had known what the creature had eaten all the endless years before. She had made the pilgrimage to Laetoli, seen the upright, bipedal footprints left in the sands of time by gracefully-striding creatures two million years before their distant relations would call themselves Homo sapiens .
Such magic would never, could never, die.
Chapter Five
If the magic had started for Barbara with the Fuzzball dig, so had the lessons. Site survey, site preparation, careful record keeping, designing a precise grid-location system so every artifact could be precisely positioned relative to a prominent landmark, selection of a dump site for the overburden—the dirt removed to get at the study-objects—to allow for convenient sifting if need be; all of this required careful thought. Without planning and record keeping, a dig in this backyard would be no more professional than the dig in that other backyard, so long ago.
Barbara stopped in the still-crowded kitchen for another cup of coffee and a yardstick. Then she left the house and walked the few hundred yards to the entrance of the burial ground. It was surrounded by a carefully tended picket fence, long and low, with a wide entrance made of two gatepieces hinged to swing open in the center. A worn gravel road led from the burial ground’s entrance to what had once been the plantation’s main internal road. It had led from the public highway around the main house and then to the working buildings, the storage rooms, stables, the blacksmith’s forge, the plantation’s depot for arriving goods and departing cotton.
None of those buildings survived, but Barbara knew where they all had been. As a child, she had many times joined her cousins in scrambling around the slumped-over foundations, searching for old horseshoes and other bits of ancient ironmongery. Now the plantation road was merely a long driveway, paved over in dusty, aging asphalt, that terminated in a two-car garage, with a large garden shed set
As an adult, she had often wondered what would have happened if she had found Fuzzball, if some series of chances had mummified his body, had hidden it from scavengers and insects, had led her to dig in the right place to find the grisly little souvenir. It was altogether possible that success, digging up such a smelly and grotesque little carcass would have disgusted her, made her throw the little body into the leaves, run away to wash the cooties off and forget all about digging up yucky things from the ground. Or maybe such an easy win would have bored her, and she would have gone on to find some other, seemingly greater challenge. Certainly success would not have inspired her to go back to the library and get out better books on paleontology and archaeology. Success would not have goaded her into asking her science teacher how bones vanished, how fossils were born, how to tell one bone from another; would not have led her to learn more than her teacher knew and go in search of more knowledge; would certainly never have pointed her toward archaeology and anthropology as a career, a life. The challenge of failure, the fascination of a whole little body being magically swallowed up by the earth, was what drove her on. Until the magic died out of it, she would never turn back.
She had once held a three-million-year-old skull in her hand, had seen the marks left on the fossilized bones by the folds and convolutions of the long-vanished brain, had seen the seat of a mind that had smelled, looked, touched, tasted, listened, perhaps even thought thirty thousand centuries before. She had peered through a microscope at the marks on ancient hominid teeth and learned how to read them, and so had known what the creature had eaten all the endless years before. She had made the pilgrimage to Laetoli, seen the upright, bipedal footprints left in the sands of time by gracefully-striding creatures two million years before their distant relations would call themselves Homo sapiens .
Such magic would never, could never, die.
Chapter Five
If the magic had started for Barbara with the Fuzzball dig, so had the lessons. Site survey, site preparation, careful record keeping, designing a precise grid-location system so every artifact could be precisely positioned relative to a prominent landmark, selection of a dump site for the overburden—the dirt removed to get at the study-objects—to allow for convenient sifting if need be; all of this required careful thought. Without planning and record keeping, a dig in this backyard would be no more professional than the dig in that other backyard, so long ago.
Barbara stopped in the still-crowded kitchen for another cup of coffee and a yardstick. Then she left the house and walked the few hundred yards to the entrance of the burial ground. It was surrounded by a carefully tended picket fence, long and low, with a wide entrance made of two gatepieces hinged to swing open in the center. A worn gravel road led from the burial ground’s entrance to what had once been the plantation’s main internal road. It had led from the public highway around the main house and then to the working buildings, the storage rooms, stables, the blacksmith’s forge, the plantation’s depot for arriving goods and departing cotton.
None of those buildings survived, but Barbara knew where they all had been. As a child, she had many times joined her cousins in scrambling around the slumped-over foundations, searching for old horseshoes and other bits of ancient ironmongery. Now the plantation road was merely a long driveway, paved over in dusty, aging asphalt, that terminated in a two-car garage, with a large garden shed set
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