Look around you. This is what our instructors have been telling us from day once, not because we might be impaled by poisoned arrows from an Indiana Jones-esque booby trap, but because we must understand and experience the land in which our cultural ancestors have worked, played, lived, breathed, worshipped for thousands of years. Myriads of people and cultures have left us clues to our past and theirs. We are here look around ourselves for everything from the mundane pottery sherd (yes, sherd, not shard, shards are glass) to a glorious imperial temple to the very soil (not dirt, as Vera so eloquently put in her post) we walk on (and often breathe).
The first day at the dig site I was sent up to the acropolis which has never yet been excavated. I get up there and I look around me. To me back there are ruins of a once bustling roman port town and pirate enclave. To me sides are terraces of olives and bananas blanketing fully green, scrub forested hills, still inhabited by the farmers tending their land in a manner similar to their great great … Great grand parents. In front of me is the vast expanse of the Mediterranean sprawling out to a horizon hidden by a misty haze of clouds and melding with the clear blue sky. If this is the land the people of Antiochia inhabited, one can only fathom at the material culture still buried in these hill sides.
I cannot wait to see what is in store for the 2014 St. Olaf team as we dig into the past.