Sacred Ground

by Barbara Wood

  As she reached for her cold coffee she contemplated the mess piled on the workbench— artifacts waiting to be examined and labeled and catalogued. Erica was in the trailer that had been converted into a lab filled with scientific equipment, microscopes, tall stools, and a bulletin board covered with pins and notes and drawings. It was early evening and she had been sorting the last of the day’s finds. She was the only one in the lab; everyone else was either still at dinner in the cafeteria tent or socializing around the camp.

  When Erica had uncovered the skull in the cave floor, Sam Carter had authorized her to commence a full-scale excavation. They got the go-ahead from the Office of Environmental Preservation, and while Sam was to be the field director, he gave Erica the honor of conducting the hands-on work, despite sharp criticism from both within and outside the State Archaeologist’s Office. However, he had cautioned her: “Be objective, Erica. After the embarrassment of the Chadwick shipwreck, there were those who wanted you fired. But you’re a good anthropologist and I don’t think your career should go into the toilet because of one impulsive mistake.”

  Promising to be careful, Erica had approached the job with her characteristic vigor and exuberance, wasting no time getting started marking out the cave floor with stakes and string, and then meticulously scraping off the soil with the edge of a trowel blade, curbing her eagerness to plunge through the soil layers and find the riches of history underneath. The scraped-off dirt was placed in buckets and hauled topside, where volunteers sieved through it to see if it contained archaeological material.

  Outside the cave, the noisy business of geologists, engineers, and soils specialists got under way in earnest along Emerald Hills Drive.

  And Jared Black, of course, had his job.

  They were in a race. Jared’s task was to locate the most likely descendant as quickly as possible and then to turn the cave and its contents over to that person or tribe. As soon as that happened, Erica suspected she would be out of a job. She was Anglo, and once the cave was owned by Native Americans they would want their own people on the excavation, possibly even halting the excavation altogether and sealing the cave. And so Erica was working long, hard hours, desperate to decipher the mysteries of the cave before Jared Black accomplished his goal.

  The first visitor he had brought to the cave was Chief Antonio Rivera of the Gabrielino tribe. He was there to possibly identify the painting and therefore allow Jared to start the legal wheels in motion. As the visitor was of advanced age, he had been lowered to the cave in a chair, and while Chief Rivera had sat and gazed at the pictographs, Erica had paused in her work to watch him. The face mapped with a million lines and creases, coppery and weathered, remained a mask as the small, alert eyes flitted from one symbol to another, stopping, fixing, staring, absorbing, and then moving on. He had sat motionless for nearly an hour, his eyes drinking in the magnificent mural, body rigid, rough cracked hands flat on his knees, until finally he had heaved a ragged sigh and risen from the chair to say, “It is not of my tribe.”

  One after another Jared brought tribal members into the cave— Tongva, Diegueñeo, Chumash, Luiseño, Kemaaya— some young, some old, men and women, in suits or jeans, short hair or braids, to stand or sit and ponder the perplexing mysteries of the ancient mural. And each, upon leaving, shook his or her head to say, “It is not my tribe.” Some of the visitors looked at Erica with clear displeasure, recalling ancient taboos about women trespassing in holy places. Some were even uncomfortable about themselves being there. A woman from the Purisima tribe north of Santa Barbara became highly agitated and left, saying that she had broken the taboo which forbade women to look upon the sacred symbols of a shaman’s vision quest and that now her entire tribe would be cursed because of her being here. Some visitors, however, looked favorably upon Erica and her work. One young man, a member of the Navajo tribe and a professor of Native American history at the University of Arizona, shook Erica’s hand and said he looked forward to hearing of her progress.

  Jared also produced Anglo experts, men and women trained in universities to know Indian ways. These, too, with their degrees and book knowledge, shook their heads and departed.

  The painting wasn’t the only mystery in the cave.

