Daniel, a Pueblo Indian potter and a student in my "Ancient New Mexico" class
at the University of New Mexico, captured it all in a recent conversation. "Professor,"
he said, "I need to talk to you about the Folsom points we studied last semester." He
was referring to a type of exquisitely made spear point common between 8500 and
9000 B.C. He went on: "They baffle me. I cannot understand them. I have made copies
of all the rest that we studied and I understand these. But the Folsom is different --
trying to make one, I have driven flakes of obsidian into my fingers until the tips were
hard and bloody. But I cannot do it. I think it is a spiritual thing -- some spiritual
thing that I do not command. I need to understand this part of my past in order to
become both the artist and the historian of my people that I wish to be."

I couldn't solve Daniel's immediate problem, having neither the technical skill
nor, perhaps, the spirituality to make a magnificent fluted Folsom point. But his
quest captures the very essence of our collective human fascination with archae-
ology. It is all about who we were, who we are, and who we hope to be.

This sense of our connectedness to the whole flow of the human saga is
deeply intoxicating. Archaeology is about much more than antiquities on a
museum shelf. It is about the hypnotic rhythms of civilization -- the rise and fall
of humankind's cultural breast, from which issues the collective breath of hu-
man triumph and folly, of greatness and ruin, of kindness and cruelty. It is about
both past and present, about power and decline.

But Daniel's quest is more focused and urgent than most of ours. As a descen-
dant of the ancient farmers of the Four Corners popularly called the "Anasazi,"
he needs to learn his people's story. The precious legacy of their survival is his
inheritance. Bequeathed to him at great human cost, the structured knowledge
of his Anasazi-Puebloan ancestors and the collective arts of survival they ac-
quired over the course of 17 centuries allowed his people to win the greatest of
all human battles -- evolution. Puebloan survival itself is absolute proof of this
Homeric victory.

Daniel's task will be even more complex than that of his ancestors. He must first
understand and recapitulate their lessons if his own world is to last for yet another
millennium. At the same time, he must adapt to the "modern" world that now sur-
rounds his. Like all powerful societies, it unthinkingly threatens to swallow up all that
is traditional. These lessons are essential to the rest of us, too. Through them, mod-
ern industrial and information-based societies may also find the means to survive
another millennium. This, then, is why we do archaeology. Archaeologists are detec-
tives in the game of evolution and keepers of the tally in the human saga of survival.
Archaeology is about people and almost always about the present as well as the past,
though we often fail to make that obvious.

Since Daniel's question prompted me, his thoroughly American professor, to
write this book as an answer, I have written it as if addressed to him. It is his

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