10 Chapter 10: Portals to the Past
Archaeology is only partly about discovering things; for me, archaeology is about thinking about things. —Stephen Lekson
Taking a noon-day break from excavating on Albuquerque’s windswept West Mesa in the summer of 2002, we stretched our legs, cramped from kneeling in a small square pit since 6 am that morning. Someone started a game of hacky sack. Reaching down to retrieve the hack, I saw something black and shiny in the sand. “Gotta be cultural”, I thought. The crew gathered around. We hadn’t found much despite two straight weeks of digging. Looking closely at the obsidian object, we soon realized that I held in my hand an obsidian Folsom point fragment, a kind of spear tip. The person who last touched the point lived more than 10,000 years ago, at the close of the last ice age. The artifact and its maker belonged to a different geological epoch—the Pleistocene—also known as the ice ages. Ultimately, our excavation would show that a small band of people was hunting a species of giant bison at the edge of a small lake. The point, along with other artifacts recovered at the site was a portal to the past. Within 10 years, the area would be transformed into a modern neighborhood.
One of the deepest of human fantasies is to travel in time to the distant future or the remote past. While we can’t blast back in time through a wormhole or in a DeLorean, we can go anywhere in our minds. This mental time travel may not be unique to humans, but certainly, no other animal is obsessed with the past and future like we are. As “storytelling animals”, we are enchanted by tales of galactic wars of long ago or a future planet ruled by apes. We marvel that because light takes time to travel to our eyes when we gaze up at the stars we may be looking thousands of years into the past. And it’s not just a modern obsession. The ancient Maya, fanatics for calendars and time, inscribed dates well into the 5th millennium A.D. Archaeology is an important sub-field of anthropology. If anthropology only looked at contemporary cultures, we would miss out on a great deal of cultural variability, just as if we only examined WEIRD cultures. Archaeology asks: Who were these ancient people, what were their lives like, and how have they shaped who we are today?
Portals to the Past: Writing and Material Culture
Short of a time machine, one way to know the past is to read what people have put down in writing. Traditionally, the term “history” has been reserved for the last bit of human existence in a few selected parts of the world where writing developed—Western Europe, the Middle East, China, India, and Mesoamerica. Writing is powerful stuff. The ancient Maya revered the writings of their ancestors and thought that reading ancient texts literally brought their ancestors back to this plane of existence. The venerable astronomer Carl Sagan wrote of the magical quality of books in Cosmos, “One glance at it and you hear the voice of another person, pe