Former New Mexico State Historic Preservation Officer and now-retired archaeologist Lynn Sebastian presents a highly entertaining and informative fictionalized account of a salvage archaeological project conducted some 40 years prior on Navajo land. She deftly describes three months living in a field camp conducting fieldwork in the San Juan Basin of northwestern New Mexico where her “real” husband Patrick Hogan led a crew in the excavation of a sample of previously recorded sites slated for destruction by the expansion of a strip mine.
Sebastian humorously dispels romantic notions of fieldwork, replacing them with more realistic details regarding the long, hot, dusty days of hard labor, cold nights, limited sanitation and amenities, and human dynamics that archaeological excavation and field camps usually entail. These are balanced by the simplicity of life stripped of outside complications, living close to the land, with evenings around the campfire under the vast, starry sky, swapping stories, bonded by a common goal and those exciting moments when “you feel as if you have reached across time and touched the past… those moments that make archaeology truly worth doing.” She describes the crew as “the last generation of archaeologists to routinely experience the peace and simplicity of life in remote field camps in the deserts and canyons and mountains of the region before change came in the technology and practice of the profession.”
Her excellent, non-technical descriptions of the duties required, decisions involved, and challenges encountered in archaeological survey, site recording, treatment of artifacts, and test excavation strategies for a variety of sites stretching from the Archaic period (8,000-2,500 years ago), the Ancestral Puebloan period (A.D. 600-1200), to historic Navajo occupation sites, complete with field maps, give the reader a fascinating window into archaeologists’ attempts to understand and record the past. Thoroughly entertaining and educational, this book is highly recommended, with Sebastian generously donating all proceeds to The Archaeological Conservancy.
