by Sarah Parcak
This data accessibility does not stop with journal articles. For many archaeological sites in the past, excavation directors died before they got around to publishing their excavations. To dig without publishing is irresponsible and unacceptable, but these bars were only recently set, after archaeology’s 200-year run-up. Writing up requires years of painstaking research and careful collation of field notes. Not fun, and often not funded. To expect people to work that hard for nothing would be unthinkable in the private sector.
This said, old dig records can be gold mines for unpublished archaeological work. Graduate students are now plowing through museum storerooms and university libraries, attempting to reconstruct important but long-forgotten excavations. There’s still much more to sort through. I’ve heard from a friend about mosques and storerooms in Cairo filled floor to ceiling with 100 years of unpublished excavation notes and reports by Egyptian and European archaeologists. We have no idea what great discoveries lurk there—maybe missing tombs, or new dynasties. The wider archaeological world will never know until archivists scan them and translate the original notes from Arabic or French.
More recently, horror stories tell of an entire season’s worth of records disappearing in luggage on the trip back. Or 20 years’ worth of unpublished records vanishing in a house move. Nowadays, we are so fortunate to be able to photograph site-book pages on a phone or tablet to create a pdf for each excavation unit to upload to the cloud. Also, on our dig at Lisht, our resident mapping genius Chase Childs recently developed systems to record registration on tablets using a customized data-entry program. Photographs, with GPS location data, upload automatically and can connect to our project’s geographic information system. Easy, if you live and work in 2018, in a country with access to great technology and financial resources. We take all this for granted.
Money Talks
But what happens if you’re a student archaeologist with no recourse to funding whatsoever? Going on a dig as a field-school participant is far too expensive for most undergraduates.
Many students must spend the summer working to afford to go to school, period. In addition to sacrificing summer wages, to go on a US university-led excavation, they must pay for their plane ticket, visas, luggage, supplies and gear, room and board, and any tuition if the field school is for academic credit. A student can easily spend $5,000–$8,000 for a single excavation, which would “cost” more than $10,000 if you factor in lost wages. You cannot dig abroad as an undergraduate from the United States without scholarships or a wealthy family.
In my case, without 100 percent coverage from these scholarships, I could never have afforded to go on any digs, which would have greatly disadvantaged my career. On a personal level, I would never have met my husband.
Even if you can pay for the travel, most digs assume you are able-bodied. Living in difficult conditions, doing intense physical labor, and walking a long distance to and from sites across unstable terrain is impossible if you use a wheelchair or have other physical issues or illnesses. Fortunately, many excavations in the United States and Europe benefit from roads and clear paths for access, but some places present major challenges.
One of our ceramic specialists, the bubbly, funny, kindly Rexine Hummel, had difficulty walking to and from the van to the site at Lisht every day. At 82 years of age, Rexine has reached goddess status in Egyptology, and has been a personal friend of our dig for many years. The Quftis on-site had the idea to build her a wooden palanquin, so my husband designed one to carry her in style. Everyone spontaneously sang and clapped during her arrival and departure, turning the beginnings and the ends of our workdays into parades and making joy out of something painful.
Getting out to the field to dig may simply not be possible for everyone, though some excavations offer the public the chance to feel involved remotely. A British web platform, DigVentures, offers opportunities to excavate in person and to follow archaeologists online as they conduct their research.11 It also raises funds for excavations via donations and the online sale of branded items like T-shirts and chocolate replicas of an Anglo-Saxon grave marker, dubbed the “NomNomNom Stone.”12
Most people do not realize that even five dollars can make a difference to an archaeological team. If 50 people give a few dollars each, that can feed your team for a few days. This broadens participation and moves away from traditional archaeological funding models that emphasize larger donations.
Rules, and More Rules
Throughout the world, each country sets its own priorities and guidelines concerning who can work there. In some countries such as the United Kingdom, a strong tradition exists for local volunteers on excavations. Everyone from the age of being-able-to-handle-a-trowel-safely (Just kidding! Trowels are safe in no one’s hands!) to as-old-as-you-please is welcome to work, as part of community engagement initiatives. During an award-winning project at Lyminge in Kent,13 volunteers actually took blocks of annual leave from their day jobs to take part. If you live close to an archaeological site, and the dig director welcomes volunteers, please do ask to take part: you’ll most likely be of great help to an overworked, understaffed team.
In general, though, the question of who has the right to explore ancient places is complicated, loaded with politics and, in some cases, the historical abuses of other countries’ heritages during the colonial era.
Egypt’s Ministry of Antiquities grants us the opportunity to dig. The ministry has strict rules and regulations surrounding permits to do archaeological work, and scrutinizes the CVs and background of each team member, as it should. This makes it difficult to get your foot in the door on projects there unless you have a specific skill to offer, like those of a ceramics analyst or survey specialist. Outside of Europe and North America, mounting expeditions to dig abroad is the exception rather than the rule. The majority of archaeologists who are Chinese or Indian, for example, work in China and India, respectively, although this is beginning to change. In 2017, a Chinese team for the first time applied to work at Karnak in Egypt, and I know they will be welcomed with hospitality by their Egyptian co-workers when the project progresses.14
One of the most exciting aspects of international archaeology is the opportunity for cultures to share expertise, technologies, and perspectives. However, in Egypt, India, or any country where a foreign archaeologist happens to work, great inequalities may exist in training and resources.
