From an early age he had dreamed of becoming an archaeologist, losing himself in the history of a place, peeling back the layers of time, searching, digging, piecing together the ancient past, bringing back the legacy of past civilizations, saving the work of generation upon generation. His passion had driven him through school in UCLA, in Stanford, in Georgia Tech, earning degree after degree, slowly becoming an authority in the subject, traveling to distant places in search of the past, probing beyond the surface, formulating his own theories, however controversial and unconventional they may have seemed. Cameron Slater was a diffusionist, believing that the ancient world was quite intercultural, cross-pollinated, with distant civilizations having been in contact at some point in their pasts. He had found evidence of this claim everywhere he had looked, in the graceful lotus motifs decorating the necks of Incan vessels, found not only on the frieze of the Great Ball Court at the Mayan city of Chickén Itzá, but also adorning the towering granite columns at Karnak, Egypt.
