Site 14, the Great Flat Field, Late Screen Age.
We have at last understood the vast paved clearings that ring every settlement of the Ancients. Rival scholars long held these expanses to be plazas of assembly, but the wear patterns argue otherwise. Observe the faded pigment: parallel lines, painted in rigid procession across the whole surface, each corridor precisely the width of one of their great rolling shells. The Ancients did not gather here. They stabled.
We name the field a Reliquary of the Chariots. Each painted stall housed a single beast of burnished metal, and the beasts were ranked. Nearest the sacred entrance, the widest berths, marked with the twin-legged glyph we now read as "reserved for the anointed." Furthest out, in the sun-blasted rows where the paint has surrendered entirely, the low-caste vehicles waited, their masters made to walk the penitential distance on foot.
The devotion here was total. We find, ground into the seams, the residue of countless small offerings: charred plant-tubes, translucent leaves that never rotted, the flattened discs the Screen People used as sacrament. And everywhere, the shallow craters, the potholes, which the faithful never repaired but merely swerved around, generation upon generation, as one avoids a shrine too holy to touch.
Note especially the tall poles bearing luminous eyes, spaced at intervals across the field. These we take to be the watching gods of the clearing, who did not sleep, who counted every arrival and departure, and to whom the Ancients rendered tribute at a small striped altar near the exit before the barrier arm would lift and release them.
They were a people who could not bear to be still, and so they built temples not to rest in, but to leave from: enormous, empty, faithful monuments to the moment just before departure.