The poems in Archaeology document Templeton’s participation in excavations of village and cave sites along Rio Talgua in Eastern Honduras in 1996. Preliminary work had established that the village was approximately 1,500 years old, while various cave sites a mile upstream, which housed ritual burials, were closer to 3,000 years old. The purpose of the work was to establish a link between the village and cave sites—to account for the lost 1,500 years—and to discover how cultures on the fringe of the Mayan region lived.
“Astonishing, impeccably crafted, this volume resonates across fields—literature, anthropology, and archaeology with honesty, precision, and clarity. These passages illumine human history like lyrical shards of a lost culture, excavated and held up to the light of passionate reflection.”
—Marilyn Kallet, author of Circe
“Composed while the poet was on a dig in Honduras, the poems in Templeton’s haunting Archaeology are written not by a tourist, but by a contemporary pilgrim ‘looking for definition’ through the remnants of primary Others. Elegiac and lyrical, this poetic sequence aligns the process of excavation with poetic practice. ‘Can art move in a land so haunted by ruins?’ and here the answer is a resounding yes, thanks to the brilliant excavation available in this book.”
—Claudia Keelan, author of The Devotion Field
“The poetry of human quest and yearning re-plants itself to ripen yet again. In the nuanced tropical landscape of these poems, my sense of space-time takes on fragrances no film has ever caught. Only a poet of Templeton’s sensitivity and gifted tongue can touch and lyricize such sensuous complexity.”
—Al Young, California Poet Laureate Emeritus
Archaeology • $8 paperback • 24 pages
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Alice Templeton 