Chapter 4 - The Lost Way

A simple scan and a few bites of the trowel uncover a truth that brings the site — and the team — to an immediate halt.

New to The Lost Way? Get caught up here! New chapters dropping weekly.

In the chapter, we talk about trash pits. This ancient pot is from an excavation in Hungary where I had the privilege of digging out many such trash pits. Interested in that story? Let me know in the comments.

Chapter 4

Adam and Sara arrived at the dig site in the shadow of the Basilica. Adam stood, staring at the tarp he’d used to keep prying eyes out. The morning was still cool and long shadows cast across the area from nearby trees and buildings. Overall, the area was quiet. The neighborhood had yet to wake up, but the occasional truck rumbled by delivering daily necessities across the city.

He started by uncovering the trench and took stock. The tops of stone walls of the ancient room were visible, showing a clear footprint of the room where they’d found the artifact. They looked ramshackle in comparison to the crisp two meter by one meter rectangle excavation pit that sank along one wall.

This view also showed the mortar and spacer stones that gave the wall its strength. The rough edges of the walls also showed where the ceiling had once caved in. Inside the hole itself, the smooth faces of the original interior walls were visible along with bits of white plaster.

“Ok,” started Adam, “I want to start with another scan. Now that the giant magnet is gone, it’d be great to get an idea of what we’re looking at down there.”

“Sounds good,” Sara said, beginning to unpack her equipment and prepare to start scanning. She changed from her boots into Crocs and removed her belt and hair clips, tying her hair with a scrunchy. The sensor on her magnetometer was extremely sensitive. Any metal on her or in the area she was scanning would ruin the results.

Her theoretical process, which had spurred the need for the dig to begin with, was that she could improve the resolution of the map created by her scans. The big trick she was hoping to prove was that she could provide insight into the depth and layering beneath the earth’s surface. Traditional magnetometry just showed anomalies. It was excellent for mapping out a site to find features like buildings, walls, or pits. The issue was that the two-dimensional nature of the results made it difficult to assess complex sites. The Basilica and its surroundings were perfect in that respect, as the area saw repeated use throughout history. She began scanning, covering an area that encompassed the entire anomaly caused by the artifact.

Adam looked on, glancing at the laptop screen as data came in. Before processing, it looked like the usual readings. He could see his trench clearly as it bisected the walls of the ancient room. Nothing of note yet, but Sara would need to further analyze the results.

As a private sector archaeologist, he focused on surveying and ensuring that no one was building a condo on a site like this. They used magnetometry and no small amount of sampling, but he wasn’t completely up to speed on the latest research. Out of curiosity he asked, “Why not just pull out a GPR? Could you integrate that as well?”

Sara grinned at him. “Because with all these rocks, compacted clay, and sixteen centuries of collapsed ceiling rubble, GPR is going to give us a mess of meaningless radar reflections. It works great in sandy pine flats in low-country Alabama, but here? It’d look like static. My algorithm isolates true 3D magnetic susceptibility—mapping the soil chemistry and burning, not just bouncing waves off buried rocks. Maybe I’ll integrate GPR for my post-doc, but for now, the math stands on its own.”

“Huh,” Adam thought, wondering how much he’d have to pay her to work for him. Then he heard a voice from behind him.

“It is bad luck to dig in a church,” came a voice in Greek. He turned around to an older woman, obviously a local. She wore all black, and a gleaming cross hung from her neck.

“I’m sorry, Yiayia, we are with the academy,” he attempted to respond in his vaguely passable Greek.

“Still, it is bad luck. Have you not heard of the legends of this place? To dig here is to invite doom.”

“We did not intend to dig, only to look under the surface. But something broke our tool,” he responded, doing his best to describe what had happened with his limited vocabulary. In years of dealing with locals who didn’t want archaeologists poking around, he’d always found it better to overexplain. She looked at him like he was an idiot.

Sara lifted her head, “What’s she saying?”

“It’s bad luck to dig here. She said to dig here will be our doom – I think,” he smirked.

The old woman looked on disapprovingly, finally crossing herself and moving on.

