Week 8: A Practical Recipe for Surviving an Archaeological Excavation

So, my regular readership (all 7 of you) will recall that on Week 0, I made mention of the blog post "Recipe for Surviving an Archaeological Excavation," by Marielle Velander, specifically that I considered it to be somewhat incomplete in its advice. Certainly, nothing that she said is wrong particularly the point about hydration, (drink water kiddos, if you don't you'll die), but for those with less sunny dispositions as yours truly, I certainly felt that there were a few important points worth adding. I doubt that these will apply to all people in all circumstances, but the following points are, I feel, solid advice for not being miserable for the entire dig.


1: Make sure you're properly prepared: This is the first thing and probably the most important. I'm not gonna go over the standard kit, as your excavation leaders should've given you the info you need in that regard, but I am going to emphasize things that came up a lot for me: There's gonna be a lot of physical wear on your body, especially in the first week or so, so make sure you're properly equipped to deal with it. First, prevention: make sure your shoes and socks fit very well, know where the friction points are and moleskin those places up. Blisters are not an acceptable excuse for absence, and they make the work x1000 worse, especially on your feet. Likewise, make sure you dress appropriately. Long, light and loose (within reason) is your best bet for staying cool and free of sunburns, followed by religious application of sunscreen (even if you're dark skinned. It's not gonna kill ya, and nobody thinks you're tough). Next: antiperspirant/talcum powder: sweating is fine and even good, but you gotta make sure it doesn't stick around after you're done.  Finally: repair: bandages, gauze, medical tape antiseptic ointment, rash and burn ointment. Most of the time, you won't need them. When you do, it's a pain to get them after you need them, even when you're in a big city.
1a: Just an addendum: you're going to forget something, or you're gonna need something that you weren't expecting. Make sure you're prepared for your lack of preparation. Yes, that does actually make sense. Just think about it.

2: Know your surroundings: Don't be an idiot like me and take a week to figure out how to feed yourself properly. Scope out your surroundings, know when and where you can get money, food, medicine, toiletries and privacy. Also: make sure you know where to go before you have to be there. Being late on the first day isn't very fun.  

3: The work is supposed to suck: If you feel miserable when you're digging for the first time, good, that's normal. Unless you're really in shape or are an obsessive, early morning gardener, the physical and mental demands on your body are going to be very different from what you have experienced in the past. The body is a stubborn beast, and doesn't really like to do things differently than what it normally does or expend too much energy. If you find yourself dying, you look around and all the vets are acting like this is nothing, don't worry about it too much and just focus on making it to the end of the day/break/the next 4 minutes. They felt the exact same thing you are now, probably. Or at least I did, and it turned out alright for me, so you're in good company. Just power through it as much as possible, because at the end of the day, it's really not that hard of work. Your body just thinks it is because it lacks perspective.
 
 4: Pace yourself: Look archaeological with discretion. It's better to slow down, do things properly and stop when you're done than to try to keep up with 3-4th year vets. Be very clear what you're supposed to be doing, and if you don't know don't keep doing things. Learn to use sweeping as a breather. Unless you're sweeping for an actual reason, like clearing the site at the beginning of the day, cleaning during/after passes, or sweeping for photoshoots, then how well you're sweeping isn't as important as keeping yourself warm and limber for when you have something to do. There will be people who can and likely will outpace you and you don't need to keep up with them. My own roommate ran an ultra-marathon over the second weekend. On accident. On an empty stomach. And showed up on Monday fresh as daisies. But for people who aren't insane, the fact of the matter is that once the day ends and all the washing up is done, you don't have to do anything, and most of the time you aren't expected to do anything. Take advantage of this. Your poor supervisors actually have to keep working, so it always could be worse.

5: Drink Responsibly There will probably be some sort of drinking party every day of the week, and if you're up for it, by all means go ahead. From what I've heard, though, digging with a hangover is basically one of the worst things that can happen to someone, so go easy on the bottle during the work week, eh? This is especially true for all you law-abiding underclassmen: just because you can legally drink every day of the week, doesn't mean you should. Save it for the weekend.

5: Hydration: Literally just stay hydrated all of the time. Yes, even now. Yes, right now. Go get a glass of water.

