When I was almost as old as this skeletal child must have been at the time she died, it seemed to me to be particularly good fortune to have been born right in the center of things—an ocean on either side of us; the twisting spine of the Rockies sending rivers both east and west; four separate state capitals—each one so big that buses plied its streets—only a long day’s drive away. Over a bare brown hill from the bank of the San Juan River, you could stand on a cement slab and touch four states at once: Colorado, New Mexico, Utah, and Arizona. The slow-witted tourists assumed you had to stick an appendage into each state to perform the feat, but we shrewder locals realized that all you had to do to truly center yourself was to plant an instep right where the incised lines intersected. The Colorado history text opened with the story of the people who first began to inhabit Montezuma County back when Jesus was growing up in similarly arid circumstances, and it ended with a brief mention of the oil boom of the early fifties that had turned little Cortez into a tacky version of modern times. It was hard for a twelve-year old to imagine that any other place could matter more.

We lived on the north end of Chestnut Street, my parents and my sister Barbara and me, right where an unnamed arroyo curled into Hartman Canyon, the shallow, sage-filled little depression encompassing all the magic of the wild West as far as the kids in the neighborhood were concerned. Unlike my father, who was vice-principal of the high school, or my mother, who made mosaic-tile serving trays and appliquéd barbecue aprons and who dreamed of a far bigger life, my grandparents actually seemed connected to the country—in part because they raised hay and red-hided cattle and canned food from their garden for the winter, in part because their last name, Lewis, was the same as the name of the farming community in which they lived, twelve miles north of town—both names supplied by my great-grandfather, who in 1897 had abandoned his Kansas City hardware store for “space,” his appellation for the empty expanse of land that spread northwest from the settlements in Montezuma Valley toward scattered Mormon outposts in southeastern Utah. The fact that Hiram W. Lewis had established the still-extant post office called Lewis, Colorado, seemed to me to be further proof that I belonged to a line of people who were right in the thick of things. By the time I was in junior-high, the region’s earliest settlers—whom my grandparents had always called Moquis—began to be referred to as Anasazi, a Navajo word the archaeologists took a liking to for a time, one that was supposed to mean “the Ancient Ones,” but which actually meant something more like “old strangers who were our enemies” according to Benson Yazzie, a Navajo kid in my science class.

All I really knew about the Ancient Puebloan people in those days was that they were the reason a national park now covered much of Mesa Verde, a high and canyon-cut island of land that rose just south of Cortez, a place that somehow never lost its exotic luster, even after a lifetime of Memorial Day-weekend excursions—my father always delighting in the way the masonry ruins seemed exquisitely at home in the cool and arching sandstone overhangs, my younger sister never quite so enthusiastic, sometimes so bored she would stay in the Corvair with Meet the Beatles or another favorite book rather than trek with us into secreted, spellbinding Balcony House, suspended in a shallow cave hundreds of feet above the canyon floor. For my father, the Mesa Verde architecture was everything—the precisely shaped stones, walls as straight and true as transits and T-squares could have made them, balconies cantilevered on bark-stripped juniper beams, circular kivas dug into the hard-packed earth. My mother, it wasn’t surprising, took far more interest in the hand-crafts—beautiful baskets, some woven so tightly they held water, sandals and satchels, bracelets and beaded necklaces, fine pottery seemingly painted by twentieth-century abstractionists.

I was a dozen years away from entering medical school, and bones still seemed creepy, but I remember being fascinated, even then, by the remains of the people themselves—skeletons of short and stocky people who were prone to suffer from bad teeth, bad backs, and osteoarthritis; the hard cradle-boards that flattened the backs of children’s skulls; primitive menstrual pads made of woven barks and fibers; mummified bodies brazenly displayed in glass cases, the leathered skin on their faces drawn into expressions of quiet anguish. Yet more than anything else, I think I was intrigued by the Puebloans’ surprising numbers: on Mesa Verde and throughout the tilting valley to the north, as many as thirty thousand people once had been at home here, three times the number who lived here now—early farmers tending land at Lewis, potters shaping clay from the banks of Hartman Creek, rabbit hunters on Chestnut Street, kids in breech cloths at play in the arroyo that later was ours.

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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.