That was it. We drove back with our produce, and the chickens squawked each time we hit a bump.
Notes for City of Stones by Elizabeth Butler
Why do we come here to dig in the dirt, living in huts and going without showers, battling insects and trudging through the afternoon heat? Some people think that archaeologists look for treasure – jade masks, delicate shell jewelry, beaten-gold ornaments. In truth, we search the gray stone past for something much more elusive.
We are looking for patterns. We search for pieces of the past and try to reassemble them. Who lived here? How did they live? Who ruled them and how was that determined? Who were their gods and how did they worship them? Did the people of this place trade salt and carved shell from the gulf for pots from Tikal, obsidian tools from Colha, molded figurines from Isla de Jaina? What news traveled with the merchants who journeyed along the sacbeob, the limestone roads that connected the cities? Did merchants talk of the rise of new rulers, the festivals held to honor gods, the failure of the cacao-bean crop, the overabundance of quetzal feathers this year, the new fashions in Uxmal, the rumors of war in the north?
Each of us looks for patterns in his own way. Anthony Baker, my co-director, is a good man with a trowel and a brush, possessed of awesome patience and the dexterous hands of a grease monkey. In his youth, Tony dismantled and reassembled clocks, electric motors, gas-powered engines, mechanical toys, and, on one hot summer day, the fiendishly intricate planetary-gear-shifting mechanism hidden in the hub of a three-speed bicycle, a device constructed of gears within gears and wheels within wheels.
These days, Tony deals with intricate constructions of a different kind. Tony studies pots. Or, to be more accurate, he studies pieces of pots – potsherds, broken fragments of bowls and pitchers and vases and incense burners and little pipes and ceremonial vessels. Long ago, the vessels broke and the shattered pieces were tossed in the trash heap, thrown into the fill for a new building, kicked aside, cast off, ignored. Tony gathers these fragments and considers them with affection.
When Tony finds a potsherd, chances are he’ll pop it in his mouth to clean it with spit. Archaeologists get used to the taste of dirt and Tony claims he learns about a sherd by its taste and its texture. Each sherd carries its history with it. What kind of clay did the potter use? What was added to the clay to temper it? How was the pot shaped, decorated, burnished, fired? Tony concerns himself with these things, and sometimes I think that he would be quite at home chatting with the artisans of AD 800 about the merits of organic paint over mineral paints, sand-tempered clay over untempered clay. Behind his home in Albuquerque he has a studio where he turns and fires pots.
Fashions in pottery changed steadily over the years, and potsherds are durable records of changing times. The presence of certain types marks the passage of certain eras. Finding a broken bowl in the fill of a palace lets us date the structure.
John, one of Tony’s most trusted graduate students, has a different preoccupation. Though I have never asked, I believe that his father was a bricklayer or a carpenter, a builder of some sort. John admires a well-built wall. He will talk for hours about arches – noting the difference in construction methods used in AD 400 and 800. I think he would be happiest if he were funded to rebuild a temple or two, mortaring temple stones in their rightful places. He draws elegant reconstruction sketches, extrapolating from the tumbled stones of the structure back to the plans from which it could have been built. In his sketches, he realigns the walls, returns the roof combs to their lofty position, carefully sets each stone of the arches back in its place, canting them inward to make a smooth line. His drawings are black and white – fine ink lines on smooth white paper. John knows that the Maya painted their stucco and stone – traces of red and black paint still cling to sheltered stones. But his imagination stops short of color. He likes the stones – solid, massive, and gray – and does not embellish upon them.
And what do I like? I like asking impossible questions about remnants less tangible, but no less durable, than pots and walls. Ancient gods, myths, legends, modes of worship, belief systems – these are my concern. What motivated the potter to shape an incense burner, a mason to build a wall? When a small child woke crying in the dead of the night, what frightened him and to whom did he pray for comfort? When a woman was dying in childbirth, what god did the h’men call on for power?
The questions are impossible; the answers, elusive. I have fewer clues than Tony or John: ancient texts in unreadable glyphs, unreliable records kept by Franciscan friars on the pagan religion they sought to destroy, ceremonial objects cast in cenotes and sealed in tombs, fragments of knowledge retained by the current h’menob. And the embellishments of my own imagination. In my dreams of the ancient past, the buildings are always painted in vivid colors. I people them with ghosts.
Tony makes pots; John builds walls; and I construct castles in the air.
7
Elizabeth
‘Who are your gods?’ The old woman smelled sour. Her costume was constructed like a Mayan temple: layers rested on layers upon layers. An orange turtleneck showed through the ragged holes in a thick brown fisherman-knit cardigan. The hem of a wine-colored skirt dangled beneath her green dress. She was dressed for a colder climate than Berkeley in the spring, bundled to withstand arctic winds. She had singled me out of the crowd of browsers in the used bookstore, recognizing me as a fellow outcast.
‘Who are your gods?’ Her voice was cracked, a parody of a confidential whisper. She stepped closer and the smell of unwashed clothes enveloped me.
I had been a lecturer on the Berkeley campus for one year and I had gained a reputation for being hard-nosed, unyielding, uncompromising. But when I looked into the bag lady’s eyes – innocent blue eyes with the color and luminance of cracked antique glass – I backed away. ‘I don’t know,’ I muttered before fleeing down another aisle of books.
She pursued me, waving her finger with greater energy. They know me, these strange ones with crystalline eyes that see what others do not.
‘Sorry,’ mumbled the clerk who had followed us both. He was talking to us and to himself. He was sorry that he was the one who had to throw the woman out. ‘Sorry, but you are disturbing the other customers.’ He was looking at the bag lady, but somehow I felt that he included me as a troublemaker. ‘I’ll have to ask you to leave.’
‘She’s not hurting anyone,’ I said in a feeble voice that no student of mine would have recognized.
Too late. The old woman was shuffling toward the street, mumbling and clutching her sweaters about her. The clerk cast me a doubtful look, and I knew that I was tagged as a strange one, a woman who talked to the human flotsam that drifted down Telegraph Avenue. I left the store soon after.
John, Tony’s favorite student at the dig, always looked at me with an air of faint doubt that reminded me of the bookstore clerk. I did not trust John and he did not trust me.
After breakfast, Tony and I lingered over our coffee. Diane had left with the survey crew, wearing her new broad-brimmed hat and a liberal coating of Barbara’s sunscreen. Barbara seemed to be taking care of my daughter, making sure she was properly dressed, instructing her in the use of a compass. Diane was smiling when she left. In the light of day, memories of my personal past were less urgent than they had seemed at night. My daughter seemed happy enough; we would talk to each other and the uneasiness between us would dissolve. My immediate concern was a past of considerably greater antiquity.