6: You'll be done eventually: Despite how long it feels at the start, excavations don't last very long. I was at it only for two months, and that's a marathon by archaeological standards. If you enjoy the work, savor it while it lasts. If you hate it: it's really not as long as you think it is, and if you stick it out to the end, good ol' effort justification will make you think you enjoyed it. And if you can look past the oppressive blur of hard labor, you'll probably find that archaeologists are a real decent lot. Quality folks, archaeologists.


Well, that's about everything. I for one have enjoyed the time we've shared. Me, rambling in run-on sentences about things vaguely related to archaeology. You, patiently waiting entire blog posts for me to get to the point. It's been real fun, but our little trip down memory lane has ended. So, for the final time, I will bid you farewell. And seriously: dehydration is really bad for you, just get a drink of water already.

Michael

Week 7: Social Negotiations

As you know, the mission of this blog is to give as honest a picture of the life of an archaeologist (well, archaeology digger. Proper archaeologists do far more note-taking and geometry). As such I would be remiss if I didn't mention the fact that drinking parties are a big part of archaeological culture. Four of the five days out of the week there is some sort of post-dig gathering which involves getting together around a pint. I expect this evolved from rural archaeology: there's just not a lot to do out in the middle of nowhere, even if it was a bustling metropolis 8,000 years ago. It's practically part of the job description, for better or for worse.

Now, this isn't a teetotaling blog. I have no problem with alcohol, although I'm not a huge fan of it myself. Sola dosis facit venenum, and other people's habits are none of my business. What I'm actually more interested in is the sheer volume of social outings in an archaeological dig. I'm a pretty solitary person myself, and the thought of spending seven hours a day five days a week with other people and then immediately spending more time with them afterwords makes my head spin. It boggles the mind. I counted myself lucky every day this trip that I have roommates as private as myself.

Now, this isn't a new dilemma for me. A good portion of my college career was spent dealing with the sheer volume of social interaction, and honestly, I didn't really deal with it particularly well. I actually find it incredible that most people considered dorms to be the hotbed of friend-making, because for me, the lack of privacy was suffocating. Sure, I met a whole number of nice, interesting people, but the fact that I could never get away from other people made me kind of shut down. I spent most of my freshman and sophomore year desperately looking for some place where there just weren't other people, which is a very difficult thing to do on a college campus in one of the largest cities in the country. As a matter of fact, it wasn't until I got my own apartment that I actually started relaxing and opening up to people. Having a private space is very important to me.

This being the case, I was quite apprehensive when I first came to the dig. Once again, I was dealing with a severe deficit of private space, and a social marathon by all accounts. I was quite worried that I would repeat my first two years of college, in which I would become so hostile to the presence of other people that I would act with hostility to the people themselves.

What I hadn't expected was the effect that the actual physical work would have on me. A lot of my social aversion comes from sensory overload. People are very complex, in terms of sensory input: not only do you have the physical stimuli, but you also have social cues to watch and listen for, group dynamics to keep track of, and, in large groups, need to devote energy to constantly jocky for position in a conversation. Highly introverted people like myself can be pretty easily overwhelmed by it all, especially if there are a lot of people to pay attention to. In the same way that an over-sweetened beverage is disgustingly sweet, or listening to heavy traffic is exhausting, it's the same with people.

What I found with heavy manual labor, though, is that by the end of the day I was so exhausted and filled with endorphins that the chaotic buzz subsided somewhat. It wasn't that I was suddenly a social butterfly because I had broken a sweat, but more that I was so dog-tired that I just stopped caring about the higher level social stuff.  Physical appearance, for one, fell by the wayside: in archaeology everyone looks terrible (except for one girl who dropped in the middle of the dig for a couple of weeks. Somehow she managed to look like a fashion model every day). Likewise, my tolerance for clique politics dropped to next to nothing. I'm sure there was some drama in certain pockets here or there, but I was too exhausted to care. If someone was nice to me, they seemed fine, if not, great, one less person I have to care about As a note, I did not actually meet anyone who wasn't pleasant to me. This year was a good lot.

What was most surprising to me though was that this attitude shift stuck around. Even at the beginning of the dig, I was apprehensive about the time I spent around people, and the time I didn't. I usually spent most of my off-time by myself, and a good deal of the time for the first couple of weeks I was rather anxious about it. Not because I didn't want to spend time alone, but because I felt like I wasn't supposed to want to spend so much time alone, and I worried what signals I might be sending to others that I rarely went to the various after-dig festivities. But as time went on, I increasingly realized that other people didn't really care, and neither did I.

