What drew you to the subject matter of The Sorrow of Archaeology?

The novel reflects an amalgam of my interests and experiences. I grew up in far southwestern Colorado, where the story takes place, and so did the book’s protagonist, Sarah Macleish. I’ve always had a real interest in the Ancestral Puebloan culture that flourished in that region long ago, and I’ve known a number of archaeologists over the years whose work I find very interesting. I’ve had the good fortune to know many physicians as well, and I’m fascinated by their working lives, and so as I began to conceive the novel, it wasn’t surprising that Sarah emerged as a physician who also digs in the dirt.

Sarah has multiple sclerosis. How—and perhaps why—did you conceive that aspect of who she is?

One of my nonfiction books, Matters Gray and White, examines the life of a clinical neurologist and looks at the mysteries and disorders of the brain. In watching my dear friend Dr. Patrick Sternberg work for a year, I met many patients who suffered from MS, and learned a lot about the disease. It’s one that truly captures my attention, both physically and metaphorically. People have pointed out that several of my books look at people with disabilities, and it’s true. I didn’t consciously plan that linkage, but a number of books are connected in that way: Matters Gray and White; Out of Silence, which is about my autistic nephew Ian Drummond’s struggle to communicate; Beethoven’s Hair pays focal attention to the great composer’s terrible ill health and his deafness, and a central character in my earlier novel, Beautiful Islands, also has a disability. I’m fascinated by the ways in which people with great physical challenges respond to them—sometimes in ways that tragically limit their lives, sometimes with real heroism.

Sarah has a love-hate relationship with the place where she grew up and to which she returns to live with her archaeologist husband. Do you have a similar attitude toward that place you and Sarah call home?

I grew up in Cortez, just to the north of Mesa Verde National Park, then I returned as an adult following an absence of ten years to the valley in which Cortez lies and stayed for twenty more. Southwestern Colorado and the Four Corners region have profoundly influenced my life and are deeply important to me, but yes, I share many of Sarah’s conflicted attitudes toward my home. It’s an extraordinary place geographically—and archaeologically, of course—and many wonderful people choose to live there. But I’ve also always encountered there attitudes and prejudices and a strange willingness simply to coast unthinkingly through life among some people that I’m repelled by. Those kinds of people exist everywhere, of course—I do understand that—but they don’t get under my skin in the same way. It’s my problem much more than the place’s problem, I’m sure. I suspect that much of my love-hate relationship with my hometown has to do with wanting to be proud of it in every way.

Sarah’s marriage to her husband Harry is challenged by her MS as well as by other issues. Did you set out to write about marital conflict as well?

Not specifically, no. I was aware that MS is very hard on marriages—as is much of living, of course—and it’s hard to imagine writing intimately about a married couple without addressing how difficult it is to sustain a mutually supportive relationship over the long term as individuals inevitably grow and change. Sarah and her husband Harry have a very strong bond, in many ways, yet each wants something different out of life, and each imagines a different sort of future. How they go about resolving those differences, or at least attending to them, does become the real heart of the book, I think.

Are any of the characters in the novel based closely on people you know or knew?

Only one. Sarah’s grandmother, Oma, is very much like my late grandmother, whom we called Dandy. Oma’s life and the circumstances of her death parallel very closely my grandmother’s, and it was an honor for me to acknowledge her in that way. Like Oma, my grandmother moved into a country farmhouse on the day she was married at age twenty-one, and she still lived in that same house when she died at eighty-seven. Living a life so utterly anchored to a single place is extraordinary—and very unusual, of course, in contemporary America. In many ways, the life of the character Oma is the book’s strongest link to the lives of the Ancestral Puebloans who lived in that same valley a thousand years before.

The novel is written in Sarah’s voice. What was it like to attempt to view the world through a woman’s eyes and to imagine her interior world?

I loved the challenge. As I conceptualized the novel early on, I very consciously set out to tell a woman’s story. I wanted to see whether I could convincingly create a female character readers would believe and find interesting. That’s one of the great pleasures of writing fiction—the opportunity to make everything up and imagine circumstances that aren’t your own. I’m not a female, not a physician, nor do I have multiple sclerosis, yet I was fascinated to imagine all of those circumstances. My spouse and colleague Lydia Nibley—who enriches my life in so many ways, and who is a fine writer herself—was hugely helpful to me in understanding Sarah and her motivations and the arc of the changes she undergoes as the story unfolds.

The novel is both a contemporary story and a look backward at Sarah's life. Can you explain something about your decision to interweave both?

Something else I consciously set out to do was to create a complex structure for the novel. It seemed to me that a book that is, in many ways, about time, shouldn’t be locked into a single chronology. We live our lives in linear ways literally, of course, but we also constantly link ourselves to our pasts—the past of yesterday, of two months ago, and virtually everyone I know also acknowledges how very much his or her childhood still somehow seems so influential, even decades later. I chose to structure the novel into very short titled chapters that alternate between Sarah’s telling of her contemporary story and her reflections on her past. The contemporary story is told chronologically, in the present tense; Sarah’s remembrances, in the past tense, begin early in her childhood and move progressively forward to the time when the contemporary story begin, then move backward again to her childhood.

What is the meaning of the novel’s title?

The Sorrow of Archaeology is the title of one of those very short chapters. I hope there’s some poetry in it, and I hope it’s a reference not only to the literal challenges archaeologists face in attempting to learn a great deal about early peoples from very limited physical information, but also to the way in which all of us struggle to create a kind of archaeology of our own lives. How do we construct satisfying narratives of our lives out of the broken materials fate hands us?

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.