Arc 3
The ethics arc. The hearing turned backward onto the deposits of the dead, who cannot swerve. The site as informant rather than artifact. Consent structures built for bone, failing to transfer to a stratum that holds more people than all the cemeteries ever cut. And the perishable stratum: the people who read the archive and never join it.
TAM_MDN_3-01
The Backward Ear
The hearing turned around, and the deposits of the dead read without opening
Piaggio built a machine to unroll the Herculaneum scrolls without destroying them, and it worked a few centimeters a year. The hearing turned backward reads the deposits of the …
TAM_MDN_3-02
The Informant
The excavator's dilemma was never an artifact problem, and one field already knows it
Sixty years after talking to Mead, Fa'apua'a said the girls had been joking, and anthropology had to decide what an informant's performance is evidence of. The new site is an …
TAM_MDN_3-03
The Unconsenting Stratum
The midden contains people, and the consent structures were built for bone
Maria Pearson sat down in the governor's anteroom and would not go away, and the law that followed re-founded a science on consent. The new stratum holds more people than all the …
TAM_MDN_3-04
The Perishable Stratum
The people who read the archive and never join it, and the missing majority the column cannot show
A winter storm opened the slope at Cape Alava, and out of the mud came the missing majority: baskets, looms, a woven hat. The new deposits have a perishable stratum too, and it is …