Why Archaeology?
September 2-16, 2019
Momentous events, heroic exploits, infamous episodes all fade into a dim remembrance. And the names of their actors are read off like the credits at the end of a long, barely coherent film. History perhaps reads more neatly than it lived, but it can do little to inspire real understanding of the people, cultures, and events it attempts to capture. Even the most evocative names in ancient history books can be little more for us than an abstraction. Sure, we acknowledge the weight of these things, and even recognize a connection or kinship with them. We respect, revile, or make uneasy truce with the people, ideas, and things of the past. But we can never truly know these as we know our own, and so will always hold them at arm’s length, and regard them with that benighted mix of curiosity, suspicion, and disdain—as strangers.
For me, archaeology is a sword bridge connecting the present and past, tricky to walk but vital to cross, so that the shadowy world of yesterday and its inhabitants do not remain strangers to us.
Excavating a site is about more than the search for artifacts, the collection of samples, or the interpretation of features. It allows us, after the passage of centuries or millennia, to unveil layers of sleeping time, pulled back age after age, and touch the same earth on which those before us walked. Walking inside a structure where they once stood, or holding an object they used each day—whether as grand as a temple or as simple as a hairpin—is to begin knowing, firsthand, the life of a flesh and blood person. Or to try to, and so try and bridge that chasm.
There is an intimacy in the things people find beautiful or hold dear—however small—and in the things they love and fear—however great. These are the things humans build monuments to, and scatter across battlefields, and craft with care beside the hearth, and one day take with them to their graves. They are the precious things we are so fortunate to find buried in the soil. Precious, because they help us to begin to tell their stories.
For the first two weeks in September, I had the opportunity to participate in an excavation of the Anglo-Saxon monastery at Lindisfarne famously raided by the Vikings in 793 CE, on Holy Island, Northumberland, England. The dig was a joint project between Durham University and DigVentures, an organization of archaeologists which supports its projects through crowdfunding and allows volunteers like myself to participate.