On a promontory, a huge Archaic campsite. People had slept in that sandy hollow for millennia, for it was black with firepits, and at times it must have been a trash heap. But Archaic trash, unlike our own, was nothing: the husks of wild grasses scattered by the wind, the femur of a mountain sheep smashed for the marrow, a few human turds.

Halfway down the steep canyonside, irrevocably stuck, abandoned and stripped, was the shell of a vehicle of the species we call a “poodle jeep”: iridescent green, with graphics. Somebody thought that advertisement was real.