A quick intro- I'm Jen McDaniel, homeschooling mama. One of my roles is to facilitate Team Paleo's interests. The cool thing is that I get to unabashedly participate in much of the exploration and learning that the kids experience. Plus I like to write as I learn, so here is a little something the muse drew from me last week...
Wondering
and Wandering in the World of Archaeology
Noting
the raw blister on my thumb, I understood why the other workers
wisely wore cotton gloves. Using only your fingers to push 10 gallon
buckets worth of dirt through half-centimeter holes in mesh screens
takes a toll on your hands. It can also feel like an exercise in
futility. At least, until the hours of repetitive dirt-pushing yields a small and precious treasure; the broken tip of an Indian arrow, a
bit of shell-tempered pottery, or charcoal and bones from someone's
centuries-old meal.
So
this is archaeology! Redundant digging, blisters on thumbs, hours
cultivating melanomas in the sun. I suddenly recalled the episode of
Gilligan's Island where Thurston Howell III commanded Gilligan to mow
his lawn, one blade of grass at a time with a manicure scissors. In
other words, archaeology is tedious business.
Yet, after the movie romance of 'doing a dig' wears off, along with a few layers of thumb skin, the tedium is accepted and you settle into the rhythm of scrape and dig and sieve and bag. The work becomes meditative, conversations float about, occasional bursts of laughter rise up. I begin to realize that by the necessity of the dig- that is, standing around a waist-high table set with a screen to pass dirt through, squatting over a neatly carved square of earth that highlights an archaeological feature- we humans are gathered together in concentration and purpose just as our subjects who lived here before us. They too sat around this pot we are digging up, not to uncover it, but to fill it with carefully cultivated hickory nuts, maybe cracking a few to gnaw on as they worked. Perhaps it was not a screening table our predecessors stood at, but a white-tail deer skin where clay was worked with heated and crushed mussel shells to make it strong. I can imagine the blisters earned proudly upon a grinding stone by a young child crushing her first soaked acorn meats into porridge.
The tedious things we do in our own homes become a fascination to us when cast in an historical play from a thousand years before. We become interested in garbage; an Oneoda Indian's equivalent to candy bar wrappers and deli roasted chicken bones. We celebrate with venerating ooh's and a nonchalant convergent march of piqued scientists upon the discovery of a stone jar, what would be to us a discarded water bottle. Food prep, bathroom habits, pet care, washing dishes... these are the things for which as little thought possible goes into during the course of our modern day. Yet when an archaeologist discovers an 800 year old garden tool, a paleo-pet, or even petrified poo, great reverence and many days may go into analyzing those items.
With
such punctuation are repetitive dig days marked. We find an artifact
amidst the dirt; something so much more than a utilitarian object. We
find, I think, something that commonizes our humanity with that of
the people who came before. We wonder if that object, or the person
who held it last some hundreds of years ago, can offer us an answer
to who we are- maybe we are like them. Maybe their wisdom can offer
us answers. Maybe their mistakes can.
Perhaps
we will find something significant that, amazingly, humanity has
forgotten. Surely it lies buried in the soil horizons of time. Or
maybe we simply like digging in the dirt, searching for buried
treasure; kids in a sandbox.
For
me, though, something primal calls me to the search. Often we hear
history's cultures referred to as primitive, although I've never
bought into that. The primal part is in me, not the ancient culture.
I have a deep need to understand humanity and it seems that something
in my gut, in my heart, says “Look here.” So I do.
The
X that marks the spot to humankind's buried treasure is in history,
culture, and the people who create it. I find modern humans
interesting as well. I might be as likely to find your toothbrush and
cooking oil collection as fascinating as tooth wear patterns in
agrarian societies and a find of Greek amphorae filled with ancient
olive oil. I want to know. I have no idea what I will find, but I'd
like to at least try.
Guarding
against the risk of assumption or projecting my own ideas onto
ancient evidence, I can consider with new eyes the puzzle of
humanity. Each artifact is a puzzle piece to a larger picture. I
pause, holding a small black potsherd someone found and is passing
around, and I wonder. Did ancient humans find leftovers from their predecessors and wonder about them? Did they know someone would come
along in the future and wonder about their tools and table scrapings?
And what do we make of all of it?
The
mind boggles. Perhaps the answers to humanity are not found in
objects, ancient or new, but in my own actions of the moment- the
action of wondering. Sometimes the answers are not nearly as
important as the process by which we find them.
