The Dig

“. . . a compelling story.”

Archaeology graduate student Jim Hunt is issued an ultimatum: get some actual field experience or lose his funding. With a domestic partner and a baby to support, Jim is desperate.

As a last resort Jim takes an unpaid position as a volunteer at a small museum in Lyons, Kansas, which is sponsoring a dig on a local farm, but doesn’t receive a warm welcome from its eccentric director, Earl Clef.

When Jim trespasses to better examine a large and very elaborate mausoleum that is out of sync with the rest of the old cemetery, he is knocked unconscious and dumped beside a country road. It is a very unwarm welcome to Lyons, Kansas.

Five hundred years before, Spanish conquistador Francisco Vasquez de Coronado also receives a hostile welcome to the area as his guide, an Indian called Turk, leads him and his men deeper into the featureless plains in search of cities of gold.

Jim learns that his assailant at the cemetery was most likely a thug named Mitch Keeper, employed by a reclusive millionaire whose wife is buried in the mausoleum that so interested the archaeology student.

Why Keeper assaults him when a simple request to leave the cemetery would have sufficed puzzles Jim. When Keeper tries to ambush Jim in an alley in Lyons, the archaeologist retaliates and is arrested, and as a consequence, loses his unpaid job at the museum.

Meanwhile, in flashbacks told in interwoven chapters, the reader follows Coronado on his increasingly desperate search for gold, endangering the lives of his men as supplies run out, and game and water are increasingly hard to find.

Despite the distrust by his men for the man called Turk, Coronado, blinded by his need for gold to repay those who financed his exploration, continues to follow the Indian.

A Catholic priest, Father Padilla, accompanies Coronado in his own quest to save souls of the heathen, whether they want to be saved or not or understand a word of Spanish.

Jim is bailed out of jail by an eccentric couple, Pete and Auntie, who are researching their family trees in the genealogy section at the museum, looking for famous ancestors.

Earl Clef tells Jim to clear out his belongings from the old shed back of the museum where the archaeologist has been living, and leave Lyons. He doesn’t want Jim’s behavior to bring scandal to his museum, and besides, the dig has been cancelled.

The museum’s assistant director, young Eva, is sympathetic to Jim’s desperate situation, but has no explanation as to why the dig was cancelled.

In the alternating flashback chapter, Coronado is even more desperate than Jim. His men are dying of starvation and disease, but Turk continues to insist that the cities of gold lay just beyond the horizon.

Jim is certain that the dig might reveal information about more than just the Witchita Indian culture; he is certain that iron artifacts he discovers during a preliminary survey of the dig site date to the age of Spanish exploration, maybe even’s Coronado’s expedition.

When Clef is found murdered in his car, the old dirt farmer on whose property the dig site is located, is arrested. To raise money for a lawyer, the farmer sells his property to the reclusive millionaire, Evan Kingston, who also owns the elaborate mausoleum that so fascinates Jim.

The stories of Jim and Coronado intersect as author Sheldon Russell subtly draws parallels between the conquistador’s need and lust for gold, and the archaeologist’s need and lust for knowledge. Coronado’s obsession leads to dishonor and disgrace, while Jim’s leads to a life-threatening confrontation.

Mr. Russell’s careful research and the old-fashioned language used in the chapters narrating Coronado’s explorations bring the conquistador, Father Padilla, and Turk to vivid life, as well as describing the endless plains upon which they play out their destinies.

Colorado’s and the other characters from his expedition are more vivid and well-rounded than Mr. Russell’s modern day characters perhaps because they are less bizarre and based on historical fact.

Earl Clef, Mitch Keeper, and Evan Kingston, the genealogy researchers Pete and Auntie, and especially Stufflebaum, taxidermist and general handyman at the museum, verge on stereotypes rather realistic characters.

Despite some shortcomings in characterization, Sheldon Russell’s interweaving of the stories of the conquistador and the archaeology student and their different but related obsessions make for a compelling story.