As a plane first touches the ground, a trowel digs into the earth and I fall down a staircase, it would seem that nothing can escape the weight of gravity. I began my journey here in Türkiye in rather unfortunate circumstance, though I had come to work I was inhibited from such due to an injury to my lower leg. This in turn led me to spend a short number of my days staring upon the ceiling of my room and intermittently reading a book I brought with me, “SPQR” by Mary Beard. Thankfully however, this did not fully prevent me for very long and I at last arrived upon the site after the short delay and was met with the uncaring glare of the Mediterranean sun. The heat itself is something I had not experienced for many years, a heat that one cannot escape from, even lingering in the shade and in the air. To breathe is to fill it and every action and step is coupled with its ever-present embrace. That alone is one thing, and I have been to many hotter places before, but in such places I had not had to work. The work itself is not, at a glance, back breaking, but it is continuous and at times meticulous. With the sun as overseer, overall I have found it to be perhaps, slightly, difficult. However I have also found through this first week that it is very achievable. If one merely continues to work and focus on the task directly ahead, more oft than not it is achieved far more easily. As the week waned I found myself consistently more able and confident, in truth I believe much of the difficulty is imagining the difficulty and that doing away with such heavy and dreadfully blistering thoughts.
As for archeology itself I have come to find my novice experiences to be nevertheless enlightening. It seems to be a very “as you go” process which makes sense given the nature of the work. I quite enjoy mysteries and puzzles and archeology seems to be a science of such, a piecing together of little evidences to imagine the lost. Feeling out where a wall is and what that means for the purpose of a building is interesting to me on a fundamental level and as that fundamental is all as of yet we’ve managed to breech I have found the intellectual side most enjoyable. Compared to my first day on sight I would say I have much more of a mind to think about such things, as earlier I was far too exhausted to do much thinking about anything at all. As for the site itself there’s so much more I want to see and understand before I make broader statements but I think that in that way my own logic is flawed. With the evidence I have now I should make a statement, and if that statement proves to be incorrect all the better as more evidence is discovered. In such a way the site does feel alive, in that the thoughts and ideas one may have about it have to change in regards to further evidences and understandings. It’s not the same place everyday because as each day passes our vision of what it was also changes. Because we lack that complete picture, the images we draw shift and morph even today. Even the ancients changed with time very noticeably, languages shift, spolia is taken and used for other constructions, the purpose of a building shifts with its owner. A site as big as a city naturally has buildings and roadways and infrastructure that have also served different purposes. The site isn’t just markedly frozen in one year of time but spans and continues to span the centuries of continued and intermittent interaction. As one sits upon a brick to write in their journal the brick is given a new purpose and reality when it has been buried for hundreds of years. When a tourist pays money to visit a site it is given a new purpose yet again. That relativism of purpose and reality is so interesting and I think that as I continue to dig deeper physically and intellectually that my understanding of such will continue to shift and change as well.