In Ruins

Tourists at cliff dwellings in Mesa Verde National Park, Colorado, circa 1939.

“The archive … is the border of time that surrounds our presence, which overhangs it, and which indicates its otherness; it is that which, outside ourselves, delimits us.”
– Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge

At twenty, I took a job with the Forest Service. I accepted the offer over my dorm room phone and made arrangements to fly from Cincinnati to Durango after final exams, all of my hopes for the summer squeezed into my dad’s ancient, external frame backpack. I was hired to work on an archaeology survey crew, and was certain that this meant I was finally stepping into my adult shoes. When I deplaned at the county airport on the first day of June, 1992, I was incandescent with delight.

By seven the next morning I stood with my fellow interns in the meadow below the Falls Creek Rock Shelters, a two-thousand-year-old site just a few miles outside of Durango, Colorado. The four of us were lined up along one edge of the field, fifty meters apart, ready to embark on our first-ever archaeological survey. We had just been instructed in the basics: how to take long, slow steps, searching the ground in front of us for artifacts; how to measure our paces so that we could keep track of how much ground we’d covered; how to think of a field as sliced into survey transect lines, covering it like shading on a map. We were young and eager, in college or just done.

My fellow interns were testing archaeology as a career path. My aims were less practical: I wanted to immerse myself in the people and places that I had been reading about all spring in my Southwestern Archaeology class. When our bosses explained that the Falls Creek Rock Shelter site had been excavated in the 1930s by Earl Morris, I gasped in delight: I recognized the name from my textbook. Real archaeologists had walked this ground, and here was I, following in their footsteps. I bent to pick up a bit of odd rock. “Is this a piece of pottery?” I asked my boss, an archaeological technician for the Forest Service.

She didn’t even need to touch it. “Quartzite. It is a flake, though—see that sharpened edge? It’s a chip left over from making a stone tool.” We fanned out to see if it had a companion, which would make this a recordable find. It did not.

“Good eye,” she assured me, and tossed the flake back into the grass.

I had a deeper desire, too. Well-versed in the facts and figures of Southwestern archaeology, I still felt something lacking: I hoped I would be able to touch the past here, to commune directly with the ancient Puebloans.

I kept this desire to myself. Instead I watched our bosses, seeing if their work brought them closer to the kind of connection that I sought. From what I could see, though, their work consisted mostly of logistics. With so much national forest and only two of them (supplemented by the four of us), they looked for cultural resources only where another project was already planned—a timber sale, or a campground expansion, or a culvert improvement. Their job was to make sure these projects wouldn’t damage the Forest’s archaeological heritage.

This week’s work was supposed to be an exception: “This is a known site,” they told us. “You’re lucky to be able to start with this.”

I peered harder into the grass, willing my eyes to see something. If this was a good site, how much archaeology would we even find this summer? All morning we walked slowly back and forth, scanning for bits of stone and pottery, and mostly what we saw was dirt. Whatever Pueblo artifacts may have once been