Adam turned to Sara. He’d taken her on as an intern at his firm in the early days. At the time, he didn’t have the money for his own magnetometer or an expert to use it, so he’d hired Sara for the summer to get him through. When he’d seen her talent, he had immediately introduced her to Nikolas, knowing he’d be able to give her real assignments with academic weight. But since then, he hadn’t spoken to her much. She still had a stiff, academic mindset. When even Nikolas told him she was too serious, he knew he’d need to try and get her to loosen up.

He decided today could be a good day to give it a shot. “Funny. My ‘doom’ sensor just hit the red. It tracks whether we’ll be the laughing stock of the academic community. You know what? She might be right. How do the initial readings look?”

“Nothing unexpected for me,” Sara responded, ignoring his quip. “I see the walls and the pit. The wall opposite our trench looks a little odd, but nothing else. I’ll run the spatial algorithm to try to look at the profile, and we’ll take another look.”

“Sounds good. I want to take another look at the trench,” Adam said, hopping down into the hole.

The ‘unit’, as it was technically referred to, was fairly standard. Two meters long and one meter wide, it was precisely measured and perfectly squared on either end. He’d begun digging it out over three days after they’d found the anomaly in Sara’s scan.

The ‘unit’, as it was technically referred to, was fairly standard. Two meters long and one meter wide, it was precisely measured and perfectly squared on either end. He’d begun digging it out over three days after they’d found the anomaly in Sara’s scan. Layer by layer, he had scraped away. They’d found a trove of 19th-century garbage first, then the mother lode of medieval garbage below that.

It wasn’t garbage in the modern sense of the word. Most people would be ecstatic to find a fragment of roman pottery or a Medeival button. But when trying to investigate something specific, all of was more junk to be bagged for later cleaning and study.

To Adam, the mechanics of how all of it got there were obvious. Sometime in the middle ages, when the larger bathhouse area had fallen into disuse, most of the building had been knocked down and built over. But for whatever reason, this room had been left. Eventually, the roof had collapsed and made a convenient hole for refuse throughout the ages. Sometimes, it was that simple. People built and rebuilt over an area, but the rectangular hole in the ground that was too small to repurpose became a perpetual garbage heap. From an archaeological perspective, that was great. It gave them excellent insight into the periods that the area was heavily used.

It amazed Adam that this whole time, people had been using the resting place of the most amazing artifact he’d ever seen as a dump. Such was history and archaeology.

The artifact seemed modern. It was too perfectly formed. Sara had even shown that the bottom was some kind of fancy modern metal. The problem with that was that, in his experience, dirt didn’t lie. He stared at the soil wall opposite where the artifact had rested and saw pristine, undisturbed soil profiles. Every layer was as compact as expected. He could still see the lines of refuse as they stretched in colored horizons like a ladder back into antiquity. If someone had dug a hole to hide this modern artifact as a prank, it would have been obvious — a deep, very different column of soil plunging into the older layers.

While waiting for Sara’s results, he decided to sketch the profile as it was so he could expand the excavation if needed.

As he studied the profile, he noted a distinct layer of rocks and wood ash below the block of Byzantine garbage. Those rocks and burnt timbers would have made up the ceiling of the original room. A rubble layer separating the original room’s contents from later periods had been expected. What was unexpected, now that he looked at it, was the thin layer of white along the floor. He hadn’t noticed it before, but missing it at the end of a long day of excavation wasn’t out of the question.

He took a few photos of the layer and then added a scale, documenting the half-inch layer of white. Pulling out his trowel, he scraped away a few grains of it and rolled it between his fingers. It was coarse and hard. Nothing like the clay and fine sand around it.

As he put it up to his mouth, Sara interrupted his thoughts. “Are you tasting the dirt again?”

“Tasting the dirt is a long and proud tradition in archaeology.¹ The lick test is the best way to make sure you’re digging up pottery and not just shale.”

“It’s still weird,” she said with a hint of disgust in her voice.

To be dramatic, he placed a grain of the substance on his tongue. His face changed instantly. “It’s salt.”

“What do you mean it’s salt?” Sara asked.

