High on the rocky hillside, an Ancestral Puebloan scoria trough metate, smashed.
It had been a huge thing, about two feet long by a foot wide. No idea what it must have weighed. It lay downhill from the jumbled stones of a long structure, surrounded by shattered pottery from decades of meals.
Who hauled that thing up the mountain? Who smashed it, and why? Scoria metates are so often found in pieces; were they broken ceremonially at a woman’s death? When a settlement was abandoned? Or is that imagination?
The sand is pecked with raindrops. Fall, rain, and cooler weather, all so welcome, have arrived together. The desert is green, and the asters are in bloom.
An illustration for Dr. Patricia Crown of the University of New Mexico, showing the technique presumably used a thousand years ago by the inhabitants of Chaco Canyon, New Mexico, to froth a drink made from cacao traded up from Mexico. Arguing the details with three archaeologists and four Pueblo consultants took six weeks and about fifty emails. Love this kind of dialogue!
BETSY JAMES: Worldbuilding and Wilderness 