Jason Nez wears a wool vest, scuffed boots, and a look of total concentration. We’re on the remote eastern rim of the Grand Canyon in the Navajo Nation, where Nez has taken me to talk about archaeology. He pauses next to a yucca and picks up a small stone. One of its edges has been subtly sharpened into a cutting tool by a former resident of the area, perhaps 1,000 years ago. Holding it between his thumb and forefinger, Nez stoops to cleanly slice off a fistful of bunchgrass. “It’s been a while since anybody cut with that,” he says, dropping the tool where he found it.
For Nez, there is no clean break between prehistory and modernity, but a continuous human story that’s been unfolding on this landscape since the first hunters followed bison herds to the Grand Canyon’s rim roughly 11,500 years ago...