THIS BRINGS US TO OUR SECOND OCCASION WHERE WE ARE able to spend some time digging a little deeper into how one does archaeology. In this case, we are going to do so quite literally, by answering the question “How do you excavate a site?”
The first thing you need to know is that it’s possible to learn how to dig in about fifteen minutes. The essential skills are not far different from those necessary for backyard gardening. The specific techniques may vary to a certain extent with the part of the world where one is working, but the tools used are the same in most places. Archaeologists excavating large areas use big tools like picks, shovels, and wheelbarrows. Detail work is done with handpicks and trowels, and dental tools and toothbrushes are used for extremely delicate work, such as excavating skeletons and other organic features that include seeds, nuts, or animal bones. The complications will come when trying to figure out what is being excavated, including deciding whether the area is inside an ancient building or outside; whether a pit or some other feature is present; or addressing some other problem involving stratigraphy.
It may seem surprising that pickaxes are used far more often on excavations than most people imagine, at least in the Mediterranean regions where I have worked. My friend and colleague at Megiddo, Israel Finkelstein, has been known to say on many occasions, “used properly, a pick can be the most delicate instrument on the tell.” He is correct, but the secret, even if digging through ten centimeters of fill or soil at a time, is not to raise the pick higher than your hips, and to let the pick head drop down into the soil because of its own weight, rather than raising it high in the air and swinging away wildly. If a team member just starts whacking away at the ground, somebody’s going to get hurt. In fact, at one dig that I was on, one of the volunteers swung a pick erratically and knocked her kneecap out of position and halfway up her thigh, or close to it. That meant a full-length cast for the next six weeks or more—so please do be careful.
The rest of the toolkit will consist of a variety of implements, but it will always include a trowel. Archaeologists don’t use just any trowel from the local hardware store, however. Marshalltown trowels or WHS trowels are the preferred brands—usually Marshalltowns for US archaeologists and WHS trowels, which are smaller and less flexible, for British or European archaeologists. They aren’t expensive; each costs less than $20, even if one purchases a fancy leather holster in which to carry it.
What’s amazing to me is that my own trowel is now older than most of the students who come to dig with me these days. It’s a Marshalltown, which my mother gave to me when I turned twenty-one. I hate to say it, but if I dropped it by accident at a site now and somebody dug it up, it would probably be considered an artifact itself at this point.
Some people also bring their own hand pick, a smaller version of the pickax. They can be purchased for about $60 from a couple of companies in the United States. The dig will often provide them, however, and I’ve never really seen the need to have my own, though some of the members of expeditions that I have been on wouldn’t be caught dead without one or two hanging from their belts.
The dig also will provide all dustpans, brushes, and measuring tapes. These, along with the trowels and handpicks, will be the instruments of daily use.
I bring dental tools with me every summer as well. My dentist saves the broken ones for me and gives them to me during my annual visit for a checkup and cleaning. Dental tools are usually used only when excavating something that needs to be dealt with very delicately, like a skeleton. I often just leave my case of dental tools in the supply room of whatever dig I’m on, since I use them infrequently.
At many excavations in the Mediterranean region, there will most likely be a color-coded bucket system in place. For instance, at Megiddo and Tel Kabri, we put the excavated dirt into black buckets, pottery into orange buckets, and animal bones into green or blue buckets. Then, every so often, we call for a bucket line and pass the buckets full of dirt all the way down to the dump, where they are emptied. Other times, we simply transfer the dirt from the buckets into wheelbarrows and then trundle them to the same dump and empty them. Sometimes, though, especially when we are carefully excavating on an ancient floor, before dumping the dirt, we will carefully sift all of it through a mesh screen, looking for the smallest objects. By the end of the season, because of carrying all of these dirt buckets around, the team members have grown muscles and shed pounds. We often say that we are probably marketing our digs the wrong way—they should be advertised as health and wellness clinics, where one can lose weight and get in shape, at the same time as uncovering ancient remains.