Ironically, this actually allowed me to be more social. Since I didn't spend nearly as much of my social energy considering the possibilities of what other people were thinking when I was alone, I had more energy to actually spend time with others, and the time I did spend alone was much more restful. Instead of spending 95% of my off time alone and 5% of my time with others, I now spend 85% of my time alone and 15% of my time with other people. Hey, I like my alone time. Sue me.

So what's the take away from this? Cure your social anxiety by doing so much manual labor you no longer have the energy to care? Eh, I'm not a psychotherapist. It worked for me.    

Week 6: the Well-fare State

So we've been perambulating pretty far from the actual business of digging recently, as the day to day affairs of the work is pretty straightforward. I suppose I could talk about more nuanced things, like soil consistency and Munsell charts and the like, but to be honest, the only way anyone ever really understands that is if they're working with the soil every day, which, as readers of blogs, I assume you probably are not.
 
Fortunately, in this week there was a change of pace. Rather than the usual in-trench digging, the section I was working in, Beta-Theta East, had just begun to open up a well to excavate, one of the more interesting things one can do on a dig. As the process of excavating a well is much more complicated than digging in a straight line and trying not to break anything important, this week I will give an in-depth account of the process.

The process of digging a well begins as any other excavation: the area is sectioned off into its own basket, and the fill is removed as per usual archaeological process (I presume, I wasn't actually present for the first part of the excavation). However, once you dig deep enough into the well in which soil can not easily be removed (usually once you have to start lifting soil overhead), then things start to get more complicated. In order to keep digging, you have to install a winch overhead, and, because manpower is cheap and gasoline is expensive, this winch is probably going to be human powered.

Now this is when the operation starts to get a bit more labor intensive. By the time that you install the winch, it is probably going to be too dark to sift through dirt and, increasingly, mud for artifacts, so you have to bring in sorters. If you've got an enthusiastic digger, this will necessitate several sorters, as you can dig a lot faster if you don't need to be constantly scanning for artifacts, and by this point about 1/2-2/3s of the trench's manpower is devoted to digging this one basket: One digger, two winch-pullers and two to four sorters. By the time you hit the water table, which we already had by the time I entered the scene, you also need a pump to draw out the water in the well. Don't get too enthusiastic about the pump though. Even when it was in perfect working order the pump served less to drain the well and more to keep the water at a tolerably waist-deep level. One final addition which, from what I heard, was a new innovation was a metal cage to prevent the walls from caving in. I must admit, that I was slightly worried that this, again: from what I heard, was not usually employed. As it was, the safety provided from cave-ins was somewhat undermined by the danger of cutting yourself on the exposed metal edges while digging in muddy water. Still, I'd rather have tetanus or gangrene than be buried alive. I'd prefer neither, to be honest, but beggars can't be choosers.

Of the well-related tasks, I must say, my favorite by far is winch-pulling, which should come as little surprise to regular readers, as winch-pulling is by all accounts, the easiest job in a dig. For the most part, your job is to stand around  the well making sure that the well-digger is all good and not having a panic attack from the claustrophobia or anything, occasionally cranking a handle to bring up another haul of gravely mud. More to the point though, your proximity to the well gives a nice cool draft, which is great since you're basically standing around in the sun the entire day, and your upright posture means that you can listen in to most conversations around the well. As a matter of fact, the only real labor intensive task is replacing the ladder when the well-digger had enough of being trapped in a dark, watery hole in the ground, which happens infrequently enough to be a nice change of pace.