  The 1814 one-cent piece she had found the day before, for example. In 1814 it was illegal for Californios to trade with Americans. American ships were not allowed to dock at San Pedro or San Francisco, and anyone who jumped ship was caught and deported. So how did an American coin get into the cave? Erica knew it couldn’t have been dropped there years later, when California was part of the United States, because the relief was so sharp. One could clearly see the wreath embracing the words One Cent, and around that, United States of America. On the other side, the Liberty head with a wreath on her curly hair surrounded by twelve crisply defined stars and the numbers 1814, all sharply defined. A coin that had been in circulation for years would be worn smooth from so much handling. This one had been recently minted when it was lost. And so there was a mystery here.

  There were more.

  Erica looked at the black-and-white photos tacked to the bulletin board showing the remarkable discovery Luke had made while cleaning the cave walls: words etched into the sandstone wall of the cave: La Primera Madre— The First Mother.

  Who was the First Mother? Was this possibly a clue as to the identity of the Lady?

  That’s what they were calling her: the Lady. The woman whose intact skeleton had been gradually exposed by Erica over the past weeks, complete with burial objects, remnants of clothing, and even wisps of long white hair.

  Determining gender had been easy: the pelvis was clearly that of a female. Age at time of death, which Erica placed between eighty and ninety, was determined by looking at the teeth, which were worn down nearly to the jaw, indicating a lifetime of eating food contaminated with coarse sand and dirt. Determining the historical age of the skeleton was another matter and required carbon-14 analysis. The bone tissue dated between nineteen hundred and twenty-two hundred years old, and the fact that a spear and a spear thrower had been buried with the woman instead of bow and arrow also placed her prior to fifteen hundred years ago.

  Erica had also been able to deduce that the Lady had been a medicine woman. Buried with the skeleton were pouches of seeds and small woven baskets containing herbs. Most of it had disintegrated but microscopic analysis had so far identified several of them as healing herbs.

  What Erica couldn’t resolve, however, was tribal affiliation. The woman had been tall, which meant possibly Mojave, who were among the tallest tribes on the North American continent. The burial objects were not Chumash, nor had the Chumash buried their dead this side of Malibu Creek. The woman couldn’t have been Gabrielino since they cremated their dead. Her funerary objects were intact, and the Indians of the Los Angeles basin ritualistically broke the deceased’s possessions— snapping an arrow in two, breaking a spear— so that the objects would die and their spirits could join their owner in the afterlife.

  But whoever she was, whatever her tribe, those who buried her had done so lovingly and with great care and reverence. The Lady had been found on her side, arms folded at her chest, knees drawn comfortably up in what looked like a fetal or sleeping position. She had been wrapped in a blanket of rabbit skins, most of which had disintegrated but which could still be seen in small patches on the skeleton. Several shell-bead necklaces were strung around her neck, and strands of shell-beads on both wrists. Pollen analysis indicated she had been laid in a bed of flowers and sage, and small offerings of food— seeds, nuts, berries— had been placed near her hands. Around the body the woman’s personal possessions had been carefully laid: feathered hairpins, engraved bone earrings, a flute made of bird bone, and various objects which Erica could not identify but suspected held ritualistic significance. Traces of ochre suggested the corpse had been painted red before interment.

  While sounds from the camp drifted through the open window— someone playing a guitar, te
ams tossing a volleyball— Erica sent herself back through time. She gazed at the photos taped above the workbench, taking in the white hair and fragile bones that had once been part of a living, breathing woman, and suddenly felt an overwhelming need to know the Lady’s story.

  Stories were what made people real, what gave them souls. Erica would never forget the day she had first started wanting to know people’s stories, the day her life’s course was set forever. She had been twelve years old and visiting a museum with a school group. They were in the anthropology wing looking at the dioramas while the teacher lectured about the lives of the Indians depicted in the reconstructed village behind the glass. Erica had been suddenly filled with an inexplicable awe to think that these people had died long ago and yet here they were, showing people in the present how they lived! What a wonderful thing to do, to not let people die and be forgotten, but to keep them alive and remembered.