But don’t go to a dig expecting to find skeletons, or gold, or jewelry, buried treasure, tombs, or things like that every day. On excavations in the Mediterranean region, it is pottery, stone tools, and other small objects that are found virtually every hour of every day. In the United States or in Central and South America, or in England or Europe, what one might expect to find may be different. Nevertheless, although most of the finds are mundane objects like pottery and walls of buildings, being the first person to touch those objects in hundreds, if not thousands, of years, is a pretty neat feeling.
Regardless of where in the world you are digging, a universal rule of thumb is to never yank anything out of the ground when it first starts appearing. It is more important to know where the bottom of an object is than where its top is—because it may be resting on a floor, for instance, which will generate important information about what we call its context. And so, after alerting the square or area supervisor and getting permission to continue digging, do so until the object and whatever other artifacts might be related to it are sitting as if they are on top of a table. Only when they can simply be picked up and taken away, like picking up a plate from the table after dinner, should any thought be giving to removal. But, if it is significant enough, the supervisor will probably want to bring over the photographer and perhaps an artist to take a picture and perhaps even draw the objects while they are in situ—that is, still in place.
The reason is that every object on an archaeological excavation, or anywhere in the world for that matter, whether it is being excavated by an archaeologist or not, has a context. The context includes an understanding of the other things that are found associated with the object—such as the other grave goods found in King Tut’s tomb, for instance—and its physical surroundings, such as whether it is found in sand, mud, water, ice, or ordinary dirt. Knowing an artifact’s context can often help us to figure out how it got there. It also will frequently allow the excavator to determine the absolute date of the object.
It is the context of each ancient object that is a large part of what makes it so important and which separates the work of the archaeologist from that of a treasure hunter or a looter. If I am shown, or read an article about, a gold bracelet or some other artifact, the first thing I’m going to say is, “Wow, where did it come from? What was its context?” If we don’t know an artifact’s context, it loses most of its inherent value for archaeologists, because it means that it’s not known where it was found, or when it was found, or what other objects were found with it, or anything about its findspot at all. That’s why an object that is looted and then sold on the art market is so sad for an archaeologist to see—an object that could have told us a huge amount is now only being sold because some collector thinks it’s pretty or wants something from ancient Egypt or Iraq.
Also, just to add a twist to all of this, an object can be found, even if it’s by archaeologists, in a primary context, or a secondary context, or even a tertiary context. If we say that something has been found in a primary context, that means that we’ve found it right where it was originally deposited way back when and that it hasn’t been moved or disturbed since.
If we say that an artifact was found in a secondary context, that means that we believe it’s been moved or disturbed by someone or something after it was first buried. One example of secondary context comes from Jericho, during Kathleen Kenyon’s excavations there. As we mentioned, Kenyon found that at Jericho during the Neolithic Period—that is, back about 7500 BCE, or nearly ten thousand years ago—the people would bury the body of a deceased person, or maybe even leave it lying out in the open perhaps, but then, after the flesh had disintegrated, they would take the head, remove it from the body, plaster it with clay, probably to simulate the flesh that had once been there, and then stick seashells, or rather cowrie shells, into the eye sockets where the eyes had once been. They would then put the plastered head on a shelf in one corner of the living room in their house, perhaps as a form of ancestor worship. Therefore, when Kenyon found those skulls, they were in a secondary context.
Does context really matter? Yes, absolutely—because the whole point of realizing that the ancient inhabitants of Jericho were removing the skulls of their dead family members, plastering them, and then putting them in the living room, where the archaeologists found them in a secondary context, means that we can now get some idea of what they were thinking and why they did it. It gives us a glimpse, perhaps, into their thought process, their fears about death or their belief in a life after death, or even the beginning of what we would now call religion.
All in all, an understanding of the concept of archaeological context and its importance is essential because it serves in part to explain why we excavate so carefully and why we need to keep careful records while we do so, because we are destroying the very context that an object is in when we excavate it. Context is everything and recordkeeping is essential. In fact, archaeologists estimate that ancient objects that have been ripped from their archaeological contexts by looters and sold on the art market without any documentation have lost about 90 percent of their value, because so little information is now attached to them. Similarly, fakes and forgeries can irretrievably affect our thought processes about the ancient world.
If you’re going to dig a site properly, what’s involved?
