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bunch of egalitarian farmers. The Mimbres people had no impressive structures like Chaco—they built with mud and river cobble, not a right angle in an entire site. No one talked about their architecture—they talked about their pottery. It was stunning, one-of-a-kind. And very valuable. It was also typically buried with the dead, which had not turned out so well for the dead. Ren had a snapshot on her desk—the work of some local paper—of a pothunter surrounded by piles of dirt, a bulldozer in the background. The pothunter was holding a Mimbres bowl in one hand and, with the other hand, tossing a skull over his shoulder.
    The boy popped the tab on another beer. Ren wondered if he was old enough to drink.
    â€œSo you have these two ways of life spreading out,” Silas continued, “one from the south and one from the north. Cañada Rosa is an intersection point of the twoworlds. We’re the frontier. We think we’ve found your lady’s work up at the Delgado site, which was occupied off and on for about six centuries. We’ve got four hundred and eighty rooms there, spread over sixty acres. Just a fraction have been touched.”
    â€œYou have a large Mimbres site?” said Ren, straightening in her chair. “Untouched?”
    â€œThat’s the beauty of this place,” said Silas. “It’s the land that time forgot. Or that time didn’t want to take the trouble to find. As you may have noticed, it’s hard to get here. Even harder for bulldozers. The canyon was spared from massive destruction partly because of the inaccessibility. And it’s on the edge of the known Mimbres world. Pothunters and looters didn’t think to look here.
    â€œThis was life at the boundaries. Far away from the center. And the question I’m trying to answer is, what did people do when they abandoned their center? Did they create a new thing altogether, or did they cling to old habits?”
    Silas’s arms hung over the sides of his chair, relaxed, as he turned to Ren. “Now. Your turn to tell me about Crow Creek.”
    She glanced toward Ed. “Ed told you about it already, right?”
    â€œEd told me some. And I saw your presentation in Albuquerque last fall. You never called on me to ask my question.”
    â€œWhat was your question?”
    â€œTell me the story, and then I’ll ask you.”
    She told him the version she told everyone. She had told it enough by now that the words left her mouth as smooth as a recording. All emotion—shock joy relief—had detached itself and sunk deep down somewhere inside her rib cage.
    â€œSome well-informed rancher down along the Gila—Crow Creek is a little offshoot—noticed rows of rocks and knew enough to know they could be fallen walls,” she said. “So he called the university. I’d just finished up my dissertation, had applied for a few openings, and my doctoral adviser called me and asked if I wanted to take a look. I did, and when the principal investigator had to get back for the fall term, I took over.
    â€œSome of the crew stayed on with me, including Ed.” She smiled at him across the fire. “I’d sort of harassed him into coming out in the first place. We’d found a few large sherds that seemed very interesting. Mimbres pottery, clearly, classic black and white, but the slip was wrong.”
    â€œSlip?” asked Paul. He was only a shape in the shadows. “These guys have mainly taught me how to dig big holes. We haven’t gotten to pottery definitions yet.”
    â€œHe idolizes us,” said Ed.
    â€œThe slip is the coating on the ceramics,” Ren said. “It’s put on before you fire or paint the piece. In the north, they polished the slip before they painted the piece. But the Mimbres polished the piece after it was painted. The sherd we found had a polished slip. And the designs had diagonal hatching.”
    Ren paused