Do you know what I expected on this Archaeological journey? I don’t either. How could I? Until this trip, all of the Greco-Roman world- all of the entire ancient world- had been as abstract as words in a textbook. How can you imagine what it’s like to hold in your very hand something untouched for over a thousand years? Artifacts even Charlemagne lived too late to have encountered. You can look at a mummy in a display case and ponder upon how that’s a person, but you’re so detached from it. That mummy lived once, doing things that history tells us, and was mummified, to later be exhumed by archaeologists in days decades gone, who learned from that mummy what they learned, and now the historical circuit is closed. It’s all very concise, and seemingly self-sufficient, and just is. But then when you’re that archaeologist, when you’re there when that abstract concept of history is exhumed from the earth, it’s as though the past is still alive, fresh, undiluted.
Who is this person?
What are they doing here?
How did they come to be here?
What were those who laid them to rest thinking, and doing?
What happened before this person died, and what afterwards?
I’ve heard of how silly all the strife over the bits of the Earth seem when viewing the Earth from orbit, but I’ve never dreamed of experiencing a similar perspective myself until the first artifacts made themselves known in this Antiochian dirt. This isn’t some display-case artifact running along a historical path utterly separate from me. In fact, there never has been a historical path utterly separate from me. We’re all a part of the grand fabric that our ancestors laid and that we are now weaving. And so wide and long is this fabric, that we can hardly see back beyond the work of the few newest generations. We’ve forgotten what so much of it looks like. What museums show is detached bits of that wide and long fabric, easy to dissociate from our own lives. What textbooks show is vague descriptions of what the designs were and how they led into one another, again easy to dissociate. What doing this archaeology myself has shown is that the bits in museums were never detached: the long tapestry of history had just been stretched taut and had its two far ends pulled together. And there’s a whole loop of tapestry back there connecting it all together. This is what Antiochia has so kindly gifted me: perspective.
So what have I learned? That we need to reveal that tapestry, and that anyone put in the right situation can see it. Let this sentiment stand as complete affirmation to my intense desire to excavate at every corner of the earth in which I’m welcomed. Let it also be noted how much I’ve fallen for this Antiochia Ad Cragum, and that I would come back every season for the remainder of my days just to see the site grow up, standing as tall on our end of the tapestry as it did back when it was first weaved.
And you know, I think that’s all someone coming here next year needs to bring: some curiosity. No need for an excessive amount- no need to force yourself to be more excited than the human norm- but just enough to feed the natural human desire to learn, to connect pieces, to build up your own interpretation of the scope of the world within which you dwell. Because if you have that, if you have a perspective, regardless of what perspective, and if you have curiosity, willingness to absorb, desire to learn, you will gain an appreciation for where we are and why we’re here and who we’re here with and who was here before us and why they were here, and you will see humanity for the glorious being that it is.
And why does that view matter?
Because it’d be an awful shame for you to not see the tapestry for the little pieces we call textbook chapters. We’ve put a lot of work into this tapestry, after all.