One possibility is called horizontal excavation, which is exposing one entire layer or stratum over an entire site. It is then recorded, drawn, and photographed. Horizontal excavation is often what is done at sites like Colonial Williamsburg in the United States. It’s also what was done by the University of Chicago for part of their excavations at Megiddo in the 1920s and 1930s.
A horizontal excavation can help you understand the layout of an entire site—where different activities took place, where people lived, worked, worshipped, were buried. For sites that have only a single level of occupation, horizontal excavation is the obvious strategy. For multilayer sites, there is a tradeoff to be made, because in achieving this breadth, you sacrifice depth—you know what one level at the site looks like, but you give up learning how the various spots of the site changed over time. At Megiddo, for example, the large excavation team from the University of Chicago worked for almost ten years and still managed to clear off only the top three layers of the site and expose the fourth—leaving the other sixteen layers below unexplored, until they changed their excavation plan.
The other major option is to conduct a vertical excavation—to dig deeply in a few spots in order to get a feel for the chronological sequence or the extent of the site. This can be a good way to get an idea of the stratigraphy that might be encountered if it is later decided to expand the excavations at the site. In that case, just a few limited areas will be selected, and in those places one digs as deeply as possible. This is what the archaeologists from the University of Chicago ended up doing in one area at Megiddo, where they dug a narrow, deep trench all the way down to bedrock, below the occupation levels—that’s how we know that there are twenty major levels at the site, going back to at least 3000 BCE.
William Matthew Flinders Petrie—one of the most important of the early archaeologists—was among the first to demonstrate the importance of vertical archaeology while excavating a multilevel site. Petrie originally had no formal schooling at all, though he had already been surveying in England, including at Stonehenge, long before he went to Egypt to measure the pyramids at the age of twenty-six. He learned by experience and eventually became the first professor of Egyptology at the University of London in 1892, when he was about forty years old. He then held that position for the next forty years.
Petrie first dug in Egypt, where he eventually trained a whole group of workers from the village of Quft (or Guft), near modern-day Luxor. To this day, the descendants of those workers, known as guftis, provide much of the skilled labor for archaeological excavations in Egypt. Each gufti does the same task that that gufti’s father, grandfather, or great-grandfather was assigned by Petrie—some are the pickmen, some are the trowelmen, some are the overseers. Guftis are a very talented group of workers; I had the pleasure of working with some of them when I was on a dig in the Nile Delta region of Egypt back in the mid-1980s.
Petrie also dug in what is now modern Israel and the Gaza Strip. There he was responsible for the introduction, or in some cases the popularization, of a number of things that we take for granted in archaeology today, including the concept of stratigraphy and superposition—both of which revolve around the idea that earlier things are usually found lower down than more recent things. This is especially true in the tells that are found across much of the Middle East, because tells are composed of one ancient city on top of another, built up over centuries or millennia, and the earliest city is always at the very bottom.
For example, at Megiddo, as just mentioned, the Chicago team found that the seventy-foot-tall mound has no fewer than twenty cities hidden within it. The first one at the bottom dates back to at least 3000 BCE and the most recent one, at the top, dates to about 300 BCE. When looking at a side profile that’s been cut into one of these mounds, it is easy to see the different layers, since they are full of dirt, stones, and other materials, with all sorts of different colors, textures, and consistencies. Such a side profile is officially called a stratigraphic section by archaeologists and is usually very carefully drawn and photographed for publication, so that other scholars can see whether the excavation was done properly or if something was misinterpreted.
Petrie is also one of the people responsible for realizing that all the broken pieces of pottery that are found with almost every bucketful of soil while digging can be used to help date the levels of the mound. It turns out that certain types of pottery go in and out of fashion, just like men’s and women’s clothing and shoes today. The fashions of pottery can be correlated with pretty specific dates and periods, sometimes within a decade or so. Archaeologists call this dating method pottery seriation.
It is frequently these pieces of pottery that give their names to our archaeological periods, so that in Greece, for instance, we talk about Late Helladic IIIA1 pottery, which dates to the first half of the fourteenth century BCE, during the Mycenaean period. Petrie also realized that if the same type of pottery is found at two different sites, the levels in which they are found at the two sites are probably equivalent in time. This has proven to be an extremely important, and useful, point.
