I’ve enjoyed swimming this past week, at the beach in town, in the cove by our site, and in the canyon at Sapadere, where we clambered around yesterday. But little did I expect to feel like I was swimming when I came out of my dorm Monday morning. As we waited for the van to the site, the air in the courtyard hung thick with moisture. After a week now, the heaviness of the humidity doesn’t feel so intense, even if I‘ve had to wring my shirt out every few hours while working due to the sweat.
During the week, too, I’ve had a number of small realizations about the site and about archaeology. We walked by the colonnade of Antiochia’s forum on Friday, and Dr. Hoff pointed out that the column drums were original granite, but the bases, once marble, were nearly all gone and had been replaced in recent years. Why were there hardly any marble columns left? People, after the forum passed out of use, had taken them and burned them down to make lime, which was then added to mortar for new buildings. Faced with making a living or not, the idea of preserving earlier structures for posterity, in the way archaeologists would like to see them, must not have even been a question. What good does a hulking marble capital do sitting unused when it could be cooked into lime, which could be used in mortar for a new purpose-built structure, and whose proceeds could become food for the family of the kiln owner? The site we’re working on is a town that was inhabited by ancient people, but what we can see and find has been, maybe unwittingly, mediated through other generations of people—the lime-makers, say—and this process of layering, disassembling, and overbuilding asserts even more clearly that the town of Antiochia and the people who lived in it are worth our attention, study, and respect.