A Real Archaeologist
Before this summer, the only excavation projects I’d been part of involved digging in sand and dirt with preschoolers. With a brightly colored plastic shovel in hand, I’d help the toddler I was babysitting dig. Sometimes we came across big rocks. Other times we encountered sprawling root systems that we imagined were dinosaur backbones. Together we’d work our way deeper, unearthing new surprises with each shovel of dirt or sand. I experienced the same childlike wonder digging at Morgantina, where each shovel full of dirt and scrape of the hand trowel likewise unearthed something interesting and unique to the place, no matter if it was a pottery sherd or a plain ol’ rock.
Unlike everyone else on the dig, I didn’t come to Aidone to excavate. But like everyone else on the dig, I quickly became infatuated with Morgantina. I arrived in Aidone on a Sunday, with the purpose of babysitting director Alex Walthall’s four year old daughter Poppy starting the next day. That first week, I fought off jet lag, played with Poppy, and got to know more about the excavation and everyone taking part at the nightly dinner. I still hadn’t stepped foot on the site, but hearing everyone talk at dinner about the trenches, the pounds of dirt, the hot Sicilian sun, I felt the camaraderie. I wanted to experience the exhaustion of moving the pounds of dirt out of the trenches if it meant I would also experience the jokes and laughter.
The Vertigo Girls and I absorbing extra sunshine as if the eight hours in the trenches weren’t enough…
Since I had the weekends off from babysitting Poppy, Alex suggested I join the excavation team on Saturday. They were only working a half day at the site, and I’d get to join the field trip to the Villa Romana Del Casale in Piazza Armerina to look at Roman mosaics after. I was living in an old apartment building, aptly named Vertigo for its winding stairs, along with four other excavation members. We were only a street over from the dig house where the team met for breakfast every morning. On that Saturday, I woke up at 5:30am, got ready, and walked the quick walk to the dig house for the 6am breakfast with the rest of Vertigo. I downed a small cup of coffee, a hard boiled egg, and some pineapple yogurt (a controversial yogurt flavor choice). Then I helped carry supplies to the van which took us down to site.
The team at the Villa Romana del Casale
Even now, I have no sense of how long the bus ride down to the site was. It was probably just 10 or 15 minutes, but the winding roads and hills could dangerously lull us to sleep at any moment. Usually, I focused on putting on sunscreen during the ride to keep my eyes open. Sarah, our bus DJ and site MVP, played upbeat music on a portable speaker most mornings. The music, I realized, was vital to our team culture and productivity. Nowhere else have I listened to “Party Rock Anthem” at 6 am, and nowhere else have I enjoyed the song so much.
Once down at the site, the routine was clockwork. We all hauled items from the vans down a winding gravel road to the site, like ants carrying bits of food back to their mound. Arguably, the most important item we brought was a cooler filled with ice water. Ice water, not lukewarm water, was essential to our digging in the hot sun.
The site, I learned, was split into three trenches. Each trench had about four people who excavated under a trench supervisor. Since it was my first time at the site, I went to whatever trench needed more help. I ended up with trench 158 for that day, since they had a lot of saggi–pits, essentially–open. I spent my morning carrying buckets of dirt over to the sifter, going through the dirt clods, and picking out pottery sherds, bones, and rocks of interest.
The Trench 160 Team celebrating the last day of excavation
While sifting was subjective, and I was inexperienced at picking out artifacts, there were some rules of thumb that helped. Kimi, the sifting expert in trench 158, gave me the tips. I learned that if I was ever not sure about whether something was a bone or a rock, I could put it in my mouth and see if I noticed my spit absorb or not. At first I was doubtful about getting that close and personal with the dirt and artifacts. But by the end of the excavation, I had inadvertently breathed and swallowed enough dirt that I felt a kinship with the pottery, bones, and rocks.
Smiling through everyone’s favorite part of excavation… weed cutting!
After my Saturday on site, I was hooked. My days took on a similar routine. I excavated in the mornings, ate a panino for lunch, and went back up to Aidone to play with Poppy for a few hours in the afternoon until dinner time. I ended up joining trench 160, which had a perplexing saggio because of a rectangular rock buried in the ground. The rock seemed purposeful, and we joked (but were serious) that all the treasure was buried under it. Our anticipation built up week by week as we excavated down layer by layer. When the day finally arrived, we all took turns big-picking around the rectangle. Eventually it was time to attempt to lift up the rock. We took turns again prying up the sides of the rock, until it began to crack into pieces. The rock turned out to be plaster, and we carried it away in pieces, no treasure stashed underneath. We dug on despite the disappointment.
Except for that one Saturday, we had the weekends completely off from digging. On the second weekend of the excavation, most of the team decided to take a bus to Palermo. We booked an Airbnb with enough beds for all of us and hopped on the bus after digging on a Friday afternoon. We drove closer and closer to the sea until suddenly there was only a horizon of blue out of the right side window. Palermo pulsed with activity compared to the tranquil town of Aidone. We saw Palermo from many angles that weekend, including underground, when we visited some catacombs. We explored mostly on foot, and then to cool our feet, we went to the beach and waded out into the Mediterranean Sea. By the time we boarded the bus back to Aidone on Sunday morning, we were revived in more ways than one. We felt ready to get back to the dirt.
The AV Club on the bus down to site
Over the course of the excavation, I learned to use all the tools. My favorite of all was the hand trowel. I used the hand trowel to articulate around rocks to better expose them for the documentation pictures. After the first week, my hand was pleasantly sore and calloused. By the third week, my hand was angrily sore and calloused. Even towards the end of the excavation, with my hands bandaged up and my whole body sore, I found joy in the work because of the team. The manual labor could be taxing, but the conversations were as natural and welcome as an inland sea breeze. We talked about everything from cartoons to repatriation.
Before we all knew it, the last day of the dig arrived. Unlike the last day of school, where the day has a blow-off energy, we worked on the site until the very end. Most of us spent the day hoeing and weeding for the final site pictures. I finally felt like a real archaeologist as I swept dirt off of rocks into bigger patches of dirt.
Fellow AVPer Skylar Masuda and I during our quartermaster duties
That night, we rang in the end of the excavation. Sprinkled in between all our work over those four weeks, we’d spent time playing scopa, reading at cafes, and walking up and down every hill in Aidone. Just like at the site, where we worked until the very end, we continued our activities until each of us got on the bus and left Aidone. That night we chatted, we played scopa, we laughed. If I were to transport back to Aidone right now with everyone, I’m sure we’d pick up right where we left off.
It takes imagination to be an archaeologist. Just like excavating with toddlers, excavating at Morgantina made me aware of an invisible possibility. Maybe under a rock there is a coin that dates the site or an artifact that answers an anthropological mystery. Maybe there are dinosaur bones. The only thing for sure is that at Morgantina, there’s camaraderie under every rock and in every ounce of dirt.
