She motioned for him to stop and called, "Round up everyone and bring them over here, Matt! We've found something they need to see!"
Matt couldn't tell from her attitude if the find was something good or bad, but Ronnie certainly seemed excited. He gave her a thumbs-up and headed for the other locations to spread the word.
"What's this all about?" Hammond asked irritably when Matt told him Ronnie wanted to see everybody at the kiva. "Did she tell you what she'd found?"
Matt shook his head. "Afraid not, Doctor. She just said everybody should go over there."
"All right, all right," Hammond muttered, adding to the students working with him, "Come on."
Everyone gathered around the kiva. The stone wall of the well-like structure was still partially intact, but it had collapsed in places and over the centuries allowed dirt to spill in and fill the hole. Ronnie and her helpers had dug down, exposing the broken top of the circular wall and emptying some of the dirt from the lower part of the kiva. Matt knew vaguely that the Indians had used these places in their religious ceremonies, but that was the extent of his knowledge.
Ronnie had gone back down the metal ladder that rested inside the hole. Ginger and Astrid were down there with her, but Jerry and Stephanie were on the ground outside the kiva with the others.
"What is it, Dr. Dupre?" Varley asked. "A significant find?"
"I think so," Ronnie said. She took something that Astrid handed her and came up the ladder to show it to the other members of the group. What looked like a dirty brown stick about a foot and a half long was really something else, Matt sensed as the unease grew inside him.
When Ronnie reached the top of the ladder, Hammond practically snatched the thing out of her hand.
"Good Lord," he said. "That's a human femur."
"Look at the markings on it," Ronnie said.
Everyone leaned in except Matt. He wouldn't have known what he was looking at.
He didn't have to wait long to find out, though. April made a face and asked, "Are those . . . teeth marks?"
"I think so," Ronnie said. "It looks like something has gnawed all the meat off that bone."
"Not something," Hammond said with excitement in his voice. "Someone. No wild animal did this. Those marks were made by human teeth." A grin stretched across his rotting face. "What you've found here, Dr. Dupre, is indisputable evidence of cannibalism!"
He didn't have to sound so damned happy about it, Matt thought.
Then again, considering that Hammond's face was rotting off his skull, maybe he did.
CHAPTER SEVEN
They were all excited by the discovery, even the ones like April, who were grossed out by it.
"We've uncovered several other bones with these markings," Ronnie said. "Also marks that look like they were made by flint knives or axes."
"Excellent, excellent," Varley said. "Continue with your excavation, Dr. Dupre. Do you need some extra help with cleaning, identifying, and tagging the specimens?"
Ronnie shook her head. "No, my team and I can handle it, at least for now. But I thought you'd all like to know."
"Of course," Hammond said as he handed the femur back to her. "This is very exciting."
They all stood around talking about it for a while; then Varley said, "We should get back to work."
The other teams returned to their digs, leaving Ronnie, Jerry, Ginger, Astrid, and Stephanie to work in and around the kiva. Jerry spread out a tarp on the ground and arranged all the bones they had found so far on it.
Matt watched him for a minute and then asked, "Are you going to try to reassemble the whole skeleton?"
"No, not here," Jerry said. "That's a job that'll have to be done back at the university. Anyway, there may be more than one skeleton down there. We're still pretty high up in the kiva."
Matt frowned. "You mean there could have been a whole bunch of bodies in there?"
"Sure." Jerry sound cheerful about the prospect, which Matt supposed meant that he was a true scientist. The evidence left behind was more important than all the people who had died to provide it.
"The Indians normally didn't use these kivas as burial pits, did they?"
"We don't really know everything they were used for," Jerry said. "The later Puebloan tribes used them primarily for ceremonial purposes, but the Anasazi and the other early peoples in this region had them, too, and we don't know why. I don't recall reading about anybody ever coming across evidence of them being used as burial pits . . . until now. And what happened here wasn't exactly a burial, you know."
Matt frowned. "What do you mean?"
"Well . . . you heard what Dr. Dupre said about all the meat being gnawed off the bone. When you finish with a chicken wing, what do you do with the bone?"
"Throw it in the garbage," Matt said as a hollow feeling crept into his gut. "This was a garbage dump for cannibals."
"Looks like it might've been," Jerry said.
"Jerry," Astrid called from down in the excavation. "We've got more bones here!"
"Coming," Jerry said.
Matt felt a little sick and just wanted to get away from there. Ancient cannibal Indians . . . just one more indication, as if he or anybody else needed it, that human evil wasn't a recent invention.
By the end of the day, the tarp Jerry had spread on the ground was covered with human bones, and another one had been filled as well. Matt stood looking at them as the sun went down and thought about the incredible amount of human suffering they represented.
Ronnie came up beside him. "Pretty impressive, isn't it?"
"In a gruesome sort of way, I suppose."
"Well, yes, there's that to consider, of course. I'm not an expert in forensic archeology, but even I can tell that these people were killed, hacked apart, and eaten, probably raw. The ends of the bones where they were dismembered don't show any signs of charring, as they would if they'd been cooked."
Matt started to take a deep breath, then stopped abruptly because of what he might smell. Then he realized that the stench of death was long gone from this place. It just smelled of dust.
"How many people are we talking about?" he asked.
"Again, I'm not an expert in that field, but I would guess somewhere between two and three dozen. And it's likely we'll find even more as we continue to dig. There's no sign of the pile ending anytime soon."
"Dozens and dozens of people," Matt murmured. "Murdered and eaten."
"I know, it's terrible. You're probably asking yourself what could cause such an atrocity."
He looked over at her.
"Actually, it ties in with something we've come to believe about the Anasazi and why they abandoned these pueblos. There's evidence to suggest that the region was hit with a whole string of disastrous droughts and crop failures. In an area that doesn't get much rain to start with, the margin for error in such things as growing corn is very small. And when there's a severe drought, the animal population is always affected, too, and becomes smaller. So if both hunting and raising crops didn't produce enough food to feed the people who lived here . . ."
"They started eating each other," Matt said.
"Yes, and then of course the ones who did survive probably wouldn't want to stay in those places that reminded them of what they'd done. So they moved away and the result is this."
Ronnie waved her hand to indicate the ruins around them.
Matt shook his head as he slipped his hands in the hip pockets of his jeans. "No offense, but I don't know if I completely buy that explanation," he said. "For this many people to have died so violently, it seems more like a bunch of them went crazy. Like an orgy of killing. It wouldn't have gone on and on like a gradual thing."