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and looked across at Paul’s silhouette. “Hatching is a pattern of lines filling a shape. Northern groups—ones connected to Chaco—were known for diagonal lines. So the slip and the hatching were northern, while the overall style was southern. It was odd. Why was someone making bowls with both northern and southern elements?
    â€œStill, we weren’t finding anything significant. We were thinking about packing up. But then we moved to one of the smaller blocks, at the edge of the site. When we got to the bottom, we found a small storage room. We struck a stash of stuff: six parrot effigies, none bigger than a man’s fist. They’d been painted in detail, although the shape of them wasn’t exactly anatomically correct. Larger-than-life beaks, big eyes, short tails.”
    She took a breath. “And we found three perfect bowls—a complete set nesting inside each other. With the same traits as the sherds we’d found. One had a ring of parrots. Scarlet macaws. The others had parrots in the center of the bowls. On each bowl, the parrots were drawn very distinctively: Their beaks are too curved. Their wings are partially extended and diagonally hatched. Their claws are pronounced.”
    â€œWhole bowls?” asked Paul. “I thought whole bowls were practically impossible.”
    â€œYeah,” said Silas, slowly. “And she found three of them.”
    â€œIt’s one artist,” said Ren. “I know it is. The work is too idiosyncratic. The pieces are Style Three Classic Mimbres Black-on-White, dating somewhere after AD 1100. We know it all came to an end around 1150, so the artist must have lived in the first half of the twelfth century. Assuming the Mimbreños assigned the same gender roles as other Pueblo groups, the artist was a woman. So maybe this woman moved from the north to the south. Or maybe the daughter of a northern woman is copying her mother’s style. But it’s one woman. I know it. One set of hands made those bowls.”
    She brushed nonexistent crumbs from her hands. She needed to stop talking. There was a temptation, always, to try and convey why this mattered, why the idea of one artist was so compelling. But she couldn’t put words to it. Surely no one wanted to disappear. An archaeologist sought out those who couldn’t tell their own story, and then, bit by bit, she tried to tell it for them. The Mimbreños were unusual for actually painting images of their world. They illustrated people and animals and insects—small snapshots of their lives. But for all the thousands of stories they may have painted into their pottery, no one knew how to read them. The meaning was missing. No one even knew what the people called themselves—
mimbres
was the Spanish word for “willow,” a label attached long after the culture had died out.
Mimbreños
, the Willow People.
    But this artist was one person, one woman who would have felt the sun on her face and known the smell of her paints and laid her head on her mother’s lap when she was small. The discovery of the bowls felt to Ren like a personal plea. She could bring this woman, piece by piece, back from the dead. She could make sure she was remembered. She could save her.
    â€œAnd now it looks like she might have been here, too,” she continued, “fifty miles from Crow Creek. Or her work was taken here.”
    â€œOur preliminary data suggests populations were migrating from up to seventy-five miles away. Maybe further,” said Silas.
    â€œSo why did the artist come here?” Ren asked. “Or, if she started here, why did she move there? What does it mean?”
    She didn’t expect an answer, and no one offered one. You assumed the dead wanted their story told, that they wanted their lives to be known and remembered and understood. You had to assume that. Only occasionally did Ren allow for the possibility that they were happy sleeping, that