How to be an archaeologist

View of the dig site from a giant crane.

Me and my fellow trenchie, Laura, digging what turned out to be a medieval trash pit, on top of a Roman walkway.

First, have unending patience. Expect to find one artifact of value every 20 days. But usually, that one item will be paired with several others - especially if the pot was broken. And I swear I found it like that.

For one month this summer, I participated in an excavation in Nijmegen, The Netherlands. Nijmegen, located near the border of Germany about two hours south of Amsterdam by train, is a typical university town in Europe - which coincidentally is very similar to university towns in America. It is even complete with wannabe-punk students and many who speak English better than some freshmen.

I, for the record, have no patience. I am what you might call a "fair-weather archaeologist." When I found something of value, that one day, it was the greatest day I had yet. All other days were, politely said, learning experiences. Boring ones.

I need to squash this myth right now: archaologists are not Indiana Jones or Lara Croft. They are usually bureaucratic-looking men in their 50s who spend most of the time in their office, writing papers about their organization's digs, and driving their Jaguars to the dig site once a week or so to check on progress.

This description is not meant to demean or ridicule the archaologist. But every job, every organization or business has to have the office boss-man, and the Bureau Archeologie Gemeente (municipality) Nijmegen had Kees Brok. Kees (pronouced kays) worked his way up from a field worker to archaeologist, through university degrees and excavations, to be Gemeente Nijmegen's head archaeologist. The ones in the site, digging and planning, getting dirty for several hours a day, are either field technicians or field directors.

My boss, Jerone, was a very young field director. In fact, he was actually a field technician assistant - the field director left Jerone much of the responsibility, unofficially. At 28, he was running his own site, located in a residential neighborhood near the River Waal. I would mostly see him in a construction jacket (brightly colored so not to get run over by the cranes) and a hard hat, walking with various field workers, discussing the problems of pipes or time constraints.
You see, Nijmegen is old. Two-thousand-years-old to be exact. They just celebrated their birthday in 2005. The Romans built a military camp along the river in the 1st century, and the city has been added upon by Batavians, Charlemagne, and various Germans. About five feet below the ground surface, I found artifacts from the 1950s, medieval times, and even a few Roman building bricks.

Since there is such history in this city, new developments are carefully handled. The site I worked on was a former housing block where the city wanted to put up new condos. Somewhere in legal clauses it states that before any new building project, the city must conduct an environmental impact survey, one of which is archaeological. This site began in March, and when I left in early August, they were fighting their timeline of September.

This is where I discovered the most disheartening thing about archaeology. You don't get to save everything. Willingly. After a day or so, Jerone had to make the call whether a pit was worth the manpower (the site is divided into several pits, usually depending on age and type of artifacts). Many times they would come across a virtual field of (sometimes broken) pottery from a Roman trash heap, but wouldn't have enough time to comb through it all, and so left it to move onto another site. The head of my pit, Martijn, said this was sometimes a shame they had to leave artifacts they knew were there because there was no time.

However, giving me renewed hope as well as an overwhelming headache was the warehouse. Comparing just one site to the abundence of artifacts still needing cleaning and processing in the warehouse put it into perspective that perhaps we didn't need to get those last bits of broken pottery, so tiny I usually thought they were rocks. The storage capabilities of these types of warehouses make it seem like there should be a thousand more museums in the world, just for Roman artifacts in upper Europe, and if only just for me (I did visit several archaeological museums in the Netherlands and Germany, and became excited to see artifacts similar to what I had handled myself).

While I can never picture myself being a field technician or an archaeologist, I appreciate the work they do to bring history alive for the rest of the world, and relished in my part in that.
There is something oddly satisfying about shaving away the centuries of muck, which to me looked like chocolate shavings. Also bragging about knowing a little Dutch, when in fact most of those words are work phrases. Pauze! (break-time)

One of Nijmegen's city squares, or platz. It's really something to be in a town with a deeper history than my entire country.