“I mean, there’s a super thin layer of salt down here at the bottom of the soil profile. But it’s only here on this side of the room. There was none over there by the hollow. I didn’t notice it the other day. I guess maybe they’d add salt to the baths and accidentally spilled some? But—” He stopped to think for a moment before continuing. “The salt would’ve dissolved since then. It’d have to be a heck of a lot of salt to still show up in the soil like this. Nikolas will know. Any results yet?”

Sara looked puzzled, staring at her computer. “There are some. They’re puzzling, and I want your opinion.”

Adam hopped out of the trench and walked over to the computer. It showed a top-down view of the room. The interference from the magnet was now gone, revealing four walls.

“We can see the four walls now, but my new party trick is this,” Sara dragged her mouse to the walkthrough view, rotated so that a 3D rendering of the walls was visible. It was almost ghostly with the walls being fairly see-through. At the bottom of the back wall was the hollow space where they’d found the artifact.

“You just put me into retirement,” Adam said, only half joking. “That’s incredible.”

“Thanks,” Sara responded. It felt good to get praise from Adam. He’d given her a massive opportunity to prove herself before she really knew what she was doing. “Now you just have to dig it and prove the tech is right. But look at the entrance.”

She pointed. Where a door should have been, the scan showed a solid, reinforced wall. “And here, just behind where the door should be... more fuzziness. Just past where you found your salt.”

“I saw that too,” Adam responded. “It gets a little fuzzy over there. Maybe during a renovation, they closed it off?”

“And left a Roman bag of bath salts just for giggles?”

Was that a joke? Adam thought. This was good. She was loosening up.

“If it’s a bag of bath salts,” he said, “I’ll buy you a beer. Take some photos. I’m going to start digging.”

He began by measuring a two-by-two meter square, lining up with the back edge of the current trench. Then, each layer of soil, starting with the topsoil, was removed and bagged. Sara began sifting through the dirt, looking for any artifacts of interest. At the bottom of each layer, Adam took photos and measured the depth. He unearthed layer after layer of mostly historical junk until he came to the rubble of the collapsed roof.

Adam carefully lifted each stone and handed it to Sara to collect with those excavated the previous day. After the first layer of rubble, he used his trowel to scrape away and make a flat surface until he reached the next layer, which included bits of wood and plaster. He’d had his 4.5 inch Marshaltown pointing trowel since his first fieldschool in undergrad.

Experienced archaeologists have a complex relationship with their trowels. It is an extension of their body. Many are as passionate about the brand or size of their trowel as golfers are about the brand of ball they use. The reason they demand consistency is that they can often feel the nature of the dirt as they scrape it away. They can also detect the material of a buried object when they hit it.

As Adam prepped the area, the tool suddenly scraped across a familiar surface he wasn’t expecting. He froze when he felt it. It was too soft to be rock and too hard to be wood. It was bone. He took out his brush and began to carefully sweep away the loosened clay. Slowly, the unmistakable dark yellow, almost brown color of long-buried bone appeared. From the few centimeters that were exposed, there was only one thing it could be.

Adam stood up, putting his hands on his hips and sighed deeply. He quickly took out his phone and called Ani and Nikolas. When Ani answered, he spoke without preamble, “Y’all might want to get over. Shit’s getting weird.”

On the other end of the line, Adam could hear the hollow echo of the archives, followed by Nikolas’s dry, unmistakable voice in the background. Ani had him on speaker.

“If he’s tasted the dirt and called it weird, we’re in trouble,” came the crackle through the speaker. “Adam’s tongue is more reliable than a lab report, even if it is disgusting. Tell him to stay out of the unit until we get there.”

Adam looked down at the brown curve of the bone. “Too late for that, Nik. Just get here.”

--

When Ani and Nikolas arrived, Adam was setting up a pop-up shelter over the unit. Sara was tapping violently on her computer.

“Come on, you piece of shit, re-analyze! What good is AI if you’re not going to re-optimize my algorithm for that object density?” She yelled at the laptop.

“Easy, tiger. Those AIs are coming for us. Best to stay in their good graces,” Adam responded, trying to mollify the angry scientist. He looked at Ani and nodded his head at her.

