ABSTRACT
After my last morning of fi eldwork in Mexico’s Sierra Tarahumara, I was traveling homeward across the dry mountainous terrain of rocky outcroppings and pine forest when the truck’s way along the gravel road was blocked by a grading machine. As we edged past it, a man from the work crew called out a friendly greeting. No sooner had I responded cheerily from the cab of our dusty third-hand camper truck than he followed up with eager questions for my husband and me sitting up there above the road. Was it true that we had special metal detecting equipment? Had we found anything? Why, he seemed to suggest, would people like us be crossing the Sierra in a truck with Canadian license plates unless we were searching for buried treasure? Surely we wielded superior North American technology for detecting and extracting the local terrain’s hidden riches?
