The first thing that struck me was the humidity. This feels pretty cliche, but it really is immediate and striking. The airport was tiny, baggage claim and security in one room. The language spoken is completely unfamiliar to me. When I woke up in the morning the place became a little more familiar to me. The landscape was much like Southern California. The mountains not dissimilar to ones I’d seen before. The streets and shops that seemed strange the night before felt standard for a resort town, just gas stations and grocery stores. While I still didn’t know the language, the people seemed warm and welcoming, their lives ordinary. The grocery stores stocked with much the same things I would find at Target or Kroger Subsidiary. Yet after a week here, the heat and humidity still feels strange. The heat feels too hot, the air too thick. The plants are thorny and leave blisters. The climate feels so oppressive that I couldn’t understand how people live here. And yet they do. And in this week I’ve come to understand both how and why people have lived here for millennia. Ancient people kept sheep and grew barley and olives. They flavored their food with herbs that grow everywhere here like the oregano we cleared in our early excavation. While driving past gorgeous hillsides today you can see banana fields and innumerable greenhouses, such delectable food that grows from this fertile soil. Meat is served at every meal and the animals it came from thrive here, sheep and cows and chickens. The landscape is beautiful and the ocean so clear and blue. It’s no wonder to me now why people have stayed here for centuries.
Working at Antiochia has tested me in exactly the ways I expected it to. The mornings are too early, it feels Herculean to crawl out of bed some mornings. The heat is miserable, within minutes of working I am drenched in sweat. The wheelbarrows feel like they will slip from my grasp. After swinging a pickax for only a few minutes I need to stop and take a break. I regularly refill my 36 ounce water bottle 3 or 4 times in a morning’s work. Squatting leaves me feeling lightheaded and my shoulders ache from sweeping and shoveling. Even with (or despite) my hard work, the progress is slow and the finds inconclusive. Yes I’ve found over a bucket’s worth of pottery sherds and some interesting pieces of bone, but most likely this was just trash used to fill in a floor. Mainly this work in the great bath and the acropolis feels sisyphean, there are so many rocks to move and buckets to dump yet no real progress seems to be made. This has to be the hardest test for me. Hard physical labor that makes me feel incompetent and weak while it feels like no progress is being made.
Yet through all this I can also see how Antiochia was a living city, changing and evolving over centuries. The great bath was once tiled and used for bathing, yet now that mosaic floor has been turned into fill for a new floor and the rooms turned into furnaces and kilns for industry. Walls have been added to divide up rooms for new uses and the very trash and waste from the city’s residents is reused to level off new structures in these older buildings. Even now there’s new life in these spaces, whether it be the museum that will be built here, the tourists who watch us work, or the locals who I get to work alongside, revealing things that haven’t been seen for hundreds of years. Life keeps moving forward, even despite the humidity and spiky plants.