by Rose Hirsch
I began writing the post below two weeks ago. At the moment it is the beginning of week four, and moments like this, while they vary in specifics, have happened a lot. This was the first:
It’s day three on the tel, your first dig, and you’re still in the process of cleaning. For the past two days you’ve been clearing weeds with a tarea, brushes and clippers, sweeping up trash and straw and dirt. You probably haven’t been here very long, but it feels like hours. It’s hot, you’re tired, you’re hungry, your feet are aching like mad, sweat is dripping from every inch of your body, and you need to keep reminding yourself that you want this, you asked for this. You’re almost afraid to check the time and see how little has passed. Since you got here this morning you’ve been working in direct sunlight, in the part of the tel that isn’t covered by the tent. You’ve been sweeping the same little area with a brush for who knows how long, and it looks exactly the same as when you started. You feel like you’ve made no progress, like you’re just pretending to work while everyone else is actually being useful (possibly a form of the imposter syndrome). You tell yourself that you’re almost there, they said that the first week is the hardest. Cleaning will be done soon and you’ll finally get to dig, like you’ve been itching to do since you first stepped foot into the tel. You might even be assigned a square later, that’s exciting. But for now you sweep. Sweeping , sweeping, and more sweeping. You don’t know how much more of this you can take before you never want to do archaeological field work again. It’s basically gardening, extreme gardening. You hate gardening. You’ve never worked this hard in your life. You’re waiting anxiously for Ima to show up with second breakfast just so you can take a nice long break and rest your aching body, but that could be over an hour away, don’t think about that, just keep sweeping.
But then, as you’re sweeping, you see something in the dirt. Something red, curved, smooth. You go to the closest supervisor and ask what it is, and they tell you it’s the base of some kind of jug. Because it was found in general cleaning it doesn’t really have context, which is important for dating and figuring out what it might have been used for, but that doesn’t matter right now. You’re holding this piece of broken pottery in your hands. You are the first person to touch it in at least 2000 years. This thing that was a part of something else that someone at least 2000 years ago actually used. Someone made this, trasported it, distributed it, used it. You are touching something from a completely different world, and the last person to touch it could never have imagined that it would end up in this state, in your hands. They couldn’t possibly have even concieved of the world being like this, 2000 years in their future, just as we cannot imagine what it will be like 2000 years from now. It makes you wonder what we will leave behind, what archaeologists of the future will find of us.
You look around. There are pottery sherds everywhere, you’ve been collecting them all day. Every single one of them has a history, is history, tangible evidence of an alien world. Recorded history is what the rulers of the past wanted people to know, and while it can be reliable, it can also lie. Archaeology, if done right, can’t lie. These sherds, bones, shells, metal, everything you’re finding is proof of what really happened here. How these people really lived. How their society was run, what kind of technology they had, and even if it’s not a complete picture, it’s a truthful one. You are touching the past, and that makes all of it, blood sweat and tears, worth it.
Talk of the Tel 