This trip to Turkey has been a wonderful experience for me, and through it I have been able to experience some different customs, traditions, and ways of life. In particular, I’ve done a few activities while here that make me feel as though I have a better understanding of how tasks had to be completed historically, without the modern inventions we now have.
Last week, I had the joy of washing laundry. (Here, that is a real joy- no joking. Having clean, non dusty, non sweaty clothing is like having your birthday and Christmas come early. On the same day.) This was no ordinary laundry experience, however. There is a washing machine here that we have access to , and to my knowledge, it works just fine. The problem is that the ratio of people to washing machines is a little off, about 30 to 1 I would guess. Instead of waiting for the washing machine to be empty, I took my clothing outside and washed it in a plastic tub purchased from a local store. And just like people did for all those centuries before washing machines came into existence, I spent an afternoon pounding and scrubbing the soil stains out of my dig clothes on a rock. What would have been nice is one of those ribbed washboards, but I was able to complete my task using the rock. It was actually cool and relaxing to wash out my clothes in the tub with the rock because I got to be up to my elbows in cool, sudsy water. Any opportunity I have to cool off in water is one I will gladly take. All in all, not a bad way to spend a Wednesday afternoon.
The other task I completed that made me feel like I was connecting to the past happened last week as well, and it involved making something that was necessary for our site. I worked with a few other students to conserve some of the walls on the acropolis that have experienced some weathering and crumbling problems, and in order to do this, we applied mortar and new stone to rebuild them and stop their current deterioration. The process itself is fairly simple: mix up the mortar, apply it to the wall, and start inserting small stones into it. We repeated this process for a few layers just to give the wall a flat, even surface, and then we had to spray more water over it to keep it from cracking as it dried. While this job was done in antiquity, I also got to take part in the preparation of the mortar, which involved making our own brick dust to be mixed into the mortar. To do this, simply take small brick chips, and pound on them repeatedly for 7 hours until they turn into a fine powder that will be used in the mortar. In those 7 hours, we made about a few cups full of dust. It is slow work, and we found that rocks are actually more effective in pounding the chips into dust than a hammer. I learned later that we did the exact same work as ancient slaves did, and we used the exact same process as they did too. Thought slavery has a somewhat different connotation to it in ancient Rome than it does in our modern mindset, I thought it was interesting that we did the same work in the same way that was utilized in antiquity.
This trip has taught me many things and has given me the opportunity to have experiences that I never would have gotten if I hadn’t come here, and doing laundry in a tub with a rock and pounding bricks into dust to be used for mortar just like they would have done in the ancient world are certainly among them. Especially with the mortar production, I wouldn’t have fully understood what goes into constructing the walls we are so carefully excavating if I hadn’t gotten to actually participate in the entire process of making the mortar. Turkey is definitely a place full of interesting experiences, both on the site and off.