What the Heads Still Ask

Nine hundred twenty-eight scraps mixed through the fills — ages and sexes jumbled across three thousand square metres. People read offering. Deliberate backfill. The special buildings sit in a depression.

Higher up, ordinary rectangular rooms. One kidney-shaped pit cut into plaster: adult woman, young man, adolescent girl — skulls piled southeast, long bones west, small hand and foot bones still there so the bodies were once whole. The other: a young woman flexed on her left, facing east, laid on fist-sized stones against a wall that looks down on Special Building A.

Same damage on both graves and on the old scraps: heavy lime, ends of the long bones gone after death, rodent teeth. Rain. Build-up. Maybe quake. House floors above, graves under them, then the dead sliding downhill into the monument fills.

Ritual centre with no one living on the mound — that picture keeps undercutting. Most of the scatter may have arrived by gravity.

Deliberate skull work is not erased. If gravity took most of the pile, the few cut heads still ask of the living who chose which heads to keep.

Leftover is both. I take the heads: the slide explains the scraps; the leftover that still turns is the choice.