Perhaps the oddest thing about Petrie, though, is that when he died in 1942, he willed his head—and his brain—to science. He had died in Jerusalem, and the rest of him is still buried there, but his head was shipped to London. At some point, when it had been stored in a basement for quite a while, the label on the jar fell off, so that for a while nobody knew whose head it was. It was eventually identified and is now reportedly somewhere in a storage room at the Royal College of Surgeons in London, although I haven’t gone to look for it personally.
Two other archaeologists who contributed substantially to how we dig today are Mortimer Wheeler and his best-known student, Kathleen Kenyon (later Dame Kathleen Kenyon). Wheeler, who excavated at many sites, including Maiden Castle in England and Harappa in India during the 1930s and 1940s, invented a new excavation method, which he employed during his excavations in both countries.
As Wheeler found, the stratigraphy at a site can get extremely complicated. He therefore decided to excavate in five-meter-by-five-meter squares, but he left a one-meter-wide unexcavated area called a balk between contiguous squares. It sounds complicated, but it’s not—simply picture a rectangular ice-cube tray like many people keep in their freezers (if they don’t have a unit that automatically makes ice for them). The ice cubes, or the squares that you fill with water in order to make the ice cubes, are the squares that you are excavating and the plastic ridge between cubes is the balk. Wheeler’s workers could walk and push wheelbarrows on the balk, but more important, leaving a balk also allowed Wheeler to keep track of the stratigraphy, because each square that was being excavated now had four interior sides to it—these were the faces of the balks that had been left in place on all four sides of each square.
If it helps, picture yourself small enough to actually jump down into the square into which you’re going to pour water in the ice cube tray and realize that there are four sides that you can look at when you’re in there. In the same way, Wheeler could jump down into each square that his workers were excavating and look at the faces of the balks that had been left in place on all four sides, so that he could see what they had already dug through and get a visual idea of the history of the area. It can be quite easy to inattentively dig through a very patchy plaster floor, if there’s not much left of it, but afterward it can be seen very plainly as a white line stretching straight across the side of the square in the balk.
Balks are straightened every day, so that a careful eye can be kept on what’s happening, including whether someone has accidentally dug through any plaster floors. The balks have to be completely vertical, however, if they are to yield a clear picture of what has already been dug through, and this is where pickaxes can come in handy, for you can use a pick to quickly and easily straighten up the balks.
At the end of each season, most archaeological teams will draw and photograph each section so that they can publish a record of it for others to see and discuss. After all, archaeology is destruction; we destroy the very things that we are studying as we dig through them, and therefore we need to record every little thing as we do so. By publishing detailed drawings and photographs of the excavated sections, other archaeologists can see them too, and they can either agree or disagree with the conclusions reached by the excavators. This is now a standard part of the scientific method for archaeologists working in the Mediterranean, and for many elsewhere as well.
So, for instance, when I was excavating as an area supervisor at Tell el-Maskhuta in Egypt in the mid-1980s, we ended up with a square in which we had dug down about twenty feet, with spectacular balk faces on the interior sides. In these, we could clearly see huge differences in colors between the layers—some were gray and black with ash, from where there had been a fire; others were as sandy as the day is long, from when the site had been abandoned for a period. In still other layers, we could clearly see the outlines of mud bricks from the walls of buildings that had once gone right through our area at different periods. It took us days to properly measure, draw, and photograph each of the balks at the end of the season that year, but we finished with accurate records that we could publish and that other scholars and future archaeologists can consult.
Another time, at Tel Kabri, we found a gorgeous series of white plaster floors with dark brown layers of soil between them. These were from different phases of the palace, as it went through renovations over time. The balks looked like an ice cream layer cake and were easy to measure, draw, and photograph.
In Athens, which is such a tourist destination, the archaeologists and city planners came up with a unique way of showing the stratigraphy that they had to dig through when building the new Metro system in time for the 2004 Olympics. In some of the Metro stations, glass panels were placed on the walls so that the dirt and the stratigraphy could be seen still in situ, as if they were the balks for an ongoing archaeological excavation. The layers of soil can be clearly seen, as well as partial walls of buildings, and drains, and even parts of a road, all of which can be appreciated but not touched.
