...three metates. Archaic, given their location, on earth once much wetter than it is in these times of drought.
Each is pecked to roughen its grinding surface. Use has rubbed the first into a bowl that exposes the thin strata of its sandstone, now spalled by frost and rain. All are broken.
The third in situ in a messy prehistoric living room, now cross-trodden by cows:
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.
WORLD-BUILDING and WILDERNESS: 