Speaking of being tapped in a dark, watery hole in the ground, I am sure that you all are eager to learn what it's like to dig in a well. Fortunately, I subjected myself to the task just for your edification. The first step of digging in a well is to equip yourself appropriately: a hard-hat, of course, and one of several pairs of galoshes, none of which really fit but you're sure as hell not going down there in your shoes. Now, suitably prepared for the task, you descend into the well, either by a ladder or, if the well is deep enough, lowered down by the winch-pullers. Once you are in the well, your galoshes immediately fill with water and bracing yourself against the cold, you realize that your shoulders are far too broad and legs too thick to comfortably crouch down and dig here, but you're already wet and the last guy lasted four hours down here without a break, so you might as well give it a go. You clumsily situate yourself between the ever-obstrurent pump, ignore the fact that you are currently sharing a muddy pit of water with a steel cage and a submerged, high-voltage machine, and get cracking. Any illusion that the upper half of your body at least will remain dry is shattered as water streams down from your dust-pan down your shirt. After about twenty minutes of digging, your supervisor leans his head over the well-head and informs you that it's picture day today, so you need to get out of the well. You dissimulate the fact that you are very happy that you're not in the well for the entire picture-taking process, and then after its over you go back down into the well for another forty-five minutes or so to make a good show of it. Once you get out, you spend far too much time trying to get your galoshes off, as their small size and suction-cup like grip means that they have clamped fast to your foot. You resign yourself to sorting, which, despite how muddy it is, is a pleasant task, as you get to sit down and generally doesn't require too much effort. Your replacement then goes down the well and spends the next five hours down there, digging out more mud every fifteen minutes than you did for the entire hour. Fortunately, all the energy which you are saving in the sorting job can be employed to repress the shame for being such a terrible well-digger.

So overall, I'd give the whole experience a 6/10. I would recommend trying it out at least once, as it makes basically every other part of an archaeological excavation seem much more palatable in comparison.

Michael

Week 5: Living in Interesting Times

This week began on quite a startling note. I had just gotten back to my apartment after a rather grueling return trip from Delphi, and was rather looking forward to carrying on business as usual. One of my roommates, in one of the rare conversations I had with him inside of our shared abode (my two roommates were both very private when it came to our accommodations, a circumstance which suited me just fine), asked me if I had heard about the coup attempt in Turkey. I hadn't, of course, as not hearing about things was rather the point of going to Delphi, and so he explained the basics to me, beaming with the same degree of fascination as I would were I to lock some unfortunate soul into a discussion of history. I must admit, it was fascinating: but then, watching a house fire is also fascinating, but that doesn't mean I enjoy it.

No, after he finished, I continued to look into the event, with a gnawing sense of dread welling up inside me. The first two reasons are rather personal: first, because several Turkish officers involved in the coup had fled to Greece, and I try to make it a habit of not being involved with the weaker party of a major diplomatic incident involving historic enemies. (As it turns out, the Greek government was of the same opinion and ended up denying asylum several months later). Second, I had actually had originally intended to visit Istanbul that very weekend, but decided against it because I decided that I couldn't be bothered to go through the effort of international travel. Once again, my own lethargy proves to be to my advantage. Suck on it, Protestant Work Ethic.

Aside from my personal safety, however, the incident moved me in a rather deeper way. Prior to this incident, I had always considered politics and the grander state of the world with a sort of bemused detachment. Like my roommate, I had been fascinated by it: I am a history major after all, and the only difference between contemporary politics and historical politics is a span of time. But, much like history, I had sort of internalized it as something I was separate from. Politics, at least public-facing politics, was some inane horse-and-pony show, a distraction from the real sausage-making that was done behind closed doors. As such, my own contribution was necessarily rather limited, and that I ought to focus on getting the necessary credentials to contribute my own voice to vast institutional machine behind the curtain.

To be honest, Brexit should've been my revelation that this isn't the case. Or really, my education in history. But Brexit, insofar as I could tell, was a bizarre institutional hiccup in an otherwise stable country, and history, as has been drilled into my head by nearly two decades of my education, was different, and that comparing the present to the past was inappropriate. But, having learned that Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, the man who said “Democracy is like a train. You take it where you have to go, and then you get off,” had just learned that he was approaching his stop, all of the little worrying little details about what seems to be the global erosion of political and civil rights seemed to come flooding back.

In retrospect, it should've seemed more obvious. I had been aware enough about the US intelligence apparatus which had developed behind the scenes that I marveled that people were shocked by the Edward Snowden leaks in 2013. I had been aware of climate change even before An Inconvenient Truth had been released, because my elementary school's sole science teacher was an ecologist by trade. I had been aware of the vast potential of automation to undermine the labor market since I took up futurology as a hobby in 2013. I watched 4chan, which, for better or for worse, I used to browse regularly, turn from an undoubtedly wretched, but ultimately harmless hive of scum and villainy turn into the spear-tip of the  Alt-Right, and fascism percolate from being one of any number of edgy shitposts (I apologize for the language, but it is a technical term) into being a wholly sincere and  evangelical movement across the entire internet. I knew all of these things, and yet, they did not form a cohesive picture in my mind. For all of the various things that were going wrong, everything was fine.

