To start off, I have a lot of advice for future participants. I think the most important advice is to pace yourself. It takes time to learn all the archaeology that you learn, and it takes time to acclimate to the heat as well as the work itself. Part of this involves listening to people around you, if the people in your unit ask you if you need a break, you should take a break. On the second day of work Emma and Jade told me to take a break, which I didn’t do for a while, and when I did I realized they were both right that I needed one. You should also take a day off if you feel like you need to, taking a break or a day off can make you feel like you aren’t doing enough, but resting when you need to ends up letting you be more useful.
I recommend eating a lot of bread (in Turkish “Ekmek”, which inspired the title of this blog post) at breakfast, it’s good to eat before you start work even if you don’t feel super hungry, the bread at breakfast is essential to me being able to work until the çay break at 10:00. It’s also a good idea to put some salt on your meals even if you don’t think you need it, because you lose a lot of salt from sweating. Bring more water, sunscreen, and snacks than you need, it’s better to have extra than not enough. When it comes to packing before you get here, try not to bring too much, most of what you need is easily available in Turkey.
My last piece of advice is more general. When you can, take moments to appreciate Antiochia, I tried to do this every morning walking from breakfast to my unit, when I took breaks, or when I emptied wheelbarrows. Antiochia ad Cragum is unlike any place I had ever been to before, so I recommend taking some time to look around and think about the place. The views of the Mediterranean, the Acropolis, the mountains in the area, and the fog (when it’s there) are all amazing and worth enjoying.
I absolutely would participate in another archaeological excavation, and I hope I will do so in the future. The work here is hard, but even so I’ve enjoyed a lot of it. Now that I feel like I have a better idea of how archaeology works, I want the chance to use what I learned at Antiochia. I assume that any excavation would take some time to acclimate to the work, but I was able to acclimate here, so I am less worried about how I would be able to acclimate in future archaeological excavations.
I’ve learned a lot while I was here, some of which I talked about in my blog post two weeks ago. Academically, I’ve learned about how to understand the way that different units fit together. Especially since some of the units feel far away from mine, in the first few weeks it was easy to forget that they were likely part of the same building. I started thinking about them differently in the last week when I could see how much everyone has done since the first week and the units now seem more connected. I’ve also learned that a spontaneous pepsi break can be exactly what everyone needs in the last hour and half or so of the day.
There have been so many memorable experiences here, it’s hard to just pick one. When it came specifically to our research, during the second week of work I was able to recognize a type of pottery that doesn’t look like most pottery at Antiochia ad Cragum, when even a day or two before I probably would not have been able to quickly figure out what I was holding. There have been many memorable non-research moments as well, including the Highland Festival, walking in Gazipaşa my first day, and hiking Selinous. The Selinous hike was one of the hardest things I’ve ever done, but it was worth it both for the view and getting to do something physical before I started excavating.
This project has made me think more about the connections between modern archaeologists and the people who lived in places like Antiochia. Working on this excavation makes people of the past feel real, getting to spend a month working in what we think used to be a house makes me feel like I have a better idea of what it was like to be a person who lived in Antiochia, or other similar cities. Our project has also made me think about being a student abroad, I think it has been a valuable experience to get to spend time in a culture that was new to me.