I’ve always been a big fan of spending a few hours in a cozy building surrounded by pictures, statues, or possessions of either dead people or supposed gods. It is so intriguing to be able to see such artifacts with your own eyes whether it be a rusty fishhook from Ephesus or a the mud-imprinted footprint of Muhammed. I find myself walking by the display cases thinking about the origins and stories behind these fabled objects, but something always feels awkward as I walk the hallways; it’s the glass on the display case that separates me from a history that I want to view up close and touch with my own hands. I know I’m not the only one who thinks this, for that’s why display cases exist; they keep grubby fingers off the items. From my work in Antiochia, I have been able to bypass this common peeve of every museum goer. Every item that is uncovered on site is a wonderful, communal experience. A piece of history is unearthed for the first time in 2000 years; a piece of history that hasn’t been seen or touched by since the owner held it in his or her hands. And it’s not just the person who finds it who’s excited. All on site take part in the questioning and studying of the item. What is beautiful about this is that we have had the opportunity to personally study and analyze these objects before their trek to the museum. Our finds have been diverse, ranging from an infant grave to a loom weight, a glass handle from a drinking cup to an inscription of a Greek name on a block of marble. Some pieces are in pristine condition and give us a clear understanding of the artifact’s history and relationship to the building while others remain only in pieces; a state in which it can be extremely difficult to picture the complete item in its natural environment. That is where museums come in. I’ve been lucky enough to visit numerous museums since I’ve been in Turkey. I have visited three museums in Istanbul and two in Alanya and Antalya. In addition to these museums, the group has taken multiple site tours of areas that are in fact quite similar to ours in design or history (site tours such as Side, Aspendos, Perge, and historical buildings such as the Hagia Sofia in Istanbul). It can be rather overwhelming when one walks into an excavated Roman town or a fancy mosque that had been fully primed into its pristine form as a tourist attraction (Perge was a 60 year project), but the sheer magnificence can tell you a lot about human ingenuity and the lifestyles of the people who inhabited the town. We have been told that our site used to house 40,000 people (hard to believe when the only exposed areas are the bath house, colonnaded street, main gate, imperial temple, and the acropolis while all other areas such as the agora, Main Street and cisterns are still covered in a meter deep layer of soil and prickly shrubs, or are gone entirely). It’s easy to loose sight of the big picture when all you do is trowel soil on top of the acropolis for days on end, but that is why these site tours and museums are so important. Museums provide you with quality examples of glassware that helps you visualize what the glass handle you found earlier in the week looked like in its original form. They provide you with the common history of these pristine objects in relation to the society in which they were created. From that we can contemplate that object’s purpose and its place within our own site. What was this glass cup’s relationship to the room it was found in and the people who used or displayed it in the Acropolis at Antiochia? I can now say that I have been on both sides of the glass; a position that I love much more than being limited to only looking at a coin as a tourist. Site tours, on the other hand, provide big picture visualizations. They remind us that WE are in the forefront of excavating a site that has only undergone 10 years of study. This isn’t a common thing anymore! We are in a time and age where many prominent sites have already undergone multiple decades of tampering and studying. Antiochia ad Cragum is, I believe, a blessing surrounded by thick bushes with thorns. We have the opportunity to learn archeological theory and practice on a site that will someday find itself in the history books. There is a lot of hard work ahead of the future dig teams, but in the end I feel that everyone will be able to see Antiochia the way it was originally meant to be seen (minus a few downed columns). The site tours help us better comprehend this possibility and, I believe, inspire us to work that much harder to unravel the mysteries of our seaside city of old.