As it turns out, this comic is the great reflection of our times.

As it turns out, things are not going to be fine. The coup attempt, for whatever reason brought together all of these things in my mind. This realization manifested as a sort of schizoid disloyalty to aligning myself to any particular field of study. Those who have been following my projected career in academia no doubt have been very confused and even somewhat frustrated at the fact that I appear to change my mind as to what I'm doing after I graduate on a weekly basis. This has in fact been the case, even more than you might realize, as I try not to reveal any change of plans unless there is a decent likelihood that I would actually follow through with it. But this apparent chaos is not actually arbitrary at all. I think that the most profound thing that the Coup in Turkey actually did is force me to think holistically: it's not actually possible to understand anything without understanding anything else.

Historians, I believe are in a position to be uniquely aware of this. The secret foundation of any historical writing is that basically everything about a work of history: where it begins, where it ends, which facts and theories are included and which are ignored are, if not arbitrary, then deliberately selected to limit the scope of a work to a functional level. There is no really compelling reason, for example that history should begin at Sumer: by the time we get our first documents, the entire Mesopotamian civilization had been established for at least several thousand years before the "beginning of history" actually starts. Likewise the convention of being an X Historian, that is to say a historian that is restricted either by Geographic region, like a Chinese Historian, by time, like a Medieval Historian, or by field of study, like an Economic Historian. Likewise, the 20 year rule, the rule that things that happened up to 20 years ago don't count as history, is a mechanism to filter out bias and human ignorance than any ontological difference.

Where this comes back to me is that, since the coup, I've grown more convinced that there's something very important that we're not getting because of the gaps between disciplines. So me saying last week that I'm going to research intellectual history, this week that it's environmental history, next week the history of walruses in Colonial French Indochina doesn't mean that I'm breaking the tablet and starting over every week. What I'm actually doing is finding ways to erase the gaps and redraw them in different ways to see if it works better. To be honest, I don't really expect to succeed. I am just a dude, after all, I can't actually know everything. But to be honest, the way we understand things now isn't exactly doing a bang-up job, so might as well give it the ol' college try.

Sincere Regards

Michael

Week 4: Power Outage

So this week my phone died -for good. I'm not entirely sure what happened; insofar as I can tell, the internal wiring of the power jack was damaged, which resulted in a slow, drawn out death as my phone exhausted the reserve of energy in its battery's final charge. This was a bit of a problem for me because my phone was a very important tool in my archaeological arsenal. It was my primary timekeeping piece (I never really got into watches. Usually they just seem redundant), my navigational tool, a functionally effective translator and, importantly a vessel for audio-books. Although I couldn't make use of them during the dig, I was plugged into one at any other moment I wasn't free to actually sit down and read something: walking, mostly, too and from work, to get groceries and other supplies, while exploring the city and while traveling outside the city. As it was, it was too important for me not to have a phone by the end of the dig at least (for international travel: not having ready access to information while at airports always leads to trouble, doubly so in different countries) so I had to make arrangements to get a new one. The fastest turn around time I could manage was a week, which turned out to be more along the lines of two and a half, so in the mean time, I had to make do without.

Now, I'm sure that many people would be thrilled to be forced to put down their phones, intellectually at least, and given my discussion of Zen last week, you might think that I was one of them. If that is the case, you would be wrong. I did receive encouragement from my brother to be more present when listening to the sounds of the city, but to be honest I was not very eager to be sensually present in a city with a terrible noise pollution problem, especially after an intensive initiation to it while I was trying to sleep for the first couple of nights before I bought some earplugs. Really, I kind of feel that the whole idea of "unplugging" to be a bit misguided. I mean, by all means, if you feel that you are spending an unhealthy amount of time on the internet then stop: readjust your lifestyle accordingly. Notice, though how I phrased it. I have seen many people frame the problem as "the internet is hurting you," but that just isn't the case. Technology doesn't do anything: it's a tool, not an agent. The internet doesn't care whether you spend every waking moment on it or if everyone in the world decided to unplug at the same time and left every server farm in the world to rust. What matters is relationships: your relationship with yourself, with your peers, with technology and with the rest of the world. Technology can change the relationship, but it certainly is not inherently good or bad. Letter from a Birmingham Jail and Mein Kampf were both written with the same tools in the same environment by the same kind of animal. The tangible, objective realities were largely the same, but the relationships of the agents, both subjective and inter-subjective varied wildly.

