I’m glad you asked about it. My archeological work in Turkey was spent at Antiochia ad Cragum, a prominent Roman ruin site located near Gazipasa, Antalya. Over the course of a month we worked to excavate certain locations of the site, with students periodically rotated to other areas based on the work they desired to accomplish. I personally had worked at one location called the small bath for a week uncovering a mosaic. With the rest of the time spent with the other st. Olaf students at a site called the domestic quarter uncovering a ruined noble’s house. Other time was spent later in the day cleaning pottery fragments or animal bones along with getting to know the town and other archeologists present and why they decided to come to this site.
My time there was overall quite a great experience, learning more about my own strengths and limits and about how to interact with different people and cultures. At first it was disorienting getting used to being in another country without knowing the language, but after a bit of time I was able to adjust and find ways around it. It was also great exploring the town and its people, trying new foods and seeing how daily life here was similar and different compared to back in the U.S. Patience as well was a great skill to have as there can be much to get frustrated on while adapting to a new area, but with patience any anger can be avoided.
I feel like these experiences and skills will help out in this job in how I’ve learned ways to adapt and get used to changing circumstances with both environments and drama with coworkers. Patience is a virtue to allow this adaptation of time to work, nothing can easily get done quickly so being prepared and not worried by obstacles can allow you to better work around them. While here I have also learned how to better work with a group with different skills and outlooks. A technical skill would be keeping up with the personal and group notebooks, showing reliability in getting the required work done and keeping a record of it. Altogether, archeology in Turkey was a great learning experience, both of its culture and of ways to help in a future career.