Note, I did not say skill, passion, commitment, or talent. Those working under adverse conditions with minimal resources have a lot to teach us. The Ministry of Antiquities in Egypt regularly makes global headlines announcing tombs, sites, and other findings of its own projects: in 2017 alone, my co-director at Lisht, Adel Okasha, found a new pyramid while directing a mission at Dashur, just north of Lisht.
Negotiating the politics of working at sites around the globe is only the first step in the journey to reach the peoples and cultures that came before us.
Touching the Past
When we visit an ancient ruin, the past is touchable and yet impossible to see. The trauma our parents, grandparents, and ancestors experienced can even affect our own cells profoundly,15 but comfortingly, perhaps, when our mothers bear us, they carry our cells with them for the rest of their lives.16 Our bodies are living archaeological sites, connected to the past and future simultaneously.
The bridge to thousands and even hundreds of thousands of years ago is contained in our DNA, which also is connected with the DNA of at least two other species, the Neanderthals and Denisovans.17 A new discovery of tools from Kenya dating to 320,000 years ago reveals evidence of long-distance trade for obsidian. The team also found ocher, which the researchers suggest may have been mixed with fat for painting.18 We’ll probably never know what was so brightly painted, although it was perhaps people’s bodies, clothing, or decorative objects long since turned to dust. This suggests that we have been innovative and creative from our earliest days as Homo sapiens, and however this colorful resource was used, the fl
uctuations in climate and the environment in East Africa at this time caused its availability, and that of food sources, to be variable and unpredictable.19 These challenges made cooperation with other people a good strategy for survival—something we’d do well to consider today.20
Archaeological Sites as Time Machines
Archaeological sites contain our cultural DNA. They are places where we can contemplate, compare, and marvel at human diversity and creativity. I’ve met many people who’ve seen the countless heads carved into the Temple of Bayon in Cambodia or the grand mountain vistas beneath the terraced housing of Machu Picchu in Peru. Every single one has had to take a deep breath before describing, not what they saw, but how they felt, witnessing such beauty.
That sensation is the only working time machine I know. It removes us from where we stand and hooks us on a thin, pale, wavering thread connecting us across time to our ancestors. We see in that instant all that we were, and all we can be, and seeing it changes us. Perhaps future people will stare in wonder at our skyscrapers, if they still exist, or our art.
Such archaeological wonders, monumentally transformed by human minds and hands, force us to stop and imagine. If you visit the Pyramids of Giza, you stand in the same place where the Greek historian Herodotus and the French general Napoleon stood, more than 2,200 years apart. What is crazy to consider is that we are closer in time to Cleopatra than she was to the pyramids’ construction.
Looking at scenes painted on the walls in the Tombs of the Nobles in Luxor, you see the colors of the floodplain; you see women and men plowing the fields with oxen and harvesting after the crops have ripened. Right outside, those scenes come to life in the modern tilled fields nearby. (Just ignore the farmer on his cell phone.) With all that has changed, the past can still be experienced in unexpected ways—we haven’t lost as much as we think.
Diversity Defines Our Species
We are the distillation of all the cultures, languages, art, music, and dance that came before us. We carry this within us at all times, but today that is all too easily forgotten. Diversity matters. It mattered for creating who we were and who we have become.
Think about English, formed from French, Greek, Latin, and Germanic languages, among others, with borrowed words and idioms from Persian, Hindi, Urdu, Polynesian, and so many more. Look at the food we eat. In a single meal—let’s say a simple stir-fry of vegetables over rice and a glass of beer—we have foods from nearly every inhabited continent: rice from Asia, peppers from South and Central America, tomatoes from South America, onions from Central Asia, eggplants from South Asia, wheat from Africa, hops from Europe,21 and spices from absolutely everywhere.22 Your dinner is the result of thousands of years of selective plant cultivation, trading networks, and an interconnected, modern global economy.
We thrive when multiple cultures intertwine and morph into something different, with more layers. We are better and stronger as a species for our diversity. Imagine practicing linguistic exogamy—marrying outside your native language—which is common in the northwest Amazon of Colombia and Brazil.23 I mean, my husband and I both speak English, but I swear we speak different dialects when he cannot find the mayonnaise in the fridge:
“It is on the middle-left shelf, dear.”
“Where?”
“The one on your left. The one you’re looking at right now.”
“I don’t see it.”
“You’re staring right at it. Your hand is touching it.”
“I still don’t see it.” Frustrating, yes. But somehow those kinds of exchanges bind us together more tightly.
