Yao Jin carefully picked away a small clump of dirt away from the exposed skullcap, brushing away the remnant dust with a brush.

“So is this a burial, Professor Yao?” An American intern student asked as he shoveled up loose dirt and dumped it unceremoniously into a bucket in a large cloud of dust.

“There is no such thing as a burial,” Professor Yao replied in his clipped British accent. “Only long term storage.”

Lotus nearly choked on the pencil she held in her mouth as she assessed her sketch of the site find. Quickly writing down the grid and depth controls on the pit, she took a moment to regain her composure. Dry wit was unexpected from the serious Chinese scholar who usually wasted few words during the course of an artifact recovery. The small elderly Chinese man looked up at Lotus through his large Coke bottle glasses and winked.

The Anthropologist had been called to the dig from Beijing after the bones had been discovered. A furor ran through the camp after Lotus’ assistant discovered the skeleton and Lotus thought it best to call in a Forensic Anthropologist to ensure no mistakes were made. At his arrival, he suffered many questions from the American student on his family lineage and whether or not he was related to Yao Ming, America’s newest basketball sensation.

“Oh yes,” he replied drily to one student that quickly became a stock respond. “We are all related to Yao Ming, all five million of us.”

“Now to answer your question, young man,” Yao continued as he continued to pick away dirt from skeleton being slowly revealed. “Do I believe this is a burial? No.” He pointed the tip of her brush to the disarticulated skeleton, bits of bone jumbled around the grid they had carefully set out. “There is no obvious signs of laying out the body in any funerary rites. Tibia and femur are missed in together with the clavicle and pelvis. If I had to hazard a guess without close inspection, it looks as if animals had gotten to the body. We’ll have to check to see if there are any animal teeth or claw marks when we removed the bones.”

“Are the bones fragile?” Lotus asked, stepping over the string grid barriers.

Yao shook his head. “I don’t think we’ll need to cast them before we remove them. They seem stable.”

Nodding, Lotus turned her attention to the adjacent grid square. Her original dig assistant seemed spooked by his grisly discovery, so she had set him about removing topsoil from the adjacent grid. The top of his black baseball cap bobbed up and down as he shoveled more dirt into another bucket. “How is it going?”

He looked up briefly, startled by her question and then looked down quickly as if embarrassed by his reaction to the bones. “Fine, Professor.”

Lotus smiled, knowing the turmoil the first year student was going through. “Let me know if you need a break.”

The boy nodded curtly and continued focusing on his shovel.