One of the first lessons you learn as a historian is to identify relationships. How did x affect y, how was person a related to person b, how did such and such historian relate to this or that event that he wrote about? Human's relationship with technology is one that is hotly debated: you can have two experts about some technology or other, while one is an anarcho-primitivist, while the other is a techno-utopian. I personally have been satisfied with neither extreme, not because I don't see their points, but because I think they are missing the bigger picture. Technology, by in large, doesn't change the relationships that people have with most things. That is why, as a historian and a classicist, I am still in business. War is hell, whether on the plains of Ilium or the jungles of Vietnam. Cult leaders, whether with wood-carved print pamphlets or Twitter accounts turn people into suckers the same way. The ephemeral, soul crushing pain of lost love feels the same whether eulogized in a Latin ode or a Youtube video. There's probably some good stuff that stays the same too, but those are boring. My point is that I don't need to force myself to "unplug" from my phone, because I already cultivate good relationships with the digital and analogue worlds both.

Oh, in other news: we found a head this week! By we, of course, I mean someone else. The rule in archaeology is that whenever something interesting is found, it is found by someone who isn't you. Way of the world. I would post a picture, but the whole publishing rights business is a bit trickier than I'm comfortable with, so I found a suitably representative substitution from the internet.

It was like this, except different

Sincere Regards,

Michael

Week 3: Zen and the Art of Digging Straight, 2cm Deep Lines

So this post is a tiny bit anachronistic, as I did not actually read/listen to Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance until a couple weeks later, but to be fair, most of what I'm writing about is only tangentially related to the book. The main portion of what I will be writing this week is about the nature of "hard work" and how to approach it.

If you have not gathered already, I am a particularly lazy person. I am not terribly interested in doing work that I don't have to do, and look to avoid it if at all possible. Don't get me wrong: I can and do work very hard, but under most circumstances that enthusiasm for labor is predicated largely on how it will enable me to expend less effort overall, even if that effort is front-loaded. To be honest, I say this with pride, and see absolutely nothing wrong with it. In fact, I would argue it's the most natural way of doing things: Water always takes the path of least resistance, flowing to the lowest point. Chemical reactions will only ever take place if the energy required to take place is less than the energy required to stay separate. Animal behavior of every kind is inclined to laze about and do nothing unless something: hunger, fear, lust, boredom, compels it to do something. Even human invention is regularly spurred not by genius or necessity, but just because some guy was spending too much time on something for his liking, and so front-loaded his effort in inventing some tool to make his life easier.

And so, with all this being the case, here I was, alone, chipping away at an empty clay pit, first to be exposed to the sun, too far away from everyone else to even hear their conversations, let alone converse with them myself. I understood why I was digging straight, 2cm deep lines in the soil: even though the pit turned out to be as empty as I figured it was going to be, we had to make sure there was nothing interesting in there: Apparently last year they found a golden tunic bauble in that same pit. You never know when you're going to strike it rich again. But as I scraped away at barren clay with my medium-pick and trowel, I remembered my past realization that work, in general, is a sucker's game.

