by Neil Caudle

ometimes, science tells us things we would rather not know. Most of us can turn away. The scientist cannot. Brian Billman would prefer to be talking about his work in Peru, where he studies the origins of political systems among pre-Columbian people. But as soon as the September 7 issue of Nature appeared, he and his colleagues were news. National news. They didn't want it that way. They hadn't set out to alarm anyone, or offend anyone. They had only been doing their jobs.

For Billman, assistant professor of anthropology, the story began in 1997. Soil Systems, Inc., the archaeological-consulting company he worked for at the time, was under contract to excavate an ancient settlement at Cowboy Wash, which is on a floodplain in the Mesa Verde area of southwestern Colorado. Having resolved a water-rights dispute with the federal government, the Ute Mountain Ute Tribe was planning a large-scale irrigation project on tribal land. But first, the tribe would have to unearth and conserve what remained of the past.

"Our first objective," Billman says, "was to get human remains out of the way of destruction so that they could be treated with respect and reburied."

Preliminary work had found traces of a twelfth century community of Anasazi, ancestors of modern Puebloan people. The community had included as many as 130 people, farming families who lived in small clusters of pithouses—keyhole-shaped dwellings dug eight or 10 feet deep into the ground, roofed with timbers and sod. Life in the pithouse revolved around an open hearth, and smoke from the cooking fires left the structure just as the people did—through a hole in the roof. Hundreds of pithouses had been excavated in the Southwest, so Billman knew—or thought he knew—what to expect.

But as the team reached the remains of a pithouse roof, Billman suspected that something was amiss. There was too much good wood in the roof. Anasazi people typically did not leave perfectly good building materials lying around. As the team dug deeper, through an infill of mud, they uncovered something else they weren't expecting: human bones. The bones lay scattered on the pithouse floor. Broken, tossed aside, and left.

This was a crime scene, and Brian Billman knew it.

Next: "This isn't going to be the usual pithouse site."

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