What advice would I give to you reading this now? The first thing I will say is you won’t starve. From where you stay you’ll be within a 15 minute walk of at least 5 different grocery stores. In the same area there are a number of restaurants, some quite good, others that should be avoided. Don’t go to Atom Master or Urban Monkey Pizza. You will be fed 5 days a week for three meals, the food is excellent. Wear your sunscreen religiously. You should bring 2 or 3 bottles of sunscreen. If you make sure to wear it you won’t get burned, but you can get burned quite easily if you don’t. Multiple big water bottles are a good investment, though you can get away with just one, as there are coolers on site. Good boots and gloves are a good investment as well. You will be wearing them 8 hours a day and you’ll want to make sure they’re durable, breathable, and have good ankle support. Bring your preferred cold medicine/nasal decongestant. There are often colds going around and while Turkish pharmacies will have medicine similar to what you are used to, it’s best to have what you’re used to. Don’t be afraid to talk to Professor Howe about taking a day off if you’re sick. Yes it sucks to sit around and sleep in, but if you don’t get enough rest to recover, you’ll probably have to get driven back home in the middle of a work day and turn a short illness into a prolonged one that can mar your entire internship. You should expect to stay quite busy. A normal day starts with a 5:30 bus ride to the site, breakfast until 6:30, a tea and snack break at 10, and lunch at 1pm. You will get back to the dorms at 2:30, you can expect an hour break before pottery washing. This year pottery washing was 3 days a week and started at 3pm, but normally it would only be two days a week and start at 3:30. Pottery washing will go until 5, with dinner at 6pm and notebooks at 7:30. Notebooking is the time when we sit down as a group and write in the official notebook what happened during our excavation that day. You should be prepared to write about what you found, your theories for what these things are, and prepare questions and goals for the next day. On Fridays you will go to the Cove after lunch, which is a gorgeous beach. Bring swimming shoes, the rocks are quite sharp and there are sea urchins that you could step on. On Friday night people will go to Konrad’s, you should go, even if you don’t drink. This is a good time to get to know your peers better and is all together a fun time.
A note on çay (pronounced chai). You will probably be drinking a lot of çay or Turkish tea. When you hear people talking about çay, you might think this is similar to Indian Masala Chai. They are not the same thing. Chai has milk, cinnamon, cardamom, and ginger in it. Çay is black tea grown on the Black Sea, it’s quite bitter and only served with hot water and sugar to dilute it. Don’t get me wrong, I love çay. It’s a great shot of caffeine and will wake you up well in the morning. But if you’re expecting chai like you’ve had in the States, this is not that.
Be curious and ask questions. Make sure you do all the readings and all that, but often the best way you will learn on this internship is by asking questions and seeing things first hand. It will take you time to identify pottery or soil changes or distinguish features from rock piles, but asking questions will help you learn quicker. Try to get to know the Turkish grad students and workers. Even if there’s a bit of a language barrier, you will quickly find them to be kind people with fascinating insights into the work we do or life in general. One thing I learned working on site is that over time ancient priorities change much the same way our own priorities change. At one point investing in public works like the Great Bath was a priority. Yet a few hundred years later the Great Bath is repurposed for industry, its marble burned for lime, and now the church on the acropolis is the work being prioritized. I also learned that Tung Tung Tung Sahur is dangerous and to buy a figurine of him will bring a curse down upon your entire group.
I found the most memorable experiences to be both the extraordinary and mundane ones. I remember the field trips we went on vividly, experiences like riding a camel or swimming in ice cold water. At the same time, I remember carrying buckets of dirt and rocks equally as vividly. Overall this experience has taught me some things both about archaeology and myself. I’ve learned I’m stronger and more resilient than I knew. I learned that I love archaeology and hate archaeology in equal measure. To discover things that have been buried for thousands of years is a surreal experience. To try and make sense of what you’ve found, to record exactly how you found it. You are creating new data on something that has never been studied before, how rare of an experience is that!?! Yet at the same time, the work is hot and tedious and rather miserable at times. Muscles will hurt that you didn’t even know you had. You’ll sweat more than you thought possible. Don’t be too intimidated by this, you’ll adapt remarkably well. You’ll have people to commiserate with. The day will end, lunch will be eaten, and you get to find out about the cool things other people found, or even share the cool things you found. Was it hard? Yes. would I go back in a heartbeat? Absolutely!