Dirt Bag

Reading Time: 5 minutes

In archaeologists, you will find an under-appreciated group of interesting dirtbags. I walked among them for a while, parading as one myself.

In my first semester of college, I fell in with the anthropology group, the gateway major that led to harder, more addictive fields like linguistics and archaeology. 

Whatever you do, for the love of God, if you want to save yourself complete and total humiliation when graced with the presence of an archaeologist, do not make any reference whatsoever to Land Before Time, Jurassic Park, or Barney. Save those jokes for the paleontologists you uncultured swine. Equally neat but not the same thing. If the Flintstones had gotten it right, there might have been some cool collabs, and you might look like less of a boob for getting the two confused, but unfortunately, the ancient Mesopotamians weren’t riding any triceratops, so we keep that shit separate, boo.  

One pop culture reference that will get you mixed responses in archaeology is Indiana Jones. I remember the first day of my entry-level arch class. Our soon-to-be-divorced professor said with a smug smirk, “Archaeology is not like Indiana Jones.” And, guess what, nobody gasped in disbelief. Nobody stormed out of the room and changed their major. 

“You mean we won’t fistfight with nazis or race them to Christian relics with supernatural powers?”  

Does that happen in other fields? Do future astronauts walk into an astrophysics course only for their professor to say, “Astrophysics is not like Michael Bay’s 1998 film Armageddon”? 

Do people need to be told? 

Don’t get me wrong. I love Indiana Jones movies. I never understood anyone that broods over wild misrepresentations of their profession in Hollywood. Loosen up, man. Nobody believes Spielberg is an authority on radiocarbon dating.

I swore my heart to the dark arts of anthro (declared my major) my first semester, and I was offered a job in the archaeology lab. What?! Me?! In an archaeology lab? Only 19 years old and I had made it. I blindly accepted having no idea what that would look like. 

If you are picturing a pristine, white laboratory with a variety of beakers; robotic arms piecing together sunken Viking warships; and put-together adults in lab coats, goggles, and surgical gloves, you would be