CHAPTER 2
Buried 900 Years

Sure enough, twenty minutes later the doorbell rang. Wilt opened it to find, not a pizza driver, but two girls about their own age. "Uhh, is Dr. Darien Stevens here?" the tall one in front asked.

Wilt immediately said, "Sure, c'mon in," then loudly called out "Dad, someone to see you!" as they came through the door. He closed it quickly, then turned to face them. "Sorry, that was a little performance for our nosy neighbor. We're likewise looking for my father; maybe we can pool our information? I'm Wilt Stevens, and this is my friend Frax Velasquez. Don't mind him, he always gets that dopey look around beautiful women."

Frax realized he probably did have a dopey look on his face.

Both girls were indeed lovely, the taller one nearly Wilt's height, athletic looking, with long shiny black hair. The other was about even with Frax, more cuddly than athletic, with a shorter cut. Both had soft brown eyes, with the smaller girl sporting big eyeglasses like his own. Frax felt himself getting tongue-tied.

"I'm Sparrow LeClerc," said the taller, "and she's Maud Moghadam." She pronounced it "Mo-ha-dahm." "We're actually looking for Dr. Sophie Leong, my guardian, and knew she was working with your dad. I haven't heard from her in about a week, and I'm getting worried."

"Ahh, Frax and I just got back from a trip, and I haven't been in touch with Dad since we left, well over a week ago."

Just then the doorbell rang again, and this time it was indeed the pizza delivery — gal, not guy. Frax noticed that Wilt sent her off with a generous tip. No doubt Dr. Stevens would understand. Turning, Wilt said, "We got two Antonio's Large. Wanna join us? Vegetarian, in case anyone cares: Black olives, mushrooms, and mild banana pepper rings. We only got a couple of drinks, but there should be more in the fridge."

Everyone crowded around the coffee table in the living room, with the girls' hair streaming in the blast of the old window fan Wilt had propped in the hallway, aimed at the group.

"What's with the white cardboard discs under the pizzas?" asked Maud. "In Madison they just use a thin paper liner, if that."

"Yeah," said Wilt. "Here they usually just throw it in the box, no liner or anything. But Frax says this is Antonio's 25th anniversary, so I guess they splurged to re-create the old vibe. Dad says the discs, and later the paper `doilies' as he called them, used to be standard. He thinks they were either to keep the grease from soaking through onto the furniture, or to keep the pizza from picking up a cardboard taste if it sat too long in the box. But now everything has gone to cost-cutting hell to keep the stockholders happy."

"No problem," said Frax. "We can just eat it all before it soaks in or picks up box flavors."

Between mouthfuls, the guys learned that Professor Leong was an archaeologist working on an early Native American dig about forty miles west of town. The site had been discovered during a snowless winter a couple of years earlier, when someone else from the department was testing new lidar aerial survey equipment to make sure it worked before shipping it off to his study site in Bolivia.

"Lie-dar?" said Wilt with mock horror. "You mean it can tell if you're lying from an airplane? Jeez, talk about a surveillance state. What's next, nose-picking?"

Sparrow rolled her eyes. "Lidar," she explained, "is sorta like radar, except with light. They basically fly over in a plane while shooting a stream of laser pulses at the ground and mapping how long each takes to reflect back; higher ground gets hit first, so bounces back sooner. The computer builds a detailed map showing really tiny elevation differences. The latest thing is lidar from drones, which can fly lower for even more detail."

The airplane lidar had turned up a distinctive soil pattern in the wooded "back forty" of an old farm near Jackson, Michigan. The researcher showed his results to Dr. Leong, and that summer she assembled a team for a dig at the site. Included was Sparrow's father, a native Chippewa from the Sault tribe, to participate as an Indian representative.

"Actually," said Sparrow, "it should have been a Potawatomi, since this is really their ancestral territory — we Chippewa are from farther north. But their guy was scheduled for back surgery, so he called up Dad, an old college pal, to cover for him. The Chippewa and Potawatomi are kinda close anyway; together with the Ottawa, we're all Anishinaabe. I came along to help during summer vacation, and —"

"Wait, wait," interrupted Frax. "What's a `nishna bay'?"

"Anishinaabe is all one word; it means `original people'. It's a group including a bunch of tribes, but the ones I'm talking about are the `Three Fires' who all spoke the same language, more or less. We're trying to bring back the language now, but it's not easy with so few native speakers left. I got an app for my phone to help me learn, with a huge pronouncing dictionary all in memory so I can use it in the field, out of cell range. But by myself, it's slow going. Dr. Leong has it on hers, too, so we could learn together, but now..."

