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“They cooked heads,” Ms. Eberle said.

Professor Fredrick quailed. His mind seemed adrift in the presiding pause. They cooked heads. He stared at the odd, gracile woman, then stared back down into the pit of skulls.

A cooking pit, he realized.

Despite the sun’s fierce blaze, he shivered in the clean, highland air. The site made him think of violations, of rape. A line of enthusiastic students tore at the face of the ridge with 20 pound pickaxes. Others turned shovels around amorphous shapes of things that the last six days of excavation had raised from the oblivion of ages. Dust rose in billows. The hectic sound of metal striking rock rang as a familiar song. Fredrick had spent his life doing this: disgorging smothered civilizations from the thick skin of the earth. Yet he’d never felt this way before. He felt like a trespasser.

Ms. Eberle stood beside him, gazing down into the dig like a god on a precipice. She was skinny and rather tall, pallid–a female version of Fredrick. Straight gray black hair had been cut around her gaunt face like a helmet. She had inordinately large breasts for her frame, which stretched the front of her khaki field blouse. Big pale blue eyes watched intently over the dig’s activity. When she smiled, the slit of her mouth showed a row of sharp, even white teeth.

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