Behind our house on Maple Street in the small town where I grew up, a large public park sprawled for what seemed like miles. A creek bisected the park. On Saturday mornings, my brother and I went there to hunt for treasure.
We, mostly he, found fossils with some regularity. One of them was large enough to be accepted as a display specimen at the state natural history museum. But while he was drawn to prehistoric fish skeletons, I was more interested in what humans left behind. Digging in the moist creek bed, I found buttons and colored glass and soda bottle caps (we had a collection) and, occasionally, a forgotten toy soldier or G.I. Joe accessory. And one day I found an arrowhead.
Now, if there is something cooler to a 10-year-old boy than finding a perfectly notched arrowhead in the mud, I would like to know what that is. I was no expert on Native American peoples, but I knew the object I had unearthed was at least 100 years old. I wondered how the arrowhead got there. Was there a battle near here? Was a boy shooting at squirrels? Who might have owned it? I was just a kid with a spoon and muddy knees, but that arrowhead made me think like a scholar.
John Rick also enjoyed poking around in the dirt when he was a kid. When he was 6, he and his mother found a 1,500-year-old mummy buried in the sand. Not a bad start to a career in archaeology.
As you’ll learn in our story What Lies Beneath, Rick grew up with a special yen for Peru, where his adult excavations have revealed a bizarre subterranean temple used by one of South America’s oldest civilizations, the Chavin. Sitting in his Stanford office recently, Rick showed me a picture of his most exciting find. Eight elaborately decorated conch shells, known as Strombus trumpets, are lying on the floor of an underground chamber. Just sitting there, as if waiting for somebody to show up and claim them.
And again the questions come pouring out. Who put the shells there? Why were they left behind? Was this a ceremonial chamber or just a 3,000-year-old storage closet?
Looking at a photo like this also invites wonder about that moment of discovery. Imagine peering into a space unseen by humans for more than two millennia and finding the beautifully preserved handiwork of some ancient person. Thrilling isn’t the word.
But of course those moments of euphoria are rare. Mostly, archaeology is a study in perseverance. Decades can pass without a moment like the one Rick experienced at Chavin. Decades of probing, digging, scratching, surveying, analyzing, model building. I’m so grateful we have folks like Rick willing to do it.
Embedded in the soil are the secrets of 10,000 generations. For scholars, the artifacts the ground gives up suggest how people lived, worshiped, ate, organized, celebrated and mourned. They’re clues to a mystery. But more than that, they are profound reminders of the extraordinary human saga that connects us all.
I wonder what else is in that creek back home.
