A Priceless Find

9/8/11
Dr. Anthony Peet

One of the hardest things I’ve ever had to do in archaeology was to backfill Lori’s dig.
 The amount of work she had accomplished in less than three days was nothing short of remarkable. Though her excavation was small it couldn’t have produced better results had a ground penetrating radar localized the place to dig.

How did she do it? How could she have known precisely where to dig? She credits a lucky gut feeling to her find, but I can’t help but wonder about her own intuition. She seems to possess an uncanny ability to sniff out pieces of the Anasazi puzzle. There’s built within her an understanding of the culture that somehow surpasses anything that can be taught even at the highest levels of education. Her ability exceeds talent. What Lori has is instinct.

Unfortunately, technique trumps instinct and although Lori had followed all the appropriate methods of performing and recording her excavation, there was no time to complete it. We quickly backfilled the site for preservation’s sake, vowing to return once the field study in Chaco was complete.

Our wait turned out to be a little longer than that. By the time I received my permit from the state to continue Lori’s dig we had less than a week before the fall semester began. With no time to gather a team, Lori and I returned to the alcove knowing we couldn’t completely excavate the site. We chose instead to focus on the extraordinary lump of jade she’d previously exposed with the idea of returning with next summer’s field crew to study the rest of the Anasazi grave.

I knew before we’d even lifted it out of the ground that the lump of jade would be an extraordinary artifact, but even as the jade began to take shape and blend with a turquoise mosaic, I quickly realized it would be the greatest find I’d ever have the privilege of excavating.

The roughly football sized effigy of a dragon’s head was breathtaking to watch emerge from the earth and when I finally lifted it from the ground and felt its hefty weight in my hands, only one thought entered my mind.

This is not an Anasazi artifact.