  Who are you? Erica silently asked the eggshell skull with its delicate cheekbones and touchingly vulnerable jaw. What was your name? Who loved you? Whom did you love in return? Alone in the cave, amid the shadows and silence, handling the Lady’s brittle skeleton so sweetly curled on its side, Erica had been rocked with unexpected emotion. It had been like tending to a child or nurturing a baby. She had felt fiercely protective of the forgotten, lonely bones, wanting to gather them to her breast and keep them safe.

  That was when her resolve had been born: to learn the woman’s identity before Jared Black found the cave’s legal owners.

  Perhaps the latest find, unearthed from the cave that afternoon, would provide a clue. The strange object was roughly the size and shape of a small football and consisted of a rabbit fur bundle tied with animal sinews decorated with shell-beads. Erica had found it at a level lower than the 1814 coin but above the soil layer from which she had extracted pottery shards. Since the Indians of the Los Angeles basin didn’t fire clay but instead traded with visiting Pueblo peoples for pottery, Erica scoured reference catalogues of Southwest pottery that had been dated and identified. She had been able to determine, by the lead ore content in the glaze and the sandstone temper, that the pots had been made in Pecos, a large Indian pueblo on the Rio Grande, around the year 1400. That still left a range of four hundred years. Further analysis was required to determine more precisely the year that the rabbit fur bundle had been left in the cave.

  Erica was certain there was something inside. An offering left by a descendant who had come to the cave to pray for a miracle— a woman hoping for a child, a warrior desiring a maiden.

  Erica wanted to open it, but her eyes ached. Deciding to go for a walk and get some air, she picked up a book from amid the clutter on her workbench and tucked it under her arm.

  * * *

  The land behind the Zimmerman property was actually the north crest of the canyon, with the producer’s mansion sitting on the south crest, across the sinking backyards. Here, among oak, dwarf pine, and chaparral, trailers and tents had been erected to accommodate the archaeologists and volunteers who had come to sieve, clean, sort, catalogue, photograph, analyze, and run tests on everything that was being brought out of the cave and out of the Zimmerman pool crater— mostly, it was human bones.

  During the day, the area buzzed with activity. While police, disaster teams and myriad city workers dealt with homeowners, curiosity-seekers, and news crews, licensed land surveyors were mapping the ground conditions of the mesa and comparing them to historical mapping. They worked all over the neighborhood with levels, theodolites, drills, backhoes, electronic distance-measuring equipment, seismic analysis units, and various types of small sampling tools to collect soil for laboratory analysis. Another backyard had partially sunk, creating a dramatic scene of an elaborate Renaissance-style fountain cracked in two and tilting.

  Archaeologists weren’t the only ones living at the site. There were people from the Seismographic Institute, monitoring delicate instruments which they had placed all over the mesa and Emerald Hills Estates; uniformed rent-a-cops hired by the homeowners to protect the mansions from looters; and construction workers brought in to shore up the cliff, the swimming pool crater, and the inside of the cave— guys in hard hats flirting with the leggy anthropology majors who had been recruited from UCLA. Many of the hard hats were Indians hired under new legislation initiated in part by Jared Black, who had argued that construction-site monitoring of Indian burial mounds not only provided jobs for Indians, it also raised cultural awareness for tribal members, helped pay for tribal training programs, and provided experts that developers and government agencies needed in order to comply with state and federal environmental impact laws.

  There were other Indians here as well, protestors on the other side of the police barriers who demanded that the excavation be stopped even though no one knew which tribe the cave and the skeleton belonged to. There were also Indians who wanted the dig to continue in hopes of getting an identification. Jared Black was often seen talking to the protestors, trying to mediate between clashing Native American groups. Already one fight had broken out, the protestors taken away in handcuffs. Emotions were running high. Since the NAGPR Act of 1990, skeletons were being removed from museum collections around the country for reburial. The Smithsonian had already returned two thousand skeletons, with the remaining fourteen thousand to follow. But the problem with the Emerald Hills Woman was that her tribal affiliation was as yet unidentified and so some tribes were worried that a member of a rival tribe might handle the bones and possibly put a curse on them and her descendants.

