The Summoning God: Book II of the Anasazi Mysteries (40 page)

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Authors: Kathleen O'Neal Gear,W. Michael Gear

BOOK: The Summoning God: Book II of the Anasazi Mysteries
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“Why’s that?’ Dale asked absently.
“I made a batch of chili once back when they used to hold the Little Snake Rendezvous in Wyoming. Won the chili cook-off, but I didn’t clean the pot. Left it in the back of the Bronco. By the time I got back to Craig, Colorado—I was working up there that year, doing Fremont stuff—the chili had eaten a thousand pinholes in the aluminum. You could hold it up and see light through it.”
Dale grunted in assent, one hand cupping the bowl of his pipe.
“So, what’s in chili that dissolves aluminum?” Maureen looked up. “And doesn’t the same thing also eat the human stomach?”
“Relax,” Dusty said. “Have you ever known a hardcore Mexican to have an ulcer?”
“We don’t have a whole lot of hard-core Mexicans in Ontario, Stewart.”
“Well, believe me. It’s only the Anglos that get ulcers in New Mexico. That and the coconuts.”
Maureen arched an eyebrow. Forget it. She didn’t want to know. Instead, she opened the cardboard box that contained the old woman’s skull. Unwrapping it from the bubblewrap, Maureen withdrew a fabric donut from her kit and rested the skull carefully on it. The donut shape not only cushioned the delicate bone, it kept it from rolling.
“How is the room beside the kiva coming?” Dale asked, glancing Dusty’s way. “Have you and Steve finished removing the rubble?”
Dusty stuffed the pan into a drawer and dried his hands on the dishtowel. His muscles bunched and corded under his tanned forearms.
“We ran two screenloads.” Dusty said. “We’ll be down to floor fill by noon, I’d say. If there’s anything there, we ought to be into it.”
“And then?” Dale puffed out a blue cloud. The tobacco had a sweet aroma, one that, if Maureen
had
to suffer through, could at least be tolerated.
“Open another room, I guess.” Dusty tilted his head, questioningly.
“I’d say it would be best to move into the kiva with Maureen and Sylvia.” Dale pointed at Dusty with his pipe stem. “Call it a hunch. I’d say we’d best finish that. Recover the osteological remains, pull that floor, and get a handle on the architectural history of the kiva.”
“I can already write that report.” Dusty bent, flipped open the battered blue-and-white cooler, and fished out a Guinness. He used a foot to push the lid closed and dug a bottle opener from the drawer. Popping the top, he sucked off the oozing brown foam, eyes on Dale’s.
“Fascinating. Most archaeologists I know have to excavate. Something about recovering the data before they describe it. I don’t know why we have to pay you to excavate, if you can just do it off the top of your head.”
Dusty ran fingers through his dirty blond hair. “Okay, let me ask it this way. Do you want us to stop with the Mesa Verdean renovation, or go through it to expose the Chacoan architecture underneath?”
“I’ll be happy with the Mesa Verdean occupation.” Dale levered himself up, and grunted as he picked his way to the door.
“Need a steadying hand?” Maureen asked, starting to rise. “It’s dark out there.”
Dale gave her a chastising look. “Maureen, I’ve been going to the bathroom outside for almost
two
of your lifetimes. I can find my way to the latrine.”
“Right. Sorry.” Maureen lowered herself back into the bench.
Dale winked at her and stepped out into the darkness. The metal steps complained under his weight. Maureen turned her head. Through the window she could see Sylvia and Steve sitting in lawn chairs around a low fire. The flickering light shone off their faces. Sylvia held a Coors can, Steve had a Guinness. They seemed to be deadly serious, apparently happy to be left alone to talk their way through their shaky relationship.
“Is Dale going to be all right?” Maureen turned back to Dusty. “Should you go check on him?”
Dusty slid onto the bench beside her. “I cannot tell you how much
trouble I’d be in if I did. If he falls down and breaks a leg, we’ll deal with it. The other way would subject me to days of cutting comments, the total brunt of his acid ire, if you will.”
