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Illustration by Drew Shannon
When I tell people that I spend my summer vacations in Northern England, I am frequently asked, “Oh … are you visiting family?” When I explain that I will be in a trench in a farmer’s field, it raises some eyebrows.
In 2019, my sister and I walked Hadrian’s Wall – 135 kilometres of British national trail that follow the 1,900-year-old stone monument, one of the largest archeological features anywhere. It is not fenced off, it is not behind glass – every part of it you can see and touch. It is your constant companion along the way, and being in such a remote region, one is most often alone with only hills, sky and ghosts of the Roman Empire. You can feel the past.
As we waited in airport purgatory for our flight home, my sister, browsing through an archaeology magazine, turned to me and said, “You know, there are archeological digs all around England that anyone can go on.” The rest, as they say, is history. Ancient history to be precise.
We are now veterans of three summer digs at a first-century Roman/Iron Age site in Yorkshire. It can be dusty and hot, or cold and rainy. So why do we bother? What is the attraction of doing archaeology? After much reflection, this is what I have learned.
Archaeology is science.
Our days are filled with digging, sorting, recording and more digging. The work is not glamorous, but it is reality, not a simulation, and real science is often slow labour – a thoughtful quiet contrast to the cacophony of modern judgments and opinions. What we find and observe, however small or seemingly insignificant, becomes part of the whole body of human knowledge. While practising dentistry, it was my job, every day and for every patient, to understand and apply science as it continued to evolve. When I retired, I was not interested in becoming a spectator. Science is not what we have found, but how we continue to find out.
Exploring my Irish heritage helped me find my family and solve my identity crisis
Archaeology is connection.
British, Australian, Canadian, American, young, old – all adjectives are left outside the trench. On a dig, we are simply fellow travellers on a quest to connect with the past – to a time long before our modern categorizations. In trying to envision people from long ago, it is too easy to reduce them to crude cave drawings, strange medieval paintings or jittery grey images in an old film. But in unearthing the physical evidence of their homes, tools and possessions, they emerge as people who were essentially the same as us – completely, and merely, human.
Last summer, my sister uncovered an ancient hair pin. Carved from bone, it is neither ornate nor valuable in today’s terms, but it was a very personal possession for someone – most likely a Roman woman doing her best to maintain her appearance in the remotest frontier of the Empire, and the last person to see or hold it in 1,800 years.
Every year we find hundreds of pottery fragments, each one shedding some light on ancient everyday lives, what people ate and drank, what they valued, or, with some decorated pieces, how they were expressing themselves artistically. I recall one find in particular: dull, grey, thick and rough, it is the ugliest piece of pottery I have found, but it is my favourite because you can see and feel the thumbprints of the person who made it 2,000 years ago. A person who had a name, a family, and a place in their community; someone who looked at the same sun, moon and sky as we do, and pondered creation and their place in it.
Archaeology is perspective.
Context is everything. This is a Day One lesson of archaeology – what you find is only as important as where you found it. To understand an object, one must know how it relates to its environment. Though not easy, I constantly remind myself to apply this principle to people, past and present. Were these ancient people “good” or “bad?” Were they primitive or advanced? Every past society was as capable of virtue and evil as we are, and no doubt had customs and beliefs that would seem strange, or even repugnant, to modern sensibilities. However, by piecing together the tangible evidence of their lives, archaeology gives us insight into the environment they inhabited and the conditions that forged their knowledge, skills and beliefs. We learn to see beyond “what” they were to appreciate “who” they were, and why. To understand our past selves is to better understand our present selves.
How can we even define what “advancement” is anyway? How will the future judge us? Our human journey, individually or collectively, is not a climb to the top of a mountain. It is a subway ride. Somewhere along the line every one of us gets on and must get off, our trip a brief episode between a quickly fading past and a shrouded future. But we all leave our mark. We all become part of the enormous continuum of humanity that we share with our ancestors.
I will be returning to the dig again this summer. There is more to learn. And if someone asks me if I am visiting family, well, I suppose I am.
Joel May lives in Mississauga.
