The child whose life had ended early and who had been buried near the intermittent creek that cut Tse Canyon belonged to a cultural progression of people who had lived in the American Southwest for perhaps ten thousand years. Nomadic hunters and gatherers, their home country encompassing the dry quadrant of the continent that reached from the Gulf of California east and north to the Rockies, from the short-grass southern prairies west to the bald peaks of the Great Basin. Their society evolved slowly, changing little until maize—the preeminent crop of the Americas—was introduced, traded northward from the region in southern Mexico where it was native, beginning at about 1000 B.C. With the advent of agriculture in the north, a kind of cultural revolution ensued. Groups of hunter-gatherers who were already at least partially sedentary—storing foodstuffs in secure locations—became anchored by the demands of the growing season, developing new tools, fashioning clothing, building shelters as they awaited the autumn harvest.

As groups discovered good growing regions and chose to stay and lay claim to them, adapting themselves to the particular demands of a place, distinct cultures had begun to emerge—among them a large and already influential people in what we now call the Four Corners region who wove increasingly sophisticated baskets, who had begun to devote their attention to architecture, and who somehow could make do in country characterized by short, dry summers, cold and snowy winters, and far more rock than tillable soil.

It’s a rather meaningless coincidence, of course, that the identifiable Ancient Puebloan tradition got under way at roughly the same time the Christian era commenced, but I know I’ve always attached some significance to it—not for religious reasons (not because a resurrected Jesus swung by these parts, as the wildly imaginative Mormons would have us believe)—but because the comparative time-scales are intriguing. During the course of the subsequent centuries in Europe and the eastern Mediterranean, the Celts fell to the marauding Romans, the Romans succumbed to the Goths, the Byzantine and Holy Roman empires had their heydays and declines, the Normans stormed Britain, and three times Crusaders marched on the Muslims. It was a turbulent, pivotal epoch in Europe, during which time on this continent the Puebloans lived in relative peace, their prosperity increasing with their growing proficiency as farmers, their pottery and architecture reaching aesthetic heights, their communal lives flourishing, if in an austere and still difficult sort of way.

While the first Christian millennium affected perhaps half the earth’s population, the Ancient Puebloan era in comparison touched a paltry number of people. Yet the stability of that society—the degree to which the lives of one generation were a clear continuation of the lives of their ancestral kin—still seems stunning to me. That kind of cultural equilibrium was already strained in medieval Europe; it was rendered almost impossible by the Industrial Revolution, and at the end of the twentieth century, it has become literally hard to imagine.

The brief life of the girl I disturbed at Tse Canyon would have been almost identical to her grandmother’s childhood, to her grandmother’s early years. Yet the world had thoroughly changed in the fifty-four years between Oma’s birth and my own, and even Montezuma County had undergone an acute kind of transformation. “It doesn’t feel like the same place,” Oma had told me. “The memories I have, some of them, are so sharp and clear. But it’s like they belong to another place I must have lived, except, of course, that this is the only one. ”

When I was in Colorado at Christmas during my last year in Albuquerque, I remember too that when I remarked at how quickly medical school and an internship seemed to have gone, Oma cautioned me that everything would pass far too quickly from now on. “It seems like it could have been yesterday that that fella from Dolores hitched his team and drove us out to the home place for the first time, Papa saying the land looked awfully sorry to him, and the teamster saying ‘Well, sir, looks like it’s your name on the papers.’ Old as I am,” she said, “you still feel like life is over hardly before you know it.”

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Excerpted from The Sorrow of Archaeology by Russell Martin, Copyright© 2005 by Russell Martin. Excerpted by permission of the University of New Mexico Press. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.