During my time in Turkey, there were a few primary things that I learned that are important to the kind of work I want to do in my future. The first is the plain work ethic. I would wake up at 5 every morning and get ready for a long day of digging. Now this digging wasn’t just smacking the ground as hard as possible. It wasn’t merely physical labor, it was mental labor too. With every swing of the pick, and every articulated movement with the trowel you would find an item. My location was specifically crowded with items. These items could range anywhere from manufactured glass to terracotta tiles for a roof system. It could be animal bones or iron nails. These items were all fragile, so you would have to select them from the rocks and dirt, identify them, categorize them, and then continue. but this time digging and selecting was also spent identifying differences in dirt texture, remembering where concentrations of items were, and then thinking about why that is. Does it mean something or is it a coincidence? How deeply do you read into a concentration of animal bones in one area? Did an animal die there, or did many parts of many animals find themselves in the same spot? Was there human interference in this? It all matters, and you could spend the entire day thinking about what you were digging up, while you were also sweating in the 95-degree sun for 6 hours. After digging, the day could continue for far longer than that, with washing pottery shards, doing journal entries with my group, to going to class with Tim. The day was long, and there were many of them.
It also taught me teamwork skills. I learned how to work effectively with many people, even over language barriers. Although the group I was in was almost always English speakers, during breaks and even just in daily excursions outside of the job site, I would encounter Turkish speakers, a language of which I barely know two words. Along with language barriers, there are a lot of personalities on a dig site, and due to the circumstances of the dig, there was often chaos within the ranks. Lots of volunteers would take power and control and boss others around, many students would do things in ways you would disagree, and frequently, there were too many people for those in charge to manage, of course, while they dug alongside them. Because of this, I learned to navigate tense encounters with others while remaining vigilant to do my work and inspire others to work well with me. The end goal of this for the group was to do good research, and for me, it was to make it through the day with as few enemies as possible. I am a tactful, hard-working, and generous teammate because of this.