The Unearthing Read online

  “I’m going to want to clear everyone out,” Echohawk said to Santino, “We have to proceed carefully and for now that means shutting down the dig.” He turned to James, who was once more on the console link to Peter.

  “James, when Peter gets here I want you guys to start taking core samples from around the site,” He said, “We need to establish the geological age of the pyramid. Also, get grids set up on the unexposed sides; thirty square meters of half-meter squares. Then we’ll do Doppler seismography to get an approximation of the site after the geosurvey cores are taken.” James nodded and began relaying the information to Peter who was leading a small convoy of three cube vans and a mini-bus of equipment and crew to the site. Echohawk started down into the work pit and approached the pyramid. Though only two sides were exposed and then only four meters of the structure it was already impressive, imposing. Its golden surface reflected the sunlight brilliantly. The pyramid was nearly perfectly smooth; there was hardly any sign of weathering on its surface: a few scuffs or scratches and almost no dents or pockmarks. Given the tools the locals were using Echohawk had expected there to be some significant scoring on its surface, but there was none. It was almost too smooth. He knelt beside the pyramid, running a hand over its surface.

  “Excuse me professor,” Santino said, “But I was wondering: you’d mentioned doing a geological survey of the land. May I ask why?” Echohawk stood up, looking around the work pit. Shovels and pickaxes, yet no damage to the pyramid

  “A geological survey will allow us to establish, roughly, about how long the structure’s been buried,” Echohawk explained, “As time passes, the ground, surface dust and natural debris changes. Each new surface layer preserves the one underneath. Each layer of earth will be characteristic of a different geological era. Certain types of seed found mixed in the earth could be extinct in the present era or be the progenitor of a current plant. Soil metallurgy changes too, as time goes on. One layer of earth might have a relatively high amount of salt from when this was once an ocean floor. Another could contain high quantities particleized iron or other materials indicative of a nearby meteor impact. The pyramid’s position relative to the local geological history and how the earth around the pyramid settled will tell us how long it’s been here and then hopefully help us figure out who put it here and more importantly, when.” Echohawk became aware that several pairs of eyes were focused on him; some faces suspicious, some hopeful, all expectant.

  “Hello, ladies and gentlemen,” he began, “I want to start off by thanking you one and all for the effort you’ve made so far in digging up the pyramid behind me.” And Echohawk was very aware of the pyramid behind him. The Mayan and Incan civilizations had worshipped at pyramids and he easily imagined this object being used as the source of veneration. He wondered when there had last been an elder preaching as a crowd gathered around him to listen. Though he admitted, the smooth lines owed more to Egyptian styling than South American.

  “My crew and I were sent here based on the pictures your band council sent to the World Aboriginal Anthropological Society. I can tell you that the discovery of this pyramid is an important one, not just from an archaeological point of view but also as a societal one for us and for all Aboriginal Peoples in the Americas. Because of the need to gather as much information as possible and because of the need to protect the structure, we will have to temporarily cease excavation.” Grumbles and disappointed moans greeted Echohawk’s words. He raised his hands in a stopping motion, calling for silence.

  “Folks, please…I said temporarily!” Echohawk called, “This is necessary, because we have to run certain tests in order to properly date the find, study the soil composition and to determine the height of the structure itself. In order to do that, unfortunately, we have to stop digging for a while. I promise that as soon as we are ready to resume digging any and all of you who are still interested in working on the dig will be rehired. And when you are rehired you’ll be working for the WAAS and being paid according to their very generous scale.” This brought smiles and some applause. There were worse ways of kicking people off a dig site.

  As the work crew shouldered their shovels and pickaxes, climbing from the work pit, Echohawk returned his attention to the pyramid. He reached out to its golden surface, laying his hand on metal warmed by the desert sun. Except that the metal covering the surface of the pyramid was cool; it certainly was no hotter than air temperature, which on that fine summer morning hovered around thirty-two degrees Celsius. Baking in the sun, the skin of the pyramid should have been much warmer. Echohawk slid his hand along the pyramid, feeling the smoothness of it. He couldn’t find any fresh scratches or gouges despite the equipment that had been used; the damage inflicted on its surface was old. The surface of the pyramid was mottled but that appeared to be a function of design. Echohawk stood and made his way from the pit. This was an unbelievable find and so far the information didn’t make sense to him at all.

  ♦♦♦

  LINX TO: Laura Echohawk

  FROM: Mark Echohawk

  SUBJECT: Laguna Dig

  Dear Laura,

  I got your last linx yesterday. I’m glad you like the book; finding a tome on abstract art of the 1980s was difficult. I think you’re one of the few people who actually likes work from that era. I hope the book helps you with your current project. It was also good to hear that you and your room mate managed to work things out; Allison’s a great girl and it would have been a shame if your friendship ended over something as trivial as housework division.

