Having read all of the reading for the excavation, I was expecting to find myself doing a lot of minute work with the trowel, and though that is sure to come, the first week has proven to be the complete opposite. We have been hauling rocks, tearing down a wall, moving meters of dirt by bucket and uprooting stout stumps. Though this work is exhausting, it is very exciting in a way, as we get to uncover a building that we don’t even know the dimensions of. All we had for a starting point was half of an excavated room and professor Tim’s hypothesis that this is a large house with at least 6 rooms. As the short Mediterranean forest came down, we would revise our hypothesis several times a day, judging a newly uncovered wall to be part of a different building or seeing what obviously is a later Turkish wall to actually partially be a blocked doorway of the original building.
Despite advanced preparations, much of what goes on beyond the dig site has also been unexpected. I was assured that the Turkish students know English well, but my confidence in that was shattered on the first day, when we had to revert to using Google Translate with one of the students, and out in the city the language barrier becomes even worse, and it weighs down on me.
But unexpected things have also been exciting. Walking around Gazipasa on the first weekend, I came across the ruins of Selinus. Imagine a busy city poult upon a hill, but all of it now abandoned. I was awe stricken, wandering amongst the silent buildings standing just a few meters from the road and the city park. They are so well preserved that you don’t even need much imagination to fully reconstruct the late Roman city. Yet the place is littered with trash and bottles, the few signs that are there have fallen down, and the remains of a bath with an intact hypocaust have been turned into a living room by some shepherd, who even took it upon himself to seal off an entrance, completely owning the place. The whole time I wanted to yell: “Have you any idea what this place is?” This is a sad sight to see, and an eye-opening one. Even though our intern work at the dig site does sometimes feel like slave work, it is reaching us a lot, not only about how to perform an excavation, but most importantly about valuing a place.
