Week 1: Fun in the Sun

This title is a lie. There was very little fun to be had in the sun on that week, very little at all. No, the opening week of the dig at the Agora, well before I was acclimatized to either the weather or the work was pretty much the opposite of fun. I will spare your delicate eyes, dear reader, with excessive grumbling. Since I have the benefit of hindsight, I can easily rationalize away the misery I experienced in the first week of digging, a luxury I had no access to as it happened. Just pretend, for the sake of dramatic illusion, that everything I say afterword is tinged with onerous moroseness.

I began the week on a high note, being twenty minutes late on the first day, thus officially making me "that guy who was late." In my own defense, I didn't actually know where I was going, and the unofficial policy of "people who have done this before show the newbies where to go on the first day" seemed to not have been in effect. So I arrived conspicuously tardily, only later realizing that I had taken a wrong turn at the last block and had actually circumnavigated the entire park in which we were digging, and then continuing to be lost inside of the park until I stumbled across the dig site. Definitely not a great start. Fortunately, my trench supervisor happened to be Prof. Gawlinski, who knew me well enough prior to the dig to know that I am not, insofar as I know, a reprobate, but rather just someone with a very poor sense of direction. As such, I got off with little more than some well deserved derision and a stern warning to not do it again. Which I didn't, by the way.

Now, you might be surprised to learn, as I was, that the first stages of archaeology are actually quite unlike what you would imagine. If I were to describe it in any way, it would be that it is like gardening in reverse. All the foliage was torn out of the ground and all the sod was meticulously scraped away with tiny trowels (it was at this point that I remembered my grass allergies. Not bad enough to stop working, but just bad enough to make the work miserable). Before, during and after, every single particle of loose dust and debris must be swept away with tiny hand brooms. Getting the ground to a suitable state of cleanliness is actually quite difficult, as it is literally made of dirt. On more than one occasion, I found myself sweeping an empty patch of earth without the faintest idea of what I was supposed to be sweeping. I would come to learn that the default answer to that question is "everything" with the addendum of "do it again when you're done." This was already a bit too Camusian for my taste before I learned that the appropriate thing to do when you didn't have any orders was to "look archaeological." "Looking archaeological," a phrase which any right minded digger detests, consists of continuing to sweep your assigned area until the supervisor finds something productive for you to do. In the worst case scenario this can last for several hours.

The next order of business, after the first couple of days of sweeping, is to perform a "cleaning pass." Finally, we got our hands on an actual pick, and it was my hope that actual digging would commence. Ah, how innocent I was. No, a cleaning pass consists of starting at one end of your trench, and more or less clear cutting your way through the soil about 2cm down all the way to the other side of the trench. This has several purposes. First, its intended function, it clears away all of the soil which has built up over the year(s) since your last dig. Second, it is an opportunity for the newbies to practice digging in a straight line without disturbing any features (rocks, walls, wells and anything else that was there when you got there). I suspect Prof. Gawlinski though that I might need some extra practice about midway through the first week, as, I got reassigned from my position in the middle of the trench to behind a tree. In retrospect, this was probably a good call. It was much easier for me to be miserable there without breaking anything important.

Over the week I got assigned many other important tasks. Most of them were "go sweep this place some more," "go help those guys do the fourth cleaning pass" and "see if this hole in the ground is something important or if it was just a tree stump" (it was just a tree stump).  While I must admit that in retrospect, these seem like rather dull and fruitless tasks, at the time they still seemed like rather dull and fruitless tasks. But- these were formative times for my archaeological career. In this first week, I learned valuable life lessons, such as how to dig in a straight line, how to tell if a bare patch of dirt has dirt which shouldn't be there and needs to be swept, and how to use distract yourself from the drudgery of life with mental escapism. These are the sort of hard hitting, real world skills that you can't learn in a classroom. And that's what internships are all about.

Michael

PS: I'm going to focus on things other than the toil of hard labor going forward. Keep in mind that the the slow process of indoctrination acclimatization to archaeological work happened gradually over the next seven weeks. For the full lifelike internship blog experience, imagine my sardonic self-pity slowly evolving into genuine enthusiasm over a period of weeks.