"Kristine Kathryn Rusch - The Tenth Planet" - читать интересную книгу автора (Rusch Kristine Kathryn)

Bradshaw already knew a great deal about the Tillamook, and had excavated
several other sites relating to them, one that got mired in yet another
controversy when his students discovered skeletal remains and the local
Native
American tribes, most of whom knew nothing about the Tillamook and their dead
culture, had demanded that the dig end while they researched Tillamook
cultural
values to know if Bradshaw was violating an ancient burial site.
He had already known that he wasn't violating anythingтАФ the body had no
evidence
of traditional Tillamook death rituals. Instead, the skull was cracked and a
large section in the back was depressed, indicating that either this guy had
fallen and hit his head or that he had been murdered. Eventu-ally Bradshaw
won
this argument and continued the dig, but not without some personal pain. The
fight with the local tribes had inspired The Oregonian to investigate
Bradshaw'spast.
That was the thing that surprised him the most about the message from Cross.
No
archaeologist with a good reputation had spoken to Bradshaw in twenty years,
let
alone asked for his help. He supposed he was flattered by Cross's message.
And
intrigued. But he felt something else, something he didn't want to feel,
especially at his age: just a little bit of hope.
Bradshaw passed the dig site and crossed behind it, toward a thin Douglas fir
where he had had the students dig their first test hole. The test hole went
very
deepтАФthis one went deeper than it should have, since the students were being
overly cau-tious. This was called a depth-gauge dig, and it was done so that
he
could examine the layers and see how deep the dig site had to go to reach the
ideal location for their search. Brad-shaw's students were going back three
to
five hundred years, but they had dug the test hole so deep that he figured it
went down five thousand years.
He smiled as he remembered double-checking their work. "No need to go any
deeper," he had said. "Much of the North-west Pacific Coast culture was just
forming right about the point you're at."
The students had stopped as if they had been burned. Ap-parently they hadn't
realized that you didn't have to dig five hundred feet down to get to five
hundred years. "This was why," he had said to his students on their first day
of
class, "you actually dig instead of read about digging. Archaeology is a
hands-on science, just like all the others. Knowing theory only takes you so
far."
Now he was glad they had gone down so deep. Because he remembered other test
holes from other digs in the area, and they all showed what he thought this
one
would show: the black layer Dr. Cross had been looking for. Only the layer