Understanding how and why our diversity is essential to our survival has become that much more important in a fractured world, where more people push against economic immigrants, refugees, and those with different religious or cultural traditions. As a result, everywhere I travel there is a lack of hope, a general sense of heaviness.
But we are in fact all related, maybe twentieth cousins, but cousins nonetheless,24 an assertion backed by DNA and computational research. When you tell someone that, they are amazed. This understanding of our interrelatedness and interconnectedness can only come by studying the past, however contentious a species we are sometimes.
“Why do we fight, if we are all related?” people ask. They clearly have never been to a family Thanksgiving dinner.
Changing Our Perspective
Our species has lived almost everywhere on the globe and at a scale almost impossible to imagine. We have survived and got on, or not, under the most challenging conditions, through political instability and war and climate change. We can learn how to survive in better ways by looking back and looking within. The clues are all there. We just need to travel 400 miles into space and turn our heads a bit to the side.
In archaeology, perspective is everything. The same feature on an ancient site will appear vastly different depending on what season or even time of day you examine it with your own eyes, on the ground and from space. You’ve learned in this book how archaeological photographers love early morning light and how perspective applies to seeing ancient sites from space, and you have gotten hints of what we might see in the future.
Now what we need is a radical shift in perspective for the world in general. We need to look down and marvel at all our achievements, but also reflect on everything that went wrong and why. We cannot be so naive as to use the rise and fall of past civilizations to justify our behaviors and the abuse of the Earth today, or to think that if past civilizations survived previous bouts of climate change, we can keep on acting irresponsibly. The smallest fraction of the number of people alive today populated Earth in prehistoric times. Estimates vary from a few million to 10 million. Populations only grew to the hundreds of millions after the rise of agriculturally based societies.25 Resources were abundant and land far more available around 10,000 years ago.
Those days are gone.
Learning from the Past
In the field of law, attorneys look for precedents. We must do this more when we make decisions that might affect millions of people. World leaders today could benefit from tapping into a database of past civilizations and historic ideas on subjects ranging from climate change and economies to the best forms of construction. If we were to make archaeology more a part of the fabric of our modern world, the past could inform all our choices through innovative studies and the sweeping scale of information hard won by innumerable generations of our ancestors.
The archaeological record shows us how much of the past is still guiding us forward. So many of our modern traditions and practices have been around for many thousands of years. Take recycling: most of us recycle our cans, glass, plastic, and paper, and occasionally items in our homes can be reused. If you think this came from the 1960s green movement, try the ancient world.
We see the reuse of stones from pyramids and temples in cities today. Old Cairo is built from ancient Egyptian ruins. Odd columns, doorjambs repurposed as lintels: it all adds to the quirky beauty of much later architecture. My favorite parts are where the builders accidentally put the stones with hieroglyphic inscriptions faceup instead of facedown, so they can be read today. Even at Lisht, Amenemhet I reused hundreds of inscribed blocks from the pyramid complexes of Old Kingdom rulers.26 Something borrowed, something blue, something old, something new—it apparently applies to ancient buildings as well as weddings.
The Past Is Ever Present
Sometimes, we see this fusion of past and present in the people we encounter on digs. In the Delta, our workwomen normally remove earth in buckets carried on their heads, just like the ancient lady whose remains we found at Tell Tebilla. They march in tandem to the spoil piles, as graceful as Greek goddesses, with reddish hair and wide, almond-shaped green eyes.
The husbands all know that their village has the best-looking women in all of Egypt—a secret they proudly share. The women wear empire-style gallabiyahs, the traditional nightgown-like dress of Egypt. Greg and I asked a friend if their clothi
ng or appearance might hark back to the 13th-century crusader battle at Mansoura, led by Louis IX of France.27 “Clothes, yes!” he chuckled. “But for looks, try the Scotsmen garrisoned here during World War II!”
Something happened a few years ago that gave me perspective on the physical changes that we modern Westerners exhibit—a humbling moment for the ages. I was crossing the Nile in Luxor with Greg, on our way to a pleasant day of sightseeing on the river’s West Bank. On the ferry, we sat next to a classic little old lady, who weighed maybe 80 pounds sopping wet. Wearing a black dress, she had a weathered face, partly obscured by a headscarf. Next to her was a bamboo cage, double the size of a standard carry-on bag, full of squawking chickens. As the ferry landed and we prepared to disembark, she motioned to the cage and to her head.
Aha! She wanted a strong I-go-to-the-gym-every-day-and-lift-weights Western woman to help her, a feeble, elderly Egyptian lady, pick up the cage and put it on her head. My ego swelled. I had an audience among the ferry passengers. They would all witness my good deed.
With a smile, I bent down, took hold of the cage, and heaved. And heaved again. And really put my back and legs and everything I had into it. The damned thing would not budge. I tried one last time, nearly pulling every muscle in my body. My audience, which had somehow doubled in size, all lost it laughing, and the Arabic I could understand was not complimentary.