Now I know what you're thinking: I must be some kind of reprobate. How can this student not value hard work? It's what we strive for! To work hard so that one day we can "make it" To this I say: yes, it is what we strive for. Why exactly? What even is "making it?" I'm sure everyone has their own idea of what "making it" means: often it will be some material standard: to upgrade yourself to the next social class, to keep up with the Jones, to retire and not have to work, but live in relative luxury and explore the world! All of these are fine goals, but from my own pragmatic laziness, there is a major flaw the work/payoff ratio is terrible. Unless you're scraping your way out of abject poverty (and good luck with that in this economy), you really aren't getting much out of the rat race. Sure, you get your bigger house, fancier duds, more attractive children, but give it two or three months and you're right back where you started, vaguely uneasy and anxious to get more. The fact of the matter is, there's diminishing returns to material satisfaction, maxing out around $85,000-$212,000 p/a depending on how stratified your community is (turns out, it gets lower the less stratified it is: thus the pragmatically lazy would necessarily support higher social equality). So hard work to "make it" is indeed a sucker's game. If our dear leader leading Republican candidate (this is late June 2016 remember. It was a simpler time), has yet to be satisfied with his life of stupendous alleged wealth and luxury, I can't think of how taking on more work and responsibilities to raise that portfolio a couple more decimal places is anything but playing yourself. To paraphrase one of the most venerable sage of our age, DJ Khaled: don't do that.

So then, what does all this philosophical nonsense have to do with digging straight, 2cm deep lines? Well this is where the Zen comes in. Well, unlike the Protestant Work Ethic, in which you're supposed to work hard because God wants you to hate yourself  wait hold on, because the poor deserve to be poor nope, still not it, it's because fun is evil and being miserable builds character  dang it, one more time: you're supposed to work hard because "hard work, discipline and frugality are a result of a person's salvation in the Protestant faith." (thank you Wikipedia), the Zen Work Ethic is something along the lines of "work hard and become skilled for the sake of being fulfilled by the work itself." Ideally, this should result in a trance-like state in which you are skillfully performing your task entirely intuitively without any conscious focus, known to people who don't actually know what Zen is as "going all Zen," but under most circumstances, a deliberate meditative focus on your work is good enough. For the Protagonist Formerly-Known-as Phadrus in Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, the work which he usually focuses on is, well, maintaining his motorcycle. For me, it was digging straight, 2cm deep lines in an empty clay pit. When I started doing this, this is when my abject misery started to snowball into sincere enjoyment. Turns out, the pragmatic idler can be convinced to work hard for no describable reward. If the work itself is the reward, then it's not really work, now is it?

Dang. I think I just played myself.

Michael

Week 2: The Dirt on the Agora

Good lord, I am really sorry for that pun. That was dreadful, I'm not gonna lie. Anyway, I figure that since this week was more of the same, sweeping, cleaning passes more sweeping, ect. ect. I would take the time to get into the history of the agora, both the place and the dig. Not too much, since this isn't really my field of expertise, but you'll get the general gist of things.

So the agorá, which translates to "assembly place" was basically the one place which people would meet for markets, political business, religious festivals, athletic competitions and so forth. It more or less functioned as the sole public space, and for Athens, since citizens (that is to say, not women, slaves or foreigners, so still a minority of the population) were expected to participate in politics on a regular basis. This form of government is usually called a "democracy" which is, strictly speaking, true, because they came up with the term, so they can use it however they want. However, as with our own democracy, it is rather more complicated than "the people make the laws." The the people, that is to say the citizens who showed up to the ecclesia (popular assembly) voted on the laws but the laws themselves were managed by a series of magistrates wh- you know what, here just look at this chart.

Yeah, it's a bit of a mess. Source

  In any case, the agora was a lot more than just an assembly place, it's also had a number of temples, public buildings and porticos (called stoaí) surrounding the main square. I'll give you a couple maps, since, although everyone is crazy about 5th C. BCE, Athens did, in fact, exist during other periods.

5th C. BCE Agora. Key in the source

2nd Cent CE. Source

I'll wrap up today by including a couple of Google Earth links. First, one that is (more or less) centered over the agora the same way these maps are, so you can see how it looks in modern times, and two more centered over the main areas which we were digging. You will see that they ran a train track over the north of the agora. To be fair, they didn't know that the agora was there at the time, and I have been assured that it's actually less disruptive than you might first think. This bit here in the center is section Omicron Omicron, the first dig site I was on, pictured before we tore it to shreds. You might think that the tree would be a nice bit of shade, but I assure you digging around it and sweeping up after it all the time was far more trouble than it was worth. And this massive pit here is Beta Theta and Beta Zeta, along with a couple other sections that we weren't digging. This is where the most significant chunk of our dig was focused this season, and it is where, next week onward, I would be spending the remainder of my time. I'll leave it at that for now.

Sincere Regards,

Michael Coffey