“I get the point.”
Dusty smoothed his fingers over the tabletop. “On the other hand, you could probably get away with it. He thinks you walk on water. Enjoy your sainthood while it lasts, Doctor. Eventually, he’s going to figure out that you’re just as human as the next person, and then—
whoosh
, you’ll drop to my level in the Robertson cosmology.”
She smiled and stared at the old woman’s skull. “Oh, I don’t know. It’s different between the two of you. You’re his son, Dusty. Face it, fathers and sons have a different relationship than anyone else in the world.”
He smiled at that. “I suppose.” After a pause, he indicated the skull. “What can you tell me about her?”
Maureen turned her attention to the brown globe of bone. “Well, to start with, she’s definitely female. At least, we can be about ninety percent sure, based on the bossing of the frontal bone, the small mastoid processes, and the almost knifelike sharpness of the superior borders of the orbits. She had a shallow palate even before her teeth fell out.” She lifted the skull, holding it between her and the lantern. “Looking through the foramen magnum—that’s the hole the spinal chord passes through—I can see a series of defects in the endocranial vault. In short, she also has
cribra crania.
”
“So she was stressed like the rest of them?”
Maureen nodded. “The cranial deformation of the skull is interesting. It reminds me a lot of the women at 10K3.”
He pointed to the back of her head. “That flatness back there is caused by the baby’s head being bound against a cradle board to flatten it.”
“Right. This woman has more than her share of it. This goes beyond the usual flattening. This is more severe. Falls into the category that we call lambdoidal deformation; it’s higher on the skull. You can see that the back of her head is almost concave.”
Dusty smoothed his beard with one hand, while the other clutched the Guinness bottle. “Yeah, we really don’t know what that means. Cradle-board deformation shows up in the seven hundreds, at the transition from Basketmaker Three to Pueblo One. This is also the time
they start making pottery and building free-standing pueblos. From there on out, we see a lot of cranial deformation.”
Maureen turned the skull to the light, exposing the bole that had been cut into the woman’s head just back of the coronal suture. She took her hand lens and looked closely at it. “Drilled and scribed,” she said softly.
“Huh?”
Maureen held the lens close to the curve of the skull. “Fascinating.”
“Yes, Dr. Spock?”
“If you look closely, you can see the initial incision on the outer table. Well, that pretty much answers that. The trephination was done perimortally. From the look of the incision, the scalp was cut when it was soft and pliable.”
“I’m not following you.”
For a moment, she just stared into Dusty’s blue eyes. They seemed to look right inside her soul and, oddly, that knowledge bothered her. She took a breath. “Well, if the scalp was dry, say several days after death, it would take sawing to cut through it with stone tools. We’d see deeper incisions into the bone where the scalp was peeled back. Now, if the incision were made antemortally, before she died, we’d know it.”
“Why?”
“Because bone is living tissue. When it’s damaged, it immediately begins to heal itself. Looking closely with the hand lens, I can see no evidence that any remodeling took place. I can clarify that with electron microscopy in the lab. The same with the incisions.”
He frowned. “Any evidence of a wound? Any reason they’d trephine her? Maybe a brain tumor?”
Maureen did a careful inspection. “Not that I can see from the gross morphology. But a brain tumor, stroke, or anything similar wouldn’t leave its signature in the bone. That’s a soft tissue defect that … Whoa.”
“What have you got?”
She bent closer, slowly turning the skull so that the lantern light cast shadows along the outside of the skull. “Someone scraped this, Stewart.”
“Huh?”
“This isn’t scalping; this is scraping, like cleaning off the tissue that was stuck to the bone.” She turned the skull so that the toothless upper
jaw faced the light and focused her hand lens on the alveolar bone.
“My God.”
“What?” Dusty was glancing back and forth between her and the skull.
