Which brings us to the other part of the story--a group of 20th/21st century contract archaeologists struggling to interpret the eight-hundred year old remains of the same crimes. The central figures are Dusty Stewart, co-owner of a cultural resource management firm, and Maureen Cole, an academic physical anthropologist called in to consult on the weird mortuary complexes Dusty and his crew keep unearthing. There is a nice tension between the two--not only the expectable sexual tension, but also one born of Dusty’s half acceptance of Puebloan and Navajo mysticism and Maureen’s hard-nosed empiricism.
So the mysteries are pursued at both ends of the time spectrum, with intriguing bleed-throughs from Anasazi times to the present, which the scientists more or less ignore while a series of tribal elders (who, discouragingly but realistically, keep dying in their beat-up trailers and unhappy Indian Health Service hospitals) shake their heads and try to protect their own children and grandchildren from the ancient but still unquiet evil spirits.
So the mysteries are pursued at both ends of the time spectrum, with intriguing bleed-throughs from Anasazi times to the present, which the scientists more or less ignore while a series of tribal elders (who, discouragingly but realistically, keep dying in their beat-up trailers and unhappy Indian Health Service hospitals) shake their heads and try to protect their own children and grandchildren from the ancient but still unquiet evil spirits.
Realistic Portrayal of Contract Life
A practicing contemporary archaeologist will appreciate the realism with which contract fieldwork is portrayed. The excavation units are laid out and dug correctly, all the right tools are used; there’s the proper respect for stratigraphy, sidewalls, the integrity of features, and artifact provenience. Crew members have to be pulled away from time to time to do powerline surveys or assess the impacts of a cellphone tower, and whenever bones are found people mumble about NAGPRA and stop work while the tribal elders are brought in to consult. Anyone with a passing knowledge of Southwest prehistory and culture will be intrigued by the way the Gears put flesh on the bones of actual archaeological data, and the way they deconstruct modern pueblo and Navajo religions and fit the pieces back together to create the warring cults of the 13th century.
I hasten to say that the books are not without flaws. The dialogue is sometimes rather forced, and the Gears have some tendency to explain what they ought to imply or let be discovered. They also sometimes overdescribe--particularly with respect to food preparation and the ambience and menus of Santa Fe restaurants. But these are quibbles. The Anasazi Mysteries are fascinating, well-paced page-turners, that convey a very real sense of what it’s like to do archaeology in the 21st century, and a very plausible picture of what it was like to live and die in the San Juan Basin during the disastrous 13th century.