  I have news of my own: I have returned to the field! If you can believe it, I finally got a field project interesting enough to pull me out of the classroom: Early last week shortly after I linxed you my last letter the World Aboriginal Anthropological Society contacted me regarding a discovery made in New Mexico on land belonging to the Laguna Band. The Laguna discovered the tip of a golden pyramid buried beneath the desert.

  Three things about this discovery have piqued my interest: First, it was previously assumed that the pyramid-building Aboriginal societies hadn’t established themselves any further north than the Mexican Peninsula. Second, the Laguna Pyramid has more in common in design with Egyptian pyramids than it does to its South American cousins: it is flat, not stepped, and covered in gold or some sort of gold alloy and has a pointed peak and smooth sides, as opposed to the plateaued summit and staggered sides of most South American pyramids. Lastly, that the Laguna Pyramid is buried is significant, because the land around Laguna has been unchanged by geological event for thousands upon thousands of years. This means that either the Laguna Pyramid is quite ancient or it was meticulously and deliberately buried. I haven’t been this excited about a project since Doctor Aiziz and I discovered the Quipu repository, in Columbia.

  I hope this linx finds you well; I look forward to hearing from you soon. Let me know how things go authenticating those works you discovered in the university’s warehouse. We’ll go out for coffee as soon as I get back to LA.

  All my love,

  Dad

  ♦♦♦

  Peter Paulson had arrived and gotten his people parked and unpacking. They parked just inside an area marked off earlier by James using orange “CAUTION” tape and aluminum poles. A small army of assistants, graduate students and general help, began unloading crates of equipment and setting up tent-like portable shelters to be used as living quarters and a mobile lab building made from corrugated aluminum sheets and a titanium frame. By the middle of the afternoon Mark Echohawk’s archaeological team had set up their entire base of operations and James and Peter had drilled out their first core samples.

  “James!” Peter called, stepping inside the lab. “What have we got going?” James turned his chair away from the workstation and shook Peter’s hand.

  “‘Sup, Pete?” he asked, “What we’ve got going is the end-stage analysis of the core samples. Printout?”

  James handed a sheaf of paper to Peter.

  “This is int
eresting,” Peter said, reading the report, “It says here there’s a high concentration of iridium in the soil around the structure.”

  “Only at a specific depth in the soil,” James answered, “It looks like a local meteoric impact.

  “Yeah, but the patterning suggests the KT boundary,” Peter said.

  “You noticed that too, huh?” James asked, “The Prof shit when he saw it. He wants me to drill new samples and re-run the geological survey.”

  “I can see why.”

  In geology, the KT boundary is a marker of a time at the end of the Cretaceous when the Earth was subject to massive meteoric bombardment, including the so-called “Death Star” impacts that most probably wiped out the dinosaurs. The hallmark of the KT boundary was an uncommonly high concentration of iridium in the soil of the era; iridium being an element common in space, but exceedingly rare on earth.

  “I don’t believe it’s the KT myself,” James said, “I think it’s just an anomalous iridium layer, probably from a local nearby meteoric impact.”

  “That would make more sense to me,” Peter replied, “It’s something to keep an eye on. We’ll look for other signs of a nearby impact when we do seismography.”

  “Yeah, the Prof wants to see you about that,” James told him, “He wants the cannons set up for as wide a scan as possible.”

  “Why?”

  “He wants to completely rule out the KT boundary’s significance to the dig, and see how big that thing is.”

  ♦♦♦

  Peter made his way across their narrow, dusty compound to Mark Echohawk’s trailer. He was a couple of years older than James and was tall, dark haired and athletic. Coming from a poor neighbourhood, he’d exploited an athletic scholarship to get himself into the UCLA Anthropology department. It didn’t take his teachers long to realize this jock in particular was more interested than working in the field than playing on one. It wasn’t long after that Mark Echohawk, dean emeritus of UCLA’s newly-expanded archaeology department, took an interest in the young Peter Paulson.

  Peter found Echohawk in the camper’s kitchenette brewing a pot of coffee. He favoured an old-fashioned percolator urn-style coffee maker over the more popular—and faster—drip-brew coffee makers. He was waiting patiently for the “Ready” light on the urn to turn red, a large glass mug in his hand.

  “Hi Mark,” Peter said. He was the only one of Echohawk’s students to call him, privately, by his first name.

  “Hello Peter,” He said, reaching for the tap on the coffee urn the instant the light flashed red. “Want a cup?”

  “Hell yeah,” Peter said, sliding into the horseshoe-shaped booth. If there was one thing the Prof did exceptionally well besides archaeology it was brew a pot of coffee. Echohawk put milk, brown sugar and a bottle of cinnamon on the table. Peter began fixing his coffee as Echohawk sat down. Peter, almost twenty-five, watched the sixty-odd year old Echohawk fix his own coffee. Peter had studied under Echohawk for years now and had been fortunate enough to go into the field with him twice. This was their third expedition together and Peter, close to graduating and beginning his own career as an anthropologist, considered Echohawk both a friend and mentor.