When recording balks, many archaeologists and excavations now also utilize what is called a Harris matrix, which is a method of representing the stratigraphy graphically. In a Harris matrix, each level is represented by a box placed on the page according to its stratigraphical position, with the lower levels placed lower on the page and the higher levels placed higher on the page. Lines are drawn to connect the boxes, in order to show their vertical and horizontal relationship to each other and thus the stratigraphical history of the square. Frequently one can construct a Harris matrix as a rough working sketch while in the field, which helps trench or area supervisors keep the various levels and their relationships to each other straight in their mind.
Stratigraphic layers, Tel Kabri
Kenyon, who is probably best known for digging at Jericho and Jerusalem, brought Wheeler’s method with her when she began excavating at Samaria in what was then Palestine in the 1930s. It is now therefore known as the Wheeler-Kenyon or the Kenyon-Wheeler method.
She and others introduced modifications into this system over the years, however, and it is now frequently combined with having workers or team members physically change the buckets into which they put the pottery and other finds, as well as the labels that go with them, whenever there is a change in the color or texture of the soil, for the change in color may represent the beginnings of a new level or stratum at the site that might become really obvious only later. In this way we are able to detect and record subtle changes in the phases of the remains being excavated. If the digging has been done properly, including changing buckets, tags, bags, labels, and everything else every time a change in soil color or texture is noted, then a mirror reflection of that should be visible in the balks of the area.
With that in mind, once the digging starts in earnest, it would be best to follow the advice that I was given on my very first dig, back when I was a sophomore in college—if there is a change in the color of the soil or the texture of whatever it is that is currently being excavated, stop and alert somebody before continuing to dig, rather than possibly going right through a floor or some other important feature. The supervisor will bring new buckets, tags, labels, and everything else, just in case the different color or texture represents an actual change back in antiquity, like an entirely new level within the mound. If this is the case, that change will also eventually be visible in the balks.
Again, I should emphasize that this is what we do at the sites that I have worked on in the Mediterranean region. Archaeologists excavating in England or in North America will have their own system that they follow, such as bagging artifacts separately by unit and excavation level, as needed.
In addition, the documentation of daily finds and other activities is a necessity, regardless of where in the world you are digging. Such regular chronicles not only help the archaeologists in publishing their results after the season is over but will also aid future researchers coming back to re-examine the data, perhaps in light of new findings elsewhere or new suggestions made by other scholars. These records will include field notes on what was excavated each day; photographs of the structures, features, and artifacts as they were found in the field, as well as back in the laboratory after some have been cleaned and conserved; ceramics and small-find logs, with running inventory lists of what has been found; and other relevant data. In many cases, excavations such as those at Pompeii and Megiddo are now entering some of the records directly onto laptops, iPads, or other devices in the field and then uploading the information daily to servers back home in the United States, England, and elsewhere, so that there is little or no risk of losing data.
For those who are wondering what a typical day on an excavation consists of, I can speak only about what we do in the Mediterranean region, but a normal workday for us at both Kabri and Megiddo begins with the team out at the site and digging by 5 a.m. We dig for a little more than three hours, until 8:30 a.m., and then stop for half an hour to have breakfast. Then, we continue digging until 11 a.m., at which time we stop for a fifteen-minute break, which usually includes coffee, fruit, and cookies. Returning to work, we continue until 12:30 or 1:00 p.m., at which point we all pile onto the bus and head back to wherever we’re staying. By that time of day, most areas around the Mediterranean are too hot to want to be shoveling dirt in a trench.
After a big lunch, most people head for the swimming pool or a long nap in their room during the few hours of down time, before reconvening at 4 p.m. At that point, some team members will wash all the pottery that was found that day and leave it out in the sun to dry, so that the directors can look at it the next day and figure out what time period it comes from. Others will wash the fragmentary animal bones that were found. Still others will enter data into the computer or do whatever other task might have been assigned to them. Square and field supervisors will be writing up their notes for the day and planning the next day’s work. That will go on until 6 p.m. or a bit longer, with dinner at 7 p.m., followed by a lecture at 8 p.m.—since many people are doing this work for college credit—and then socializing until lights go out at about 10 p.m.
