Mars Life

Jamie Waterman's discovery of cliff dwellings on Mars opened up a whole new scientific frontier, prompting a series of excavations that revealed that an intelligent race had lived on the red planet sixty-five million years ago, only to be driven into extinction by the crash of a giant meteor.
One of the people who continued Jamie's work is Carter Carleton, an anthropologist who was driven from his university post by unproven charges of rape. Whether or not he wanted to go to Mars, he became the planet's star scientist when he uncovered the remains of a Martian village.
But as the ultraconservative New Morality movement gains control of the U.S. government and cuts off funding for the Mars program, the future of exploration on the red planet faces an extinction as grave as the one that felled the Martians themselves.
Science and politics clash on two worlds as Jamie desperately tries to save the Mars program and to uncover as much information as possible about the fate of the vanished Martians...before no one is left on the planet to study them.