Seeing Like An Archeologist

And Why Everybody Should Take an Archeologist With Them Anywhere They Go

Dear Republic,

The Republic of Letters seems to moonlight sometimes as an archeological journal. A few months ago we had an awesome piece by Daniel Gavilovski on a dig in Germany. Now, as part of our permanent series on what people do all day — and what they love about their work — Veronica Peterson writes on a desperate, lifelong, hopeless passion for archeology.

-ROL

SEEING LIKE AN ARCHEOLOGIST

I’m not certain of much these days, but this I know: I will be an archaeologist until I die.

Just a month into the vague state of being that has descended upon me after completing the terminal degree in my field, friends and family call me “Dr. Peterson” with love and pride. But since I am not going to be a professor, as far into the future as I can see, the conferral of the title does not seem to bear any of the rights and privileges one witnesses in the academy: no deferential students, no staff catering to my whims, no administration filing the documents of my transgressions into a cabinet made from a black hole. Lest you worry, this is not an airing of grievances. It’s actually a love letter. But lately, as I emerge in agonizing fits and starts, bleary eyed and feral, from the cavernous depths of discipline, I have been questioning if it’s that wrong for archaeology to be woven so thoroughly into my identity?

Archaeologists study ancient things systematically. We stretch the definition of “ancient things” to mean “the material remains of the human past” so our studies now encompass quite a lot: fossilized bones of our hominid ancestors, microscopic particles of ancient Egyptian beer, anthropomorphic dark earth in the Amazon rainforest, Puritan headstones, the waste decomposing (or not) in modern-day landfills. We’re a big tent discipline that can feel at times surprisingly parochial.

Mostly, though, archaeologists study fragments—ones you can touch and ones you can’t. We get to know cultures through the pieces of things people left behind. We hold up bits of ceramic, glass, metal, bone, and other materials and we ask them, what were you? Were you a vessel? Did you hold water, wine, oil, grain or some other substance, containing, until the contents were ready to be placed into another vessel over a fire or directly consumed, spread, or otherwise manipulated? We study the fragments of that cooking fire: the placement of rocks, bricks, and the burnt organic remains within. We extract things from the earth for inspection and classification. We analyze how these fragments were used. Often, we can’t say what the fragment was for sure because today it’s too small or the identifying feature has worn away, back to dust. I suspect this is why we are often reported to be “befuddled” or “shocked to discover.” Reporters mistake our joy of finally hitting on the piece that proved our hunch. They forget we trained to develop pretty good hunches in the first place. Now to be fair, the reporters probably aren’t that mistaken about us but just clear-eyed about what will get a click: here is a view of so-called experts as the fools they really are, with an interesting tidbit about the past thrown in.

We develop these pretty good hunches because we are primarily concerned with what counts as evidence. Just exactly what human behavior can we infer from a fragment, or assemblage of them? Excavation is an inherently destructive act—you can’t put it back the way you found it. We are constantly developing new methods and new ways of seeing our fragments. So, we’re also collectors and curators, because some day someone might be able to do something with these carefully labelled bags of soil. Without documentation on the context of the find—the depth, soil qualities, what else was found near it, above it, below it—the worlds within fragments are lost to us. Whatever sparks the archaeologist’s initial interest in the discipline, it comes, eventually, to this: we don’t love the thing itself so much as the thing and the context it springs from.

We value these fragments because they show us worlds within: the structure of political organizations, how humans use things to make meaning and how things influence the meanings we make.

To see like an archaeologist, then, is in great part to always be looking for fragments that might be made to speak.

Perhaps, on the whole, we’re not great at making a case for our real selves, in popular culture or academia, because we’re so busy trying to get away and scan the ground for artifacts.

However, I stand by the argument that no one is more fun to travel with than archaeologists. We’ll get you looking deep into the past to see how the modern landscape came to be. We’ll take you to obscure places, to see little histories in the buildings and pathways we pass through. At our best, we’re bringing the past back into the present and thinking about what that means for the future.

We’re able to do this because we also train to see the world in slices: plans and profiles and graphs of the time it takes for particles to return to our sensors.

Field work is the initiation, which for most people takes place in a field school during college. In theory, field school teaches you all aspects of field work, from the different excavation roles to artifact processing and maybe even a little bit of lab analysis. The main thing it teaches you is the process of seeing the world in slices.

I was 22 years old when I went to my field school, a little bit older than everyone else and committed to taking up a job in investment management when I got home. It seemed all of my peers were considering a future in archaeology except for me. I wonder about that sometimes. How I went to Ireland as a final hurrah, a last goodbye to my studies, and eventually returned to the fold in a big way. I wonder how many of us work as archaeologists now. I think the number is quite small.

Blackfriary, in Trim, County Meath, was a medieval monastery. After Henry VIII, the king in England, dissolved the monasteries, people in this Irish town kept burying their unbaptized children and other loved ones who were forbidden from a proper church burial around the monastery grounds. It was a big site, perfect for a field school.

The first week, I was assigned to an excavation unit with three other young women (like many disciplines these days, women are the majority of majors, but our numbers are reduced at every step on the ladder). The unit was a long, narrow trench in what we called the garden but I read now in the excavation reports was “a medieval field system and possible enclosure” (heady stuff!). There was some initial discontent in the ranks, as all the action seemed to be in the big square unit cutting through the heart of the monastic building, near where some standing stone walls survived. There they found a beautiful piece of stained glass. An expert from Dublin came out to oversee the removal and we all stopped what we were doing to watch. Smaller units by the building were finding burials. We found a whole lot of nothing. But I came to love working “out there in the garden” despite our limited finds. Removed from the hubbub, we could chat freely as we worked. It was peaceful, even with the gentle thud of our mattocks on the tough ground, the soil spraying as we broke up clumps of earth. We only used our pointing trowels for the fancy work of “cleaning” surfaces for photographs and emphasizing the change in stratigraphic levels. For people who work with dirt, archaeologists are some of the most fastidious people I have ever met. Even now I can hear my friends quibble: not all archaeologists (myself included) excavate… and dirt, in any case, as Mary Douglas wrote, is just matter out of place.