"Hey!" Wilt straightened up. "We could all learn Anishinaabe! Not only would you have practice buddies, but think how totally cool it would be to have a secret language at school."

"Fine, but let's not get sidetracked from the main issue here, like finding your father and Dr. Leong."

"One word. Just give us one word, like `Hello' maybe."

"Boozhoo."

"Gesundheit. Or should that be `there, there, don't cry little girl'?"

"Very funny. Boozhoo is what you say for a greeting. There's a whole theory about that, but let's hold off on it for now."

"Err, I've got a question," said Frax. "You used the word `Indian' a minute ago, but I've heard `Native American' and even `Indigenous' sometimes. Up until now I've never needed to use any of those for someone I know. So what's proper?"

"Good question. All my friends refer to themselves as `Indian', though some people prefer `Native American' when others refer to them, to show more respect. I myself don't have a problem with either, but if you're among those you don't know very well you might want to use `Native American' just to be on the safe side."

Sparrow got back to her story. The survey had shown a pattern of furrows and ridges known as "Indian garden beds" that had once been scattered over much of southwestern Michigan and parts of Wisconsin. Some of those sites had been enormous, hundreds of acres, and were amazingly complex geometric works of art, but all had long since been plowed over for conventional European agriculture. By the early 1900s nothing much remained.

"Except in one place," said Sparrow, "in Michigan's Upper Peninsula along the Wisconsin border, in ancestral Menominee territory. They're relatives of the Anishinaabe, from the same ancient Algonkian language family. Those beds were unknown to modern research until recently, and dated to about 1000 to 1600 CE. But they're a long way from the beds in southwest Michigan, and farther still from the site here in the southeast.

"From historical records, the general consensus was that the southern garden beds had been quite old, probably dating back before the arrival of the Potawatomi around 1500 CE. The Menominee dates seem to fit with that. Dr. Leong hopes this new site will provide clues to the original builders down here, presumably not Menominee but sharing the same ancestors."

"What's with that `CE' bit?" asked Wilt. "Some new kind of date system?"

"Nah, just a new name for the old one you already know. The old `BC' and `AD' are now `BCE' and `CE', for `Before Common Era' and `Common Era'. Annoys uppity Christians, and placates everyone else."

Artifacts had never been reported from historical garden beds, which wasn't too surprising since they were assumed to be farm fields, not villages where people would have had their toolmaking, cooking, and waste sites. But Dr. Leong and her U.M. team were ever hopeful, not to mention they were eager for an opportunity to try out the department's new ground-penetrating radar system that could peer through soil without any digging. Even if they didn't find artifacts, the remains of a campfire or garbage dump would allow advanced dating methods to be applied.

"Err," said Frax, "could you explain about this radar thing? I thought radar only worked in air, like for cars and planes."

Sparrow thought for a moment. "Well, I'm no expert but I've seen it work. The GPR system looks like a funny lawnmower; you roll it over the ground and it sends data to a computer. Something about bouncing pulses, like lidar only with radio waves. Don't forget that here the waves don't have to go very far, only a few meters into the earth, not like tracking cars or airplanes from a distance.

"Anyway, as it turned out we actually did make a pretty strange find. The GPR indicated a fairly deep hole, maybe five feet deep and four across, filled in with rocks like a `dry well'. Of course, it could have been a dry well made by a recent farmer. But the location in the woods made no sense for that, and when we started digging we found the rocks were covered with soot, which we assumed meant a campfire. Since this was essentially a five-foot stack of rock layers, maybe it was a traditional site for some kind of ceremonial fire, where they brought in new rocks when the old ones became covered with soil and ash over the years.

"But the rocks weren't in rings with dirt and ash in the middle, like you'd expect from a stack of old fire sites. And five feet of natural soil buildup would take many thousands of years. It really did seem to be just a hole full of rocks.

"So we spent days carefully removing rocks and dirt and the ash around them, saving and labeling everything in layers so it could be dated later. When we finally got to the bottom, there turned out to be a real artifact under it all. It was also sooty, like the rocks.

"It was totally weird. Looked sorta like a large mug, but with three handles. A mug would be pretty unusual in itself, since nobody has ever found Indian mugs of any kind."

"Weird," interrupted Wilt. "What did they drink out of?"

"All kinds of containers, depending on what was available, like gourds, or bowls or cups of carved wood, or woven rushes waterproofed with pitch, even animal skins and bladders. For those living in the north woods the usual thing was a `makak', a container made of birch bark. White birch trees are common there, and the bark can easily be made into a cup or pot, stitched tightly with local fibers from tree roots or basswood bark.

"Elsewhere, the things closest to mugs are pottery `beakers' with a little stub for a handle. This one not only had three large handles, it also didn't look like it was shaped by hand. And it obviously wasn't fired like traditional Indian pottery, which used pit firing."