“Polish, Stewart.” She cocked her head. “I’ve seen this before. In the micrographs that both Christy Turner and Tim White documented in their works on cannibalism. ‘Pot polish.’ They boiled her skull. As they stirred, the bone rubbed the side of the ceramic pot and was ‘polished.’” She held the lens for him. “Here, look.”
Stewart took the lens and leaned over her. She could feel the heat from his body, and her nostrils caught the subtle musk of his sweat. He shifted slightly, and her arm tingled as he brushed it.
“That shiny stuff?” he asked, peering through the lens.
It took her a moment before she could refocus and answer. “That’s it. At least I think it is. In all honesty, we’re going to need to put it under the microscope.” She took the lens back, experiencing a tinge of anxiety as he resettled himself and stared thoughtfully at the skull. He resumed that pensive stroking of his beard.
“How do you know that’s pot polish? I mean, what if someone carried her head around in a leather sack? What if there was fine sand in it? Wouldn’t that leave the same kind of microscopic surface abrasion?”
She shook her head. “No. If that is indeed the case, the micrograph will show a random scratching of the bone surface. Pot polish resembles microscopic rasping. Lots of parallel striations in the bone. And we should see it all around the skull, places where it was scraped against the inside of the pot.”
“You can tell this?”
She nodded, squinting at the facial bones as Dusty turned the skull.
Maureen took the skull and positioned it so that the light struck the left malar, or cheekbone. “Look at this.” She used her pen to indicate a shallow cut across the bone. “And here.” She slowly turned the skull, the light accenting additional cut marks. Maureen held her hand lens up, studying the V-shaped groove. “My God, what did they do to her?”
Dusty was frowning. “What are you seeing, Doctor?”
She turned the skull upside down, following the hollow bridge of the zygomatic arch from the cheek to the temporal bone. “Someone cut the masseter muscle—that’s the big one in your cheek that bunches when you tighten your jaw—right off the bone.”
She turned the skull back to where the lantern light shone into the big hole cut into the side of the cranial vault. The lightning bolts incised into the bone caught the light.
“Okay, so put this together for me.” Dusty sipped his stout, eyes on the skull.
“Well, remember that what I’m about to say is a shot in the dark that I’ll have to prove or disprove in the lab, but I think someone cut the hole in her skull when she was alive or just freshly dead. Then they skinned and defleshed the skull, and finally boiled it. Probably to completely clean the bone.”
“How do you know they didn’t boil it and then deflesh it?”
She frowned. “Well, I won’t really know until I put it under a scanning electron microscope, but I don’t think so. For one thing, you wouldn’t have pot polish on the alveolar bone. The lips would cushion the skull from abrasion. And you wouldn’t have these cut marks.” She indicated the nicks in the bone. “Cooked meat would simply peel away in these areas.”
He folded his arms. “Cannibalism?”
“Maybe.” She pushed herself back and took a deep breath. “Do you think this skull is related to the stripped femur we were looking at the other night? Both specimens are elderly, female, and found in the kiva.”
As he considered that, the lantern shot light through his beard and hair. “If it’s the same person, the leg was burned in the fire, and the skull was placed in the kiva after the fire. That would be curious.” He gave her that careful inspection again and asked: “Can you test the bone? Determine if it’s the same individual?”
She shrugged. “I
might
get a blood type out of the skull. It was boiled, Stewart. Heat denatures protein and DNA. The only thing we can do is an exclusionary test.”
“What’s that?”
“If we test both bones for blood type, and one comes out type A and the other type B, then you can postulate with some confidence that you’ve got two individuals. If both come out type A, then you can postulate that it
might
be one individual.”
“Or two individuals that just happen to have type A,” he supplied.
“Right. It all becomes a matter of probabilities and potential contamination.”
“Sorry, Grandmother,” Dusty said respectfully. “Whatever happened to you, it must have been terrible.”
Maureen considered the sadness in Dusty’s eyes, then asked: “The woman in your dreams?”
His handsome face turned stony. “I don’t believe in astral archaeology, Doctor. I have to tell myself that was only a dream. I’m hardly going to write an article for publication proclaiming—”

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