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pieces of bone, all belonging to one hominid2 female. The scientists gave her the nickname Lucy, after the Beatles song “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds,” but her official name is Australopithecus afarensis.

The Lucy skeleton was dated back about three million years, the most complete and oldest hominid skeleton to have been found at that time. Lucy was about a meter tall and walked erect, which opened new debate in the scientific community as to when and why humans started standing upright.

“If I had waited another few years,” Johanson wrote in his book Lucy: The Beginnings of Humankind, “the next rains might have washed many of her bones down the gully. . . . What was utterly fantastic was that she had come to the surface so recently, probably in the last year or two. Five years earlier, she would still have been buried. Five years later, she would have been gone.”

Violent winter storms also increased our knowledge of Native American history and culture. For years, Richard Daugherty of Washington State University had been excavating buried remains at the abandoned coastal village of Ozette. Little by little he tried to piece together the history of the Makah Indians who had once lived on the land. Their descendants told him a story of a huge mudslide that had buried the entire village. Daugherty was unable to confirm the story until 1970, when nature lent a hand. A storm sent tides raging up the beach at Ozette and washed away a bank.

Under the soil was a vast deposit of artifacts dating from around the time of Columbus’s arrival in the New World. There were fishhooks of wood and bone, a harpoon shaft, a canoe paddle, a woven hat, and parts of inlaid boxes. The objects are now housed in a museum created by the Makah Tribal Council.

Most fortuitous3 of all was the accidental discovery of a Stone Age body by two nonscientists. German hikers Helmut and Erika Simon were walking in the mountains of the Austrian-Italian border on a particularly sunny morning in September 1991. They wandered off the trail and were startled to see a dead body in the melting ice. They assumed it was the corpse of a modern climber, and they called a rescue team. As the medics chipped him from the ice and unearthed many of his belongings, it became clear that this climber was quite a bit older than they had originally suspected.

In fact, the man’s body dated from 3300 b.c. It had been preserved in ice until a fall of dust from the Sahara and an unusually warm spell melted the ice in 1991, bringing the “Ice

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Man” back to the surface. Since he was found in the Ötztal Alps, he was given the nickname Ötzi. What was unique about Ötzi was that he was incredibly well preserved, with his clothing and tools intact. This gave scholars a greater understanding of Ötzi’s life, culture, and community.

A unique set of circumstances gave us this window into the past. Soon after Ötzi died, his body had been covered with snow, which kept the predators away. Then a glacier covered him and entombed him in ice. Normally, a glacier would destroy everything in its path, but Ötzi’s body was sheltered in a rock hollow.

Even more amazing was that a freak thaw unearthed him just as a pair of hikers were passing. As one commentator wrote, “Over the past five thousand years the chance of finding the Ice Man existed for only six days.”

Thinking Critically about This Reading

Lee argues that “archaeology owes a debt to Mother Nature” (paragraph 1). Why does Lee state this, and under what circumstances might Mother Nature be an enemy to archaeology?

Questions for Study and Discussion

1. What is Lee’s thesis? Based on her evidence, do you think her thesis has been proven? Why or why not?

2. Lee begins her excerpt with the story of Lucy, the name given to the hominid female whose bones date back three million years. Why was the discovery of Lucy so important?

3. While excavating at Ozette, Richard Daugherty heard about a village lost to a mudslide, and he was able to confirm the story when a storm unearthed artifacts from the time of Christopher Columbus. What might this suggest about memories that are passed down in an oral (as opposed to written) culture?