"Hey, I know about that," said Wilt, "Dad tried it once in our back yard. It was fun, but kinda smoky."

"Well I don't know about it," said Frax. "Will somebody please clue me in?"

"No problem," said Sparrow. "It's basically where you make your pots or dishes or whatever out of clay, plus some stuff called `temper' so they won't crack when they dry. Then let them dry completely, bury them in a pit with dry grass and firewood, and burn the whole works. When everything finally cools down, you pull the pots from the ashes. If it all went well, the pots will hold water, mostly, but they won't be especially strong. The fire doesn't get hot enough to `vitrify' the clay, and even if it did, most of the clay around here is what potters call `low fire', a kind that melts instead of vitrifying even if you could manage to get it hot enough."

"What's this `vitrify' business?" asked Frax.

"Vitrify just means to make it glass-like. You can tell by the sound when you tap it with a fingernail: There's a sorta ring if it's vitrified, otherwise more of a dull `thunk'.

"This mug thing was obviously vitrified. It appeared to be more like `high fire', which is strong and waterproof, and under the soot it had a sheen that could have been a glaze, something not used in ordinary pit firing."

"Cool!" said Wilt, "High fire and glazes are what my old man is always talking about, and messing with."

"So Dr. Stevens is a potter, as well as a physicist? That might explain a few things."

"He sure is, maybe more of a potter than a physicist. Though it could be it just seems that way since I mostly see him here at home; he's got a pottery studio right behind the house."

"More and more interesting," said Sparrow. "But getting back to the mug thing, it couldn't have been a one-off piece, since high fire technology would have required a lot of development. Somewhere, archaeologists should have found pottery from the stages along the way, along with the special kilns needed to fire them — none of which has been found on the continent.

"Even more important was that it didn't have the `look' of handmade pottery; it was perfectly symmetrical and smooth, like made by machine or at least from a machine-made mold.

"So to most of the team it was obviously modern, buried here by a farmer or prankster for some bizarre reason — and gone to an awful lot of work to do it out in the middle of the woods where nobody would be likely to find it.

"My father wouldn't accept that. He was the one who actually uncovered the mug, on his turn working in the hole, and he was pretty well exhausted and heat-stressed from all the digging and rock lifting by that point. Maybe he just got carried away because it was `his' discovery, but he couldn't buy the farmer-prankster idea.

"He knew it wasn't like any Indian artifact he'd ever seen. And it looked like it had been deliberately burned and buried, as if it was `evil'. If the thing was really as old as it seemed, but was made using technology unknown to that era, then maybe it had belonged to some unwelcome visitor. Maybe the occupant of a UFO. Or maybe the ancient European legends of Atlantis were really true. Maybe the evil visitor was the source of our Native American legends of soul-eating monsters called `windigos'. The other team members teased him good-naturedly about his far-out ideas, but he just got more and more excited.

"Then he started grabbing his chest and collapsed. We called 911 and did CPR, but he was in bad shape by the time the ambulance got there. He ... died in the hospital the next day."

Sparrow was pretty choked up by this point, and had to stop. The rest just sat around in total silence, stunned, not even chewing pizza. Then all three spoke up with words of condolence and sympathy.

Finally, tears in her eyes, she went on. "Well, a few weeks later the team did get dates back for the dirt and stuff we had dug out, especially the soot on the rocks, and it was all really old from top to bottom, like around 900 years. So Dad had been right that the artifact wasn't a modern prank, and since it was all the same age it supported his claim that the whole thing was about deliberately destroying the artifact.

"The typical thing to do with pottery is `petrographic analysis', where you take broken pieces, called `potsherds' or shards, and slice them up super thin. Then you examine them under a microscope, to tell what kinds of clays and minerals were present and how hot it had gotten when being made. But since this was a unique piece, with no broken parts, Dr. Leong wasn't in any rush to take slices out of it. She said she knew someone who might be able to run some high-tech non-destructive tests on the artifact, like X-ray diffraction and electron microscopy and such, to hopefully get some clues to its origin. That guy turned out to be Dr. Stevens."

"Wow," said Wilt. "So this is the big project he's been so obsessed with. I gather that whatever he's found out so far, it wasn't some simple explanation for the mug thing and how it got there?"

"I honestly don't know," admitted Sparrow. "Dr. Leong didn't give any details that I heard about. I think if it was something simple, she would have told everyone. She's a really open person; I've been staying with her ever since, and we get along great. She's applied to be my legal guardian.

"That's pretty much all I've got, but Maud just drove in last night from Wisconsin, and she has a disturbing story that sure sounds like it could be related."