In the 1960s, a peasant farmer was digging around at the base of the Temple of the Sun when he unearthed a burial chamber filled with priceless Mesoamerican artifacts. The farmer later claimed to have discovered vessels, implements of gold, and other finds his untrained mind could not recognize. Most of the stuff was sold on the black market and vanished, but one object fell into the hands of a Mexican archaeologist curious enough about its origins to pursue the matter back to the farmer himself.
It was a metal object roughly the size and shape of a U.S. mint silver dollar. The artifact was inscribed with characters that resembled the earliest form of hieroglyphics used by the Egyptians. Potassium-argon dating techniques that accurately measure when a metallic ore was last heated to a temperature above 227 degrees Fahrenheit subsequently revealed that the artifact was made around 3000 B.C.—about the time the Egyptians first developed their pictographic writing system.
But how, Dr. De Rosa asked himself, could such an object appear in Mesoamerica, thousands of miles across the Atlantic Ocean from the cradle of Egyptian civilization in the Nile Valley—long before any known human culture existed in the rain forests of Central America? The tenets of traditional archaeology could not answer that question, so the object was declared a forgery by the prevailing experts and locked away in a vault at the Universidad de Mexico until Dr. De Rosa received permission to study it three decades later.
After a careful examination, Sebastian concluded that the artifact was genuine and that it represented the first physical link between Egyptian and Mesoamerican civilizations ever unearthed. But he also knew that the only way he could convince other archaeologists that the object was real was to somehow “repeat the experiment.” In other words, unearth a similar object buried at around the same time at the same site—probably over a burial chamber similar to the one the farmer discovered forty years before. So when Sebastian De Rosa learned that the Mexican government was preparing to build on the land around the Temple of the Sun, he appealed to the president of Mexico for the time and the funds to search for just such an artifact.
For a year and a half Sebastian De Rosa and his team had been hunting and had come up empty-handed. Now their time had run out.
“Professor! Professor!”
Sebastian looked up, glad for the distraction. Marco, a worker hired locally, was waving a long sheet of computer paper over his head. Marco’s job was to scan the ground with a metal detector mounted on a long pole. The data collected by that device was fed to a laptop computer manned by Thomas, an archaeologist Sebastian had trained himself and a digital imaging specialist whose job it was to interpret the vague, shifting forms that appeared on his monitor.
“Over here!” Sebastian called to Marco.
Breathless, Marco crossed the excavation site, and, with a Cheshire cat grin, he thrust the computer printout into the archaeologist’s hand.
“We found it!” Marco declared as Sebastian examined the image on the printout.
“Where?”
Around the Temple of the Sun a series of deep, long trenches had been excavated by Sebastian’s team. The main trench was close to six feet deep. Marco pointed in the direction of that main trench, and Sebastian took off in a run, legs and arms pumping.
By the time Sebastian arrived, the diggers had already abandoned the pit and stood on the edge watching, curious to see what all the excitement was about. Only Thomas remained at the bottom of the deep trench, waiting for Dr. De Rosa to arrive. Sebastian leaped into the middle of the pit and paused to study the digital image on the computer sheet once again. The printout indicated that a solid object—round and possibly metal—was buried just beneath the earth under his feet.
Dropping to his knees, Sebastian fingered the rich, black soil. Marco leaped into the trench to kneel next to the archaeologist. Around them, work ceased as rumors of a major find raced through the site.
“It’s right here,” Marco said, patting the ground with the flat of his hand. “Thomas says it could be metal of some kind.”
Sebastian looked up at Thomas. The computer expert leaned against the wall of the trench, arms folded, his open laptop perched on a wooden crate.
“What do you think?”
Thomas pondered the question. “It’s too small to be the chamber.”
Sebastian waved the comment away. “Of course it’s not the chamber,” he cried. “It’s a burial offering. The Teotihuacans would bury a hundred or so gifts around the burial chamber. Obsidian blades, pyrite mirrors, shells… we must be right on top of it.”
As Sebastian crouched over the spot where the object was buried, Thomas placed a small brush and an archaeological probe into his hands.
“You do the honors,” Thomas said, stepping back.
As a crowd gathered around the pit, chattering in Spanish, English and French, a tall, mustached man in a dark suit moved unnoticed to the front of the group, where he watched Dr. De Rosa.
Sebastian began by carefully pushing the dirt aside with his bare hands. Then he positioned the archaeological probe and gently thrust its sharp tip into the soil, slowly piercing the crust until the long metal spike was nearly buried. Dr. De Rosa felt nothing on the first attempt, so he drew the probe out and tried again.
It wasn’t until his fourth attempt that Sebastian struck pay dirt. Almost as soon as the tip disappeared in the soil, it touched something hard. The artifact was buried less than an inch below the surface. Dr. De Rosa immediately withdrew the probe and set it aside.
“He’s found something,” someone in the crowd whispered.
Sebastian cautiously pushed the dirt away with the brush until he could just make out the rough outline of the object. It was small, about the size of a coin. And round like a coin, too.
“What is it?” Marco asked.
Dr. De Rosa did not reply. Instead, he dug his fingers deep into the soil around the object until his fingers closed on the thing. Sebastian held his breath as he lifted the artifact out of the ground.
“Professor?” Thomas whispered breathlessly.
Finally, soil fell away and the object was revealed. Sebastian let out the breath no one knew he was holding. Eyes strained, but Dr. De Rosa still crouched over the artifact, shielding the thing he had unearthed. When he looked up, Dr. De Rosa found a host of eager, expectant faces surrounding him. He stood, still concealing the mystery in his hand.
Finally, without fanfare, Dr. De Rosa presented the artifact to his audience.
They saw a glint of blue, and a familiar white swirl, and some characters etched onto a circular, rusted surface. There were murmurs. Then gasps of surprise. Finally, Sebastian held the object high enough so that everyone could get a look at the only significant discovery his expedition had made during eighteen months of grueling, backbreaking work—
A rusty metal cap from a cola bottle.
“Vintage nineteen-fifties, I’d say,” a slightly accented voice announced.
Sebastian looked up to see Mexico’s minister of the interior, Juan Ramirez, staring down at him.
“Minister, I—”
But the bureaucrat cut Sebastian off. “According to you, the Teotihuacans’ final gift to their dead king was a Pepsi?”
“Give me one more month,” Sebastian said, still clutching the bottle cap.
Frowning, Minister Ramirez shook his head.