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Scraping earth away from the short gray femur, exposing it to the air with a bamboo tool after seven hundred years of entombment, I can’t help but keep thinking: these canyons and crop-striped mesas mothered us both. This child and I are siblings surely, sisters of stone and bone and the curious accident of birth. Although I still can’t see enough of her pelvis to be sure, I’ve imagined she was a girl during the two days since I first probed the midden’s ashen soil with a trowel and unexpectedly bumped it against her skull. And in that time it’s seemed certain to me that she was as rooted here as I am, strangely captive at the lips of these sandstone bluffs. Perhaps she lived long enough to be desperate to get away, much like I often have been, determined to see if life could be better lived in other landscapes, to fasten herself to fresher country, or even to become a kind of nomad, mercifully free from belonging somewhere.

I’m a physician still, but I dig in the dirt these days instead of taking stock of my patients’ bodies, attending only to bones stripped of muscle, blood, and brain for almost a millennium by now. On a blistering day in June, I sit in the shade of a juniper tree near the cliff-carved head of Tse Canyon in far southwestern Colorado, and part of a human skeleton is exposed in a meter-square hole beside me. Fragments of what once was a turkey-feather blanket lie among the vertebrae and finger bones, a tooth-tiered mandible and the small and delicate ribs. Beside them, and just now coming into view as I pick at the hard red soil with the blunted point of my trowel, is the dome of an overturned gray bowl, an intricate geometric pattern painted in black on its underside.

Working alone through the rising heat of the morning, then the blanched and baking hours of the afternoon, I expose the bowl, photograph it, and at last lift it and the mound of earth inside it away from the surrounding ground, then work to bare more bones to the light and the late twentieth century until I encounter something arresting: this second femur is much smaller than the first, seemingly stunted, and the tibia to which it once was attached also is atrophied, the child undoubtedly crippled by the misshapen leg. The defect must have been congenital, and it is easy to imagine that it also could have caused her death: the girl might have fallen from a rocky ledge, might have stumbled and struck her head. I’m eager to examine the skull as well now, but before I dislodge it I want Harry, my husband, and his crew to have a look at the remains of this poor Puebloan child, to ensure that my initial excavation doesn’t destroy important information, to hear what they separately will make of a prehistoric girl who surely had to struggle to walk, who died in Tse Canyon and was buried beside this bowl.

“Me too,” I mumble out loud, speaking to no one but the twisted skeleton as I labor to get to my feet, bracing myself with my cane as I stand, waiting before I start to be sure I have my balance, then walking with wide and measured steps along the powdered-dirt path to the place nearby where Harry too is digging into my homeland.

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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.