A Tragic Accident... by Zachary Goldstein

I am eleven years old. I walk silently along the shoreline of the western coast of Mexico, my best friend Nick and my brother Zane at my side. The sun is just setting over the horizon and the waves break clear and crisp against the gray sand. My father is sitting a few hundred meters away, up a long flight of stone steps leading to an overhanging balcony built straight into the cliff side. He is listening to the radio.
“Go.” He had said to us. “Go exploring. Find what it is they left here, the people that came before us.” Only now as I grow older and wiser do I realize the true implications of such a challenge. I’ll always remember those words. What it is they left; the people that came before us; Find it. Find what? Naturally in the blissful naivety of youth we assume something specific. We had watched Indiana Jones the day before. We wanted to find the lost Ark of the Covenant. Just find it, mind you, never open it, because then our faces would melt off. So we walk along the beach, picking up every rock and piece of petrified wood we come across.
It is getting darker now. The world changes. Things look different now; things are not as they had appeared before. Still walking now, we see a jagged edge jutting up from beneath a small dune ridge up next to the cliff side. My brother being the younger and less cautious among us runs up to the object and pulls it from the sand. It is heavier than he expected, and he drops it abruptly. It is undeniably a strip of rubber bearing distinctive markings like those found on a common consumer automobile. Walking further north, we find more debris. In the darkness the moonlight is our only guide. Shards of metal litter the coastline as if strewn about by giant, careless hands. My best friend Nick runs ahead. He stops maybe fifty feet from where we are standing and beckons us to follow. We approach the frame of an automobile, burned out from the inside. A shadowy figure, charred black, windowless. An enigma, an unknown. The faint smell of burnt charcoal whips up into my nostrils. Find what it is they left behind; the people that came before us.
A child or even a young adolescent’s interpretation of the events that transpired in the past that led to the presence of these material remains may vary depending on upbringing and social proficiency, but the universal constant of curiosity will always remain. What happened here? I thought. Now, a native resident of the area would know, for instance, that there is a road at the top of the cliff. A local may even know that the previous year, a tragic accident had occurred resulting in the destruction of a highway rail and the deaths of three people. This we did not know. The organic remains removed, the matrix remains, a symbol of the rapid and violent deposition of the features of this site. I call it a site because, in context with our experience at the time, it for all extents and purposes was one. Viewed in secondary archaeological context, the removal of the human remains by Mexican authorities did not help our pre-adolescent minds in dreaming up hypotheses to explain the features of this area.
We nonetheless explore our surroundings, gathering bits of rusted metal that were small enough to carry. It was night now, and we walked back, leaving our site behind but fully intending to return tomorrow. Little did we know that by removing these “artifacts” from the sand, we were destroying the matrix and context of the ruin forever. We were akin to common looters, the sworn enemies of responsible archaeologists everywhere. On a realistic level, no professional archaeologist would be interested in the site we discovered that day. However, relative to our reality, if you will, the site signified a mystery of utmost importance and cultural relevance. The burnt-out car frame was as exciting to us at the time as the excavation of an Indian burial mound, or the finding of a lost Egyptian mummy. It is the same to us because the meaning is the same, proving that context is everything when examining and cataloguing the archaeological record.
We would never return to the car in the sand. We left Mexico for the border early the next morning. The next year, the beach house was seized by local officials and declared government property. But that is another story, not for this writing. Find what it is they left behind; those that came before us. To this day, I have no idea whether or not my father was referring to the burnt-out car and scattered debris discovered by three pre-adolescent youths on vacation in Mexico all those years ago. I do know, however, that whether he was speaking specifically or in general terms, my unwitting first experience as an amateur archaeologist permitted me to realize, years later, the importance of context. And the past, like the present, is all about context.