ABSTRACT
Once during a trip to the Grand Canyon we participated in an outing to Anasazi ruins led by a park ranger. In trying to get us to understand what it’s like to try to imagine how the Anasazi lived, he picked up from the ground a stray discarded pop top from some previous visitor’s can of Coke®. He told us to imagine not knowing anything about 20th-century U.S., finding this little circular light metal item, and trying to reconstruct the life in this culture from this artifact. Perhaps a sacred item? A piece of body ornamentation? Currency? Junk? How can you know?
