Effigies Read Free

used the same brand of field notebook that she did. Except he’d spent his childhood digging up relics from the dawn of his own civilization, and she’d spent hers unearthing the slave cabins where her ancestors had been held captive.
    Oka Hofobi’s mother showed Dr. Mailer and Chuck into the room, and the newly formed team enjoyed a good half-hour fondling the goods in anticipation of finding some treasures of their own.
    When Faye noticed Joe moving toward the window, she wasn’t sure whether he’d reached the end of his attention span, or whether he was feeling crowded in a room with so many people, or whether the outdoors was simply calling him. Since she was the one who kept coming up with reasons for Joe to leave their Florida home on Joyeuse Island and be with strangers, she sidled over to make sure he was okay.
    It turned out that Joe had been called to the window by a sunset made more splendid by a blue-black thunderhead that roiled bigger by the minute. But it wasn’t the colorful sky that held him there. Pointing with his chin, he silently called Faye’s attention to the flat-topped mound that rose from the property across the road from Oka Hofobi’s house. It stood on the far side of a soybean field at the edge of a heavily wooded area. Unlike Nanih Waiya, it had not been cleared of the trees that rose through its flanks. The underbrush covering the mound served as camouflage, so that it could hide in plain sight. It stood in full view of the rural highway that wound through this area, where many people surely saw this large and ancient structure every day without paying it much attention.
    Oka Hofobi saw them peering out the window. “One day, I’d love to excavate that. My neighbor, Mr. Calhoun, caught me sneaking around over there when I was fifteen and he told me to get the hell off his land. It was a good thing he didn’t think to ask me to empty my pockets. Check these out. I found them in the rootball of a downed tree.”
    He opened another case and pulled out two nondescript clay balls. They weren’t molded into a complex shape or thrown on a wheel. They weren’t incised with intricate patterns. They weren’t even pretty, but Faye took in a sharp breath while everyone around her erupted with exclamations like, “Hey!” and “Look at that!” and “No shit!”
    The two brown lumps were cooking balls typical of the Poverty Point culture, which meant that they could be fifteen hundred years older than the Middle Woodland site that Oka Hofobi had mined for the other artifacts in the room. The cooking balls were so ubiquitous at Poverty Point sites that archaeologists called them PPOs, short for Poverty Point Objects.
    Oka Hofobi handed one of the balls to Faye. It felt warm and comfortable in her hand. Perhaps three and a half millennia had passed since someone leaned down and scooped up a lump of clay, squeezed it into a ball, then threw it in the fire. She could feel the contours left by that long-decayed hand. Narrow depressions where slender fingers had squeezed the earth were divided by ridges formed where the clay had squished up between those fingers. This was the soul of archaeology for Faye—forging a human connection with the past.
    “Now I can’t say for sure Mr. Calhoun’s mound is as old as we’re all thinking it is. All I’ve got is these two cooking balls. Maybe they came from somewhere else…”
    “You’re thinking maybe they flew?” Toneisha asked.
    “I don’t know. Maybe Mr. Calhoun’s great-grandfather traveled all over the state, building a collection of arrowheads and artifacts. Maybe when he died, his kids spread them over the mound in his memory.”
    Every eyebrow in the room was raised in skepticism.
    “Okay. Maybe they’re cooking balls and they were made right here, but they’re more recent than we’re thinking. My point is that out-of-context artifacts aren’t likely to tell us what we want to know. We just can’t know how old that mound