I find myself, for the last time, in a familiar location: I’m in a coffee shop sweating bullets while racking my brain for the contents of my blog post. I normally try to put some fun, wacky twist on my posts, but for now I’m in more of a reflective mood. The first thing I should offer is some advice to future interns, because apparently I know things now. Before I came to Turkey, my number one concern was the heat, a concern many other students shared. And having lived in that heat for a month, I can assure you that it’s not as bad as you’ll expect. Yes, you will sweat a lot, yes, the air feels like molasses, and yes, the sun IS trying to kill you. But you WILL get used to it. I did, at least mostly. And you will be far more interested in the things happening around you to worry about the weather.
(While I’m on the subject of advice: Buy a pillow when you get here, the Dig House ones are lumps of fabric in a pale imitation of a pillow. Also, bring enough deodorant for the month. I may have not looked hard enough, but spray deodorant seems to be the only product in vogue here. The packing list also says that you can’t find high SPF sunscreen in Turkey, but I have been able to find 50-60 SPF sunscreen here, so I wouldn’t sweat it too much).
So, back to all the things you’ll be doing to distract yourself from the heat. When digging on the site, you will find a LOT of ancient pottery. I got very used to pulling ceramic out of the ground, but that doesn’t mean that it wasn’t special when I held my first quarter-sized pottery fragment in my hand. I cannot use words to describe the feeling I got when I found a piece of pottery and my finger fit perfectly into the groove pushed into the clay by someone who lived thousands of years before me. You will find a ton of cool things on the site, so make sure you have your camera with you. However, something I’ve learned is that archeology is as much about what you don’t find as it is what you do. While excavating the Acropolis North Slope, Dr. Howe has continually asked us if we think the structure we are excavating is a house or not. What makes me think that the structure is a house is that we have not found anything that suggests it is NOT a house. No religious objects that would be found in a church, no scales that a merchant might keep in their store. My biggest academic takeaway from this trip has been that in archeology, you will almost never have complete evidence of something, so you must synthesize what you do know with what you don’t in order to reach anything resembling a conclusion. Or you can just lie and make things up. I’m not your boss.
This sort of research oriented thinking is something that I would want to pursue further in any future archeology digs I participate in. This past month has firmly convinced me that there is a very large difference between archeology and simply digging: while archeology might seem slower and more tedious than simply swinging a pickaxe with wild abandon, which is sure to unearth more ancient artifacts, the methods of archeology are a reward unto themselves. Taking breaks to think about things as seemingly banal as the color and texture of the soil you are sifting will force you to consider every single aspect of the site you are excavating. This type of analytical thinking and problem solving is what I enjoyed most on the dig, and it would be the number one thing I would look forward to if I were to go on another archeological expedition.
It’s time for me to leave, now. But first, I will leave you with what is at once a poem and advice about the Fellas protein bar. I write this to commemorate the bar, to convince you to buy one, and also because apparently 2 other people have already written that I would write about it. Also if you expect me to follow the syllable stress rules of iambic pentameter you are out of your mind.
Shall I compare thee to a Fellas bar?
Thou art less edible and nutritious,
Fifteen grams protein carry me afar,
The flavors on my tongue art delicious.
Without the energy from my Fellas,
Çay break would be dull and feel incomplete.
I would falter and cease to be zealous,
I would collapse under the summer heat.
The Fellas bar melts not in your backpack,
And does not dissolve when it becomes wet.
You may buy enough to fill your knapsack
At the holy temple called Migros Jet.
So now a Fellas I bring home with me,
A memento of my time in Turkey.