Our “finds” in the monastery garden amounted to patterns of stained soil showing potential planting rows and a ceramic irrigation pipe. There were very few artifacts. I didn’t know it, but this was the start of a personal pattern. On every excavation I’ve worked on since, my units tend to be free of artifacts but full of ecofacts, things like charcoal or in one case, a single cow scapula in a 2x2 meter unit that went over a meter down, whose significance was established later in the lab and write-up phase long after my role on the team ended. Or most creepy: one time I was excavating what turned out to be a late 19^th or early 20^th century trash pit on an estate in upstate New York. The hole was narrow and deep. It was a gray, rainy day. Working under a tarp, I pulled out probably three or four feet of ash only to find the broken face of a porcelain doll staring straight up at me.

However, our field school crew chief with us in the Blackfriary garden was excited by whatever it was we were uncovering and documenting and she conveyed to us that what we were doing was meaningful… somehow. She was a French scholar named Julie who was leaving in a few weeks to defend her dissertation. She needed us to finish the unit before she left. “They can draw the profiles right,” she told Finola O’Carroll, the Principal Investigator, at the end of our rotation. Julie’s emphatic request left an impression on me, and so too on Fin, who let us mess up the rotation schedule to stay where we were needed. I never thought my ability to use basic tools could actually help somebody in their search for meaning. You could say that’s when I was hooked.

Julie and the Co-Principal Investigator, an exhausted looking but affable dad named Denis, taught us how to take coordinates and elevations of points in our unit from the Total Station and how to draw plans and wall profiles. Plans depict the state of the excavation unit from the point of view of someone looking directly down at it. They are drawn at arbitrary depths, like every 10 cm, and at the start of a new stratum (an observably distinct layer). You document the position of artifacts and ecofacts as they are found in situ or as they lay in the ground. An imaginary coordinate grid is laid upon the unit. One corner is designated 0,0. A string is kept taut along the edge. A tape measure lays beneath it. The field tech dangles their plumbob (a string attached to a weight) over the point they want to take. She takes her tape measure and lines it up perpendicular with the other tape measure running across the length of the unit at ground level. She is at 43 centimeters on the length line (or x-axis), and 62 centimeters on the y-axis. If she’s by herself, she remembers those numbers and picks up her clipboard to mark her graph paper where the unit has been drawn to scale (often 1:20). But with a partner, all she has to do is call out the numbers and her partner makes the mark. It’s a simple system. In my case, with lots of labeling and taking extra points, the shape of things on the ground emerged on the paper. In the hands of someone with artistic talent, an archaeological plan can be beautiful.

The profile is another slice, representing a head-on view of each unit wall. Profiles are not completed until the unit excavation is done and the natural strata have been identified, numbered, and described (by natural I mean, layers of the earth formed through geological or human processes). But the method is essentially the same except the coordinate grid is on a vertical plane instead of a horizontal one. There’s something satisfying about finishing a profile and the last plan. So much can go wrong in the field. Even with the best preparation, you never know what you will find until you start peeling back the layers of earth, one by one — to steal a phrase from Stanford archaeologist Barbara Voss. But when you finish that last wall profile, you not only know what you’ve found, you’ve documented it by blending systematic action with interpretation. It is an art of science. Someone could flip through your plans, 10 cm level by 10 cm level, and figure out from these sliced representations of the underground exactly how the earth came to be the way it was on the day you started digging. How cool is that?

Now, cameras and computing power can do this and make spiffy 3D models, in color, no less, but one truly learns to see like an archaeologist with just some basic math, string, stakes, plumbob, tape measure, graph paper, pencil, clip board, and time. No batteries required. Just the ability to synthesize. (In fact, I would argue, that learning analog is essential to learning itself but that’s a topic of its own, this is my love letter to archaeology) How do I take this life-size result of social behavior and reduce it to a portable, shareable scale? How do I ensure someone in the future can see what I saw, after I destroyed this in situ feature to literally get to the bottom of it? Yes, unfortunately, to know it, I must destroy it. (Actually, we’ve developed some cool ways to explore sites and features both below and above ground with minimally invasive or noninvasive techniques). But I take a lot of heart from the fact that with the right training, you can interpret properly documented excavation plans and profiles from a place you’ve never been, long after the soil was sifted and the unit was backfilled.

***

When I was 19 years old, I put my hand on the sidewall of an excavation unit in the loess plateau of Shaanxi Province in China. I trailed my fingers along the marks left by a potter’s fingers as they dug out a kiln in their village, a place now known as Yangguanzhai. I can’t remember if the kiln was from a more recent period, encountered on the archaeology team’s way down to the target era of study, or if it was actually the work of a neolithic potter of the Yangshao culture (5000-3000 BCE), a period of agricultural intensification and settlement. Seven thousand years later, though, I put my hand where their’s had been. I don’t know anything more about this person than this, that they made ceramics. But how incredible that I know even this about them at all?

Every day we encounter the little bits of other people’s lives that make up an incomprehensible world. Is there a better way to try to make sense of it all than to figure out how to piece those fragments together? I sure as hell haven’t found one.

Veronica Peterson is a historical archaeologist and food scholar. She earned her PhD in anthropology at Harvard University.

Painting by Ferdinand Heilbuth.