My first week in Turkey has been a sensory and information overload. Turkey is hot, dry, and dusty, – a bit of an adjustment from the hot, humid, wonderfully verdant summers of my native Virginia. Yet while the change of landscape and topography was shocking, I found I was even more surprised by what I learned about archaeology itself. Over the course of the week, I’ve come to the conclusion that archaeology is both a destructive and subtractive practice. (That, as I hope is clear, is not a “bad thing.”) The process of archaeology – removing ground cover, clearing away topsoil, and finally excavating the site – all remove material and destroy the things on the surface of the dig site to discover what lies below. As such, nothing can be undone or repeated. This destructive work is critical to the process of archaeology. Without it, we can’t discover the objects we hope to find which allow us to piece together the lives of the people who inhabited the site we’re excavating.
I initially found this destructive quality to archaeology disconcerting because I had previously thought of archaeology as scientific. All the technical terms, tools, lab notebooks and precision seemed to suggest that archaeological excavation was at its core scientific, perhaps even a science itself. Yet science is repeatable and archaeology is not. Because the very process of archeology destroys both the dig site and its context there is no ability to replicate or repeat the excavation.
For me, the knowledge that we can’t redo what we’ve done gives archaeology tremendous significance. If archaeology is destructive, then you have to do the best job you can the first and only time you do it. Since the point of archaeology, as far as I see it, is to tell the story of people in the past through the objects they left behind, we only get one shot to tell that story. While the process of archaeology allows us to tell that story, it means we have a duty to tell it well with the one opportunity we have. I hope that through my time in Antiochia I can do just that.