  As Erica crossed the noisy camp, she looked over at Jared Black’s ostentatious forty-foot Winnebago, parked a distance away from the humbler tents and trailers. There were no lights on inside. She had seen him leave early that morning, tearing out of the parking area as if the backseat of his Porsche were on fire. Apparently he hadn’t yet returned.

  Jared was not an idle man. Even though he was on the State Native American Heritage Commission, he still had his private law practice with a prestigious firm in San Francisco. He was currently having his staff run searches on local deeds and historical references to the cave, poring over the records of the Franciscan Missions, digging through city, county and state archives, trying to find if Indians had ever been owners of record or if there were references to any particular tribe in that area.

  Erica had been inside the RV once, when Jared had called a meeting between her and Sam and members of a local tribe. The Winnebago was equipped with state-of-the-art electronics, an entertainment center, king-size bed, Sub-Zero refrigerator, dishwasher, microwave oven, automatic ice maker, plush carpeting, and glass cabinets displaying crystal stemware. It was ritzier and loaded with more conveniences than any apartment Erica had ever lived in. Jared Black, the lawyer and Indian rights activist, was a flashy show-off, in her opinion, reveling in the spotlight. Jared had a secretary, on loan as a courtesy from a local law firm, who came every morning and then left with a full briefcase. People were in and out of Jared’s RV all day long— attorneys, politicians, tribal representatives. His professional life was an open book.

  Jared Black the man, on the other hand, was something of an enigma.

  At the end of the day, when work shut down and city crews went home, and Erica and her team put away their tools and dispersed to the cafeteria tent or to private living quarters, Jared Black also closed down for the day, the visitors stopped coming, the lights went on in his RV, his door remained closed. He never joined the others for dinner but dined alone. And then around eight, he would leave, carrying a small athletic bag, and return two hours later, his hair damp. Erica imagined he went for a workout somewhere, perhaps to play handball or to swim laps, but it wasn’t just two or three nights a week, it was every single night almost without fail. He’s a personal trainer to prizefighters and kung fu stars. He climbs the outside of the Bonaventure Hotel every night, with permission of course. He wrestles alligators that are going to be made into Gucci wallets. Whatever it was, it ac
counted for his build. Even in a three-piece suit, it was obvious Jared Black possessed a trim, hard body.

  From what Erica could see, he had no social life. She wondered about his wife, why she hadn’t come to join him. He had gone away for four days a couple of weeks back, Erica presumed it was to go north to San Francisco, where he lived. He and his wife engaged in passionate and unbridled lovemaking. They made love everywhere— in their bedroom, in Golden Gate Park, in a cable car— an insatiable love fest to make up for lost time and to tide them over in the celibate months to come.

  Jared’s pieces didn’t fall together the way other people’s did. Erica couldn’t find his story. Although she knew the surface facts about him, she could not unearth the artifacts that were buried beneath his complex layers.

  Erica did know one thing about Jared Black, however: she didn’t trust him.

  A booming voice pierced her thoughts. “There you are!” Sam Carter, emerging from the cafeteria tent with coffee stains on his tie. “I was just coming to see you.” The news wasn’t good. “I’ve just gotten off the phone with the OEM. We’re at the mercy of nature, Erica, that’s all there is to it. Those aftershocks yesterday, another swimming pool sinking, they’re saying this whole canyon could go in a second. You have to be ready to move out at a moment’s notice.”

  “But I’m not finished!”

  “The Office of Emergency Management doesn’t want to take responsibility for your safety should another big aftershock strike— and they are expecting one.”

  “I’ll take responsibility for myself.”

  “Erica, your safety is my responsibility and if the OEM says we have to clear out, then we clear out.”

  He saw the book she was holding. When she caught his questioning look, she handed it to him. Rare Medium, Well-Done: The Strange Life and Ministry of Sister Sarah. The title was taken from the headline of a story that had run in the Los Angeles Times in 1926 reporting the smashing success of the medium’s mass séances at the Shrine Auditorium, where over six thousand hysterical people had claimed to see and speak to spirits. “Doing a little light reading before bedtime?” Sam said.