“isn’t that, like, indiana jones?”
- bootsinthestars
- Jul 11, 2018
- 4 min read
I’ve long had at least a vague idea of what archaeology is - probably, in fact, dating back to the first time I watched Indiana Jones. Spielberg’s portrayal is pretty swashbuckling, to say the least. I was pretty sure most archaeologists didn't make rent by snatching treasures from locals or fighting Nazis, but I didn't know much else.
Fast forward to my first semester of college.
I was completely overwhelmed by the sheer number of courses at my disposal. I could do whatever I wanted, and it was terrifying. I started shoving random courses into my schedule - some that had been okayed by upperclassmen, some that just looked interesting. So, on a whim, I added an archaeology class.
On the first day of the archaeology course (my second day of college), the professor leaned his bike against the front wall of the classroom and smiled at all of us.
“Archaeology is not like Indiana Jones,” he said.
He spent most of that first class in the pursuit of a definition of archaeology, trying to brush away preconceived notions (artifacts go into museums, not pockets) and expose the present-day value of understanding the past.
Stolen from my professor’s syllabus: archaeology is the study of the human past from the material evidence of their activities and practices. No dinosaurs, sorry. Just people.
You’d never believe how much people leave behind - and what conclusions a good archaeologist can draw from just a pile of stone slivers. Archaeologists are like detectives, interpreting information about cultures and groups from the clues left behind in the ground. It’s part excavation, part data analysis, part grant writing.
Archaeology informs a good deal of the history we know today. In the right hands, it can share the stories of those who have been silenced by illiteracy, norms of gender and sexuality, governments, poverty - regular people who didn’t often make it into historical records of their day. Forensic archaeology can even build cases for crimes against humanity and return the lost to their families.
It took me a few months after that first class to realise that I wanted to major in archaeology. Before I fully committed, though, I wanted some practical experience. Something outside of the classroom. So, last summer, I headed to the west coast of Ireland for field school.
While in Ireland, days started by 8 and ended at 5, it rained for the majority of our excavation, and the tents we camped in were nearly destroyed by the wind at least once. In short, it was amazing. I never wanted to leave the unit we were working on, motivated by the promise that the next layer of soil held, though I quickly learned that artifacts were never guaranteed. I wanted to go back as soon as I got home.
Last semester, I worked with several classmates on a dig in southeastern Texas. We would pile into cars at 6:30 on Saturday morning and dig until we’d worn ourselves out that evening. I received no shortage of fire ant bites during those weeks, but we came away with a wealth of animal bones and corroded pieces of metal that needed analysing. Not quite the experience I had in Ireland - for example, southeastern Texas is humid and the soil a haven for absurdly large grubs - but it was amazing, all the same. Aside from the 6 am wake-up after a long week of class.
In the words of one of my archaeology professors, I got the bug. It would be hard not to, I think. Already, archaeology has introduced me to some of the smartest, most considerate people I’ve met. The field is sometimes overwhelming in its scope, drawing on the work of many disciplines in its goal to understand the world, or maybe just a person. Something seemingly small, like discovering a female Viking warrior, can rewrite narratives of gender and power, changing the way we see our past and our present. For nearly every issue we see in the world today, an archaeologist has studied it in the past, developing a historian’s hindsight on topics we might imagine to belong to our century alone.
To all the people who have wondered out loud to me what archaeology is, what’s the point, why - I hope you found this a decent introduction. If you’d like to learn more, I’ve linked some great resources below that will take you places I can’t in a regular blog post.
On migration
On water management (& crises)
On “disappearances,” or mass murder
On food
On the Middle Ages (still extremely relevant!)
If you’re interested in field research, this is a good starting place:
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