Although classicists and historians often get a chance to study an archaeology module as part of their degrees, classical archaeology as a discipline is often underappreciated and misunderstood by non-specialists.
Traditionally, interest in archaeology has been limited to objects and buildings of monetary or aesthetic value – think of the pure white ruins on school textbooks, or the postcards of perfect statues you buy in the giftshops of museums – meaning it is underused as a historical source.
As I write this, I have a copy of Cicero’s Political Speeches next to me, which has a picture of the interior oculus of the Pantheon on the front cover. As Cicero was a Republican murdered by the close friend of the person who built this temple, I’m not sure how pleased he’d be that this was how some of his most brilliant speeches were being presented. Cicero was definitely someone to judge a book by its cover!
Archaeology has so much to offer the study of classics. As well as helping us to properly understand famous figures like Cicero, archaeology can help broaden our knowledge of the everyday reality of non-elite people living in the ancient world which, for me, has brought the past alive.
Archaeology is a fantastic subject as it is not only something you learn, but something you do: all the finds nicely cleaned and photographed in publications are only discoverable after going through a lot (and I mean a lot) of dust, dirt, and rocks.
This summer, I took part in some fieldwork in Crete to study the Minoans, a Bronze Age pre-historic culture. It was hard work, but by (literally) standing in the footsteps of these people, I felt I understood the culture far better than I had when sat in a lecture hall. The following account gives a sense of what a day on a dig is like, and how the life of a Minoan (who lived 1000s of years ago) might not have been as unimaginable as you might think…
5.30am: Time to get up and get dressed. Today will be hot, sunny and dusty, so I wear light full-length clothing. Although it’s hard to get any fashion advice from the Minoans (textiles don’t fare well in archaeology!), surviving frescoes show that many of the women also wore long garments. The skin colour of the men is painted reddish, to show that they worked outside, which looks a lot like the sunburn of some of my less careful co-workers!
When I go in the kitchen to make a much needed coffee, I see the oven tray which still has the burnt bits of pizza from last night. Yesterday on the site we’d found a large cooking vessel which had been burnt: the ancient people couldn’t be bothered to clean it up either, and had instead thrown it away onto the rubbish dump – I wonder if anyone would notice if I did the same…
7.30am: The hard work begins. We are surveying the top layer of the surface, documenting any pottery and other finds that appear, and clearing away any rocks or plants obscuring the surface.
Every grid must be marked carefully, and all our finds documented. It is difficult and often repetitive work, especially as it gets hotter before lunch, but the amount of pottery we each find gives us a tangible sense of our achievement and spurs us on. The Minoans from our site probably also spent most of their time working hard in the sun on this and the surrounding land.
Although we mainly find pottery, the other thing that we find a lot of are stone tools – large pebbles with variously flat and rounded edges. We can only guess at their function, but some of them seem like they could be quite useful for our work, like hammering in the nails which pin down the labels we use to mark the exact findspot of our most interesting objects. Maybe the Minoans could give us some tips on how to work more efficiently!
4pm: After a nap, we wash all our finds from the morning by hand, and carefully document them so they are ready to be taken to the museum. We do this in a local school, abandoned a few years earlier. In fact, almost the entire village has been abandoned, with only a few solitary figures still meandering round to greet us.
A few millenia ago, this is what the settlement would have felt like: not quite deserted, but eerily quiet as it slipped from someone’s home into another nameless site, with only walls and pottery showing anyone was ever here. One day this will also happen to my hometown, to my old school: I wonder what future archaeologists will make of it.
8pm: After a hard day’s work, it’s off to the taverna, where a local restaurant has made us a feast. One of my favourite dishes is fava beans. An archaeobotanist on the team has analysed some of the soil and found that these beans were also eaten by the Minoans; I wonder if they also got slightly sick of it, as many like me would’ve been vegetarian and beans a staple of their diet.
As a bunch of tired British Uni students, we’re all more interested in the local spirit: raki. At the end of every meal, everyone toasts each other with this delicious but lethal drink. The shot glasses we drink them out of look suspiciously like one of our most common finds, the mass-produced conical cups, which Minoans produced for feasts just like ours. These feasts were central to developing their communities, and showed Minoans also liked a bit of fun: archaeologists similarly appreciate the value of working hard and playing hard!
Amelie is a second-year student studying classical archaeology and ancient history at the University of Oxford. If you’d like to know more about the results of Amelie’s fieldwork in Crete, or studying archaeology at university, feel free to contact her at [email protected].