  “You read the geosurvey report?” Echohawk asked.

  “Yeah,”

  “What do you think?”

  “I think we have to run some scans and dig.”

  “Why?”

  “The iridium layer,” Peter replied, “It could be anomalous, but I’ve seen enough spectrographs of the KT to know when I’m looking at it. So either the structure was buried at the end of the Cretaceous or else it was built in a pit dug out that far down and then at some point later on it was very, very meticulously buried.” Echohawk nodded. He’d come to the same conclusion. Neither of them liked the implications.

  “That’s why I want to start off with an extended Doppler seismology scan,” Echohawk said, “To see if it was buried deliberately or not. I also want to find out if the pyramid was part of some sort of temple complex. Something that size, chances are it wasn’t a stand-alone structure. Chances are there’s other structures buried nearby and I want to see if we can’t locate them as well.”

  “We should follow up with a hard dig,” Peter said, “Use PET scanners to see what’s between us and the bottom and just strip out as much earth as possible. We may even want to consider getting an orbital deep radar scan of the surrounding desert.”

  “One thing at a time,” Echohawk said, “Set up the Doppler cannons for as wide a scan field as possible. Then, we determine the next step.”

  ♦♦♦

  It took most of the rest of the afternoon to set up the Doppler seismology cannons for the scan. Doppler seismology scanning had been a beneficial addition to field archaeology years earlier. Using special cannons, slug weights were fired into the ground. The seismic vibrations, Doppler waves, resulting from the blasts were picked up by echographic equipment similar in nature to ultrasound scanners. The resulting information was fed into computing systems that compiled three dimensional images of objects buried beneath layers and layers of earth. The use of multiple cannons fired simultaneously and networked into a central computer would generate a detailed image of an object and anything surrounding it for kilometres. Doppler seismology had proven to be most beneficial in palaeontology, helping discover entire dinosaur burial grounds. But the technology had also been used in archaeological digs in Egypt, Iraq and India. Its greatest success to date had been the discovery of an entire lost city in China’s Gobi desert.

  When James and Peter returned from setting up the cannons, the sun was well on its way towards setting. Three canteen trucks, one cooking hamburgers, fries and pizza, one serving ice cream and one serving just about everything else, had established a beachhead on the edge of Echohawk’s camp. James left to get their suppers while Peter reported in with Echohawk. The rest of the expedition were seated at picnic tables eating, or were working diligently in the lab building preparing for the Doppler scan and running final analyses on the soil samples taken earlier that day. They ate their fast-food suppers and then joined Echohawk in the lab with Paul Santino.

  “Gentlemen,” Echohawk said, “We’re ready when you are.” James sat at one workstation, Peter at another.

  “Tracking and recording are online,” James said.

  “Echography imaging systems on,” Peter said, “We’re compiling a scan of ambient seismic activity.”

  “An ambient scan will allow us to get an accurate image of the artifact,” Echohawk explained to Santino, “By sampling the seismic ‘noise’ made from foot and vehicle traffic and natural shifting in the ground, the scanner will then be able to filter out that background activity and focus entirely on the shockwaves set off by the cannons firing.” Santino nodded and continued to watch the display screens in front of James and Peter.

  “We’re ready Prof,” James called.

  “You may fire when ready,” Echohawk said with amusement.

  “Thirty second blast warning,” Peter said, toggling a switch. Two short blasts of a siren erupted in response, followed by a long wail which cycled higher and higher in pitch before dying out

  “Cannons armed,” James reported.

  “Final countdown,” Peter said, reaching for an isolated console, “Ten, nine, eight, seven, six, five, four, three, two and one. Fire!” James unlocked a sealed button on the computer console and pressed it. There was a deep muffled rumbling noise and the slightest of tremors passed through the ground. A sound like distant thunder rolled through the compound and instantly every screen on the monitors before them flared to life, recording the progress of the shockwaves set off by the multiple cannons firing. A distinct image was forming on the main screen where the Doppler compilation was being done. It showed the pyramid as seen from above, resting atop a large circular dais. From there the image became strange, almost incomprehensible: The dais was sitting on top of the crest of an arched dome, kilometres across. The dome was covered by an irr
egular network of pits and canyons and large constructs that looked like clusters of buildings. The dome itself was so huge that its periphery could not be seen on the scan image.

  “What the hell was that?” Echohawk asked, rising.

  “I don’t know,” Peter said, “I don’t understand what we’re looking at.”

  “Show me three-D of the scan,” Echohawk said, “James, how far did we scan?”

  “We set up the seismology to scan everything within a ten kilometre radius of the pyramid,”

  “Can we compile further out?” Echohawk asked, “Extrapolate based on what we have so far?”