Theodore Pratt 22 min read

At first the two museum scientists thought the Indian attack on them was a joke, modern Indians didn't attack white men any more. Except that these did.

Theodore Pratt's 1960 story is a sharp first-contact and social-SF tale with an archaeological twist. Clever, atmospheric golden-age SF. Read it for a story where a Southwest dig into the ruins of a vanished ancient people turns dangerous and strange, and the past proves not as dead as the scholars assumed.

In its time

Published in 1960, during the 1960s, new wave revolutionizes the genre.

Reading it

22 min read (a short story, a single idea, delivered and gone).