Ani walked over and put her arm around Sara. “What wonderful thing has technology brought us today?”

Sara looked at Ani with an annoyed stare and went back to typing. “While you were on your way here, I started analyzing the readings from the stone walls. We were seeing something fuzzy on the scan. I thought it was interference, but then I thought, ‘What if that’s what bone looks like when I scan at this resolution?’ So I am working on an algorithm to try to reprocess, but the AI just keeps spitting the same code back at me. It’ll take days for me to rewrite line by line.”

“Or, I could just dig it up?” offered Adam.

“Not helping!” Shouted Ani.

Ani closed the laptop in front of Sara, who collapsed in her chair.

“Sara-jan. This is archaeology, not Anthropic.”

“Fuck those guys,” she fumed.

“Yes. Indeed, fuck those guys,” Ani continued, “But what I mean is, whatever is in that hole has been there for a really long time. We don’t have to be in a rush.”

“I know. It’s just that you guys gave me this opportunity and I have all these ideas...” Sara started before being silenced by Ani.

“Bringing you with us was brilliant. I’m so grateful you came. It’s exciting and a little scary to watch you work. Let’s all take a breath. I know that this is an unconventional situation, and you’re worried about our reputation. But nothing in archaeology moves quickly.”

“Except when Joe Developer puts a mini-mall on a cultural heritage site.”

“Yes, Adam, and we’re grateful for all you do,” Nikolas responded sarcastically. “But thankfully that isn’t the case here. Additionally, as Adam knows full well, we now need to register this burial with the Ministry. The stakes have now changed, and the excavation is no longer ours.”

Ani cut in, seeing Sara start to stiffen, “But remote sensing is fine. They’ll likely appreciate anything you can give them.”

Sara looked up at her, calming down, “Thanks, Ani. I’m just a little wound up.”

Nikolas helped Adam out of the trench, and the two men walked up.

“And that’s why we need to take all of this new information and make a game plan,” Nikolas stated, “Let’s start with you, Adam. What shit is ‘getting weird’ as you’re so fond of saying?”

Adam stared at the excavation unit, the sun bearing down. Three walls and half of the floor were completely uncovered. He had excavated down to the collapsed ceiling and had been working his way towards the ‘door’ which had apparently been walled up. Then he’d found the bone. It didn’t take a bioarcheologist to know it was the back of a skull.

“As you can see, there’s a burial in this storage room. And whoever put it there didn’t want it found. From the looks of Sara’s scan, the doorway’s been bricked up, Edgar Allen Poe style. We need a plan. I know what soil layers to expect, but I don’t know much about the orientation of the body just yet. It’s likely face down, head towards the back wall where the hollow was, but I could be wrong. I’m also guessing female based on the size and nuchal crest, but it could also be a juvenile.”

“Oh,” Adam continued, “And there’s a layer of salt on the floor. It starts just on this side of the burial. Because this storage room just wasn’t exciting enough.”

The three archaeologists stared at the unit. All three were thinking the same thing, but none of them wanted to say it out loud. It sounded absurd. There wasn’t enough room for the buried body to be lying face down. The burial was almost certainly prostrate. An artifact that would have been a world wonder, bricked into a storage closet, with someone worshiping it, was a concept from an adventure movie.

Not seeing a better course of action, Ani hopped into the trench and examined the bone, barely peeking out from the dirt. She looked at the soil profile from top to bottom. She reached out with her hand, feeling an intense pull towards the bone. Her hand reached out slowly, as if moving on its own, before Nikolas’ voice jolted her out of the trance.

“Why salt? It doesn’t make any sense. I’d expect there to be salt around the artifact as well. Was there any evidence of salt before?” He asked.

“Nope. It’s pretty distinct. There’s enough of it that the groundwater didn’t absorb it into the soil. Which brings up another question. How is it still there and not dissolved away? It’d have to be a ton of salt,” responded Adam.

Sara, carrying the handheld magnetometer, knelt next to Ani and began scanning the area where the body would be. “I want to try something,” she said.

Adam leaned over, “Sara, when did you think this up?”

“Just now.”

