Dr. Eleanor Friedman-Bernal is an archaeologist living and working near Chaco Canyon, where she believes she has discovered the key to the disappearance of the Anasazi people: a coveted kokopelli-design on valuable ancient pots.

Actress Rosalia De Aragon has also appeared in Last Stand at Saber River (1997), the story of a Civil War veteran fighting a new battle on the Arizona frontier, which starred Tom Selleck and Keith Carradine (Coyote Waits).

In Hillerman's words:
"A flash of lightning on the eastern horizon -- much too distant to hear the thunder and the wrong direction to threaten any rain. A last gasp of summer, she thought. The moon was higher now, its light muting the colors of the canyon into shades of gray. Her thermal underwear and the walking kept her body warm but her hands were like ice. She studied them. No hands for a lady. Nails blunt and broken. The skin tough, scarred, and callused. Anthropology skin, they'd called it when she was an undergraduate. The skin of people who are always out under the sun, working in the dirt. It had always bothered her mother, as everything about her bothered her mother. Becoming an anthropologist instead of a doctor, and then not marrying a doctor. Marrying a Puerto Rican archaeologist who was not even Jewish. And then losing him to another woman. "Wear gloves," her mother had said. "For heaven's sake, Ellie, you have hands like a dirt farmer." And a face like a dirt farmer too, she'd thought."

A Thief of Time, Chapter 1