The whole team then wakes up at 4:30 a.m. the next morning, are out at the site by 5 a.m., and the entire routine begins again, usually for five days per week, and anywhere from four to seven weeks per field season. All this takes place for us in June and July, since that’s when most people are able to come as volunteer team members. Most are college students, but many are people from other walks of life, usually ticking off an item on their bucket list—so we have retired doctors, lawyers, nurses, schoolteachers, and so on. The one thing that they all have in common is that they had always wanted to go on a dig, though some are quite surprised at the actual conditions—when digging anywhere in the Middle East, be prepared for it to be very hot, and probably quite dry and dusty as well, unless the site is somewhere near the coast, in which case it can be incredibly humid as well as very hot.
Of course, when excavating elsewhere in the world, such as in England or in North America, one should be prepared for very different situations, including digging in the rain and mud. The time frame involved for an individual day’s work can also vary greatly, especially if one is working entirely with professionals, rather than volunteers. This is particularly true when the archaeologists are involved in what is called “cultural resource management”—such as when they are hired to go in just ahead of the bulldozers before a major construction project, in order to make certain that there are no archaeological remains that might be destroyed. In such cases, the workdays can be much longer, possibly from dawn to dusk without a break—except for hastily consumed meals and coffee—for days or even weeks at a time.
What will be found on a typical day during an excavation? At many sites in the Mediterranean region, from Italy to Israel and beyond, unless one is working at a prepottery Neolithic site, there will broken pieces of pottery turning up with almost every trowelful of dirt. These are called sherds, which is shorthand for potsherds. Think of them as broken dishes thousands of years old. Pottery was in common use for almost all household and industrial activities in most places in the ancient world—made out of local clay, fired en masse, and easily broken when dropped. It was cheaper and easier to gather up the broken pieces, toss them away, and make or obtain a new one than to try to fix it. The same is true of stone tools made of chert, flint, obsidian, or quartz in prehistoric sites—easily made, easily broken, cheaper to replace than repair.
Remember we said earlier that most of the good stuff worth writing home about is going to be what we call artifacts, which are objects manufactured or modified by humans. Sometimes it can be tough to tell a worked stone tool from a stone that just tumbled down the creek bed for a mile or two, but usually it’s obvious when something is an artifact. That is, unless it’s the first day of the dig—virtually everyone who hasn’t been on a dig before comes running up to the square supervisor approximately fifty times on the first morning, waving something and saying “Is this a piece of pottery? Is this pottery?” “No,” comes the answer. “It’s a rock—but it’s a nice rock.” After a while, it becomes second nature to tell at a glance a broken piece of pottery from a nice little pebble or rock.
Since pottery and stone are not biodegradable, you’ll find lots and lots of such pieces. Remember, pottery and stone also are found during a survey and mark the existence and location of a site; on a dig they are being uncovered still in context, within the site itself.
There also will be animal bones, plenty of dirt, and lots of rocks—lots and lots of small rocks and larger stones. Some of them are just random; others are parts of walls and buildings. The trick is to figure out which is which before picking one up and throwing it away—there’s nothing worse than realizing that you’ve just thrown away half of an ancient wall; that’s a rookie mistake.
This also is where the archaeological axiom quoted at the beginning of this book again comes into play—“one stone is a stone; two stones is a feature; three stones is a wall.” It is an amazing feeling to start uncovering a line of rocks in an excavation that were clearly set there deliberately by someone long ago.
All in all, it will be important to keep in mind that real archaeology is not always as romantic as it is portrayed, especially by Hollywood. Each moment of discovering something remarkable involves many days or weeks of dirt, sometimes blood (and blisters), always sweat, and occasionally tears. The rewards are great, however, whether having a unique experience digging for the first time ever, returning to a dig for the second time, or publishing the results. There is something majestic about an archaeological project, with all the planning that is involved and all the hard work that goes on during and after the season. In a way, it is a bit like a symphony orchestra performing a major piece; it doesn’t work unless everyone plays his or her part.