Adam, Ani, and Nikolas exchanged glances as the screen processed the scan data. Slowly, the blurred area came into focus. A ghostly shadow of bones in extremely high resolution. Their collective jaws dropped as Sara spun the image around, showing different angles.

“The body is prostrate, head towards the object. But look at the arms. They’re behind. Why should someone worship like that?”

Ani reached out, her hand again drawn to the burial. As she touched the bone... a wave of emotion flooded through her arm and seemingly into her chest. Her vision flashed, and she ripped her hand back.

“She wasn’t worshiping. She was bound and placed there, arms tied behind her back.”

“Ani,” Nikolas said, “We can make some assumptions, but it’s early to say it’s a woman. We haven’t even excavated the whole skull yet.”

“It was a woman. She was bound... gagged... and buried there alive. Her pain. I can feel it,” Ani looked up frantically at Nikolas, fear in her eyes, “How do I know that? How could I possibly know that? I couldn’t – but I do somehow.”

Ani’s heart clinched in her chest, her body suddently reacting as if it was her tied up and buried alive, not the woman in the burial next to her.

Sara looked at Ani with a terrified face as her colleague began to shake uncontrollably. Not sure what to do, she looked at Adam but couldn’t read his face which seemed oddly calm. He was looking directly at Ani’s arm. Nikolas had a similar expression, but said nothing.

“I’m covering the unit. Sara, finish the scan and pack up. Ani, we need to get you inside,” Adam said flatly, taking her arm and pulling her from the trench.

Ani didn’t object, just whispered, “Adam, how?”

Adam took a long look at the laptop screen. The fingers and hands overlapped. The shoulders were in an odd position. The jaw was set awkwardly. But it was also a skeleton from the 4^th century. What Ani said was plausible, but impossible to verify without excavating. Would a rope show up in Sara’s scan? He couldn’t see one.

“I don’t know, Ani,” he said in a comforting tone. “We will figure it. But for now we really need to get you inside. I certainly have hit my daily weridness quota. We also need a strategy before we file the report with the Ministry.

“Nik, help her begin the walk back. Take a taxi if you need to. I’ll get things buttoned up and head back with Sara.”

Nikolas put his arm around Ani and began walking back towards the lab, whispering calming words that Sara couldn’t make out. She turned to Adam, “Adam, what just happened? Why are you not freaking out? She can’t possibly know all that.”

“She can.”

“How?”

“I don’t know.”

“That’s not an answer.”

“Did you ever meet my wife? Ever see her and Ani together?”

“No, why?”

Adam sighed and knelt next to the unit, covering the burial carefully, “I’m not a believer in this stuff per se, but when they were together, they had a weird connection. Ani gets that a lot. She gets these feelings. She and Mary could look at each other, and they’d somehow know what the other one was thinking. I always chalk it up to them knowing each other deeply. But sometimes, it was uncanny,” he paused, “This feels like that. Don’t ask me how, but it does.”

Sara looked frustrated, “Adam, that’s not science.”

“I agree. It’s not science. But I’d give it a 90% shot that it’s a woman. It’s also weird that the burial is so close to the door. Also, there’s the salt. It’s all too weird. When Ani gets weird like that, Nik and I have learned it’s best to regroup.”

“He didn’t balk at you calling him Nik.”

“I know. This time it was allowed.”

“You know you guys are crazy, right? Every time I feel like I know you three, something absolutely insane comes up.”

“Yeah, we’re a herd of cats, we are.”

“What? Does that make me the shepherd?” Sara countered.

“You’re project brought us all together, so I guess so,” he said, smiling at her, “Head on back. I’ll secure the site and catch up.”

Jumping back into the pit, Adam reached out and touched the bone in the dirt. He did not feel anything. He knew from her body language that Ani clearly had. What that had to do with her constantly rubbing her arm, he wasn’t sure about. He’d need to ask. He covered the trench, locked the gate to the fenced-off excavation, and walked quickly to catch up with Sara.

1. Yes, licking dirt and or small artifacts is something archaeologists do. I remember watching a mentor do it at my first dig in undergrad. I thought he was full of it. Then I tasted the difference between a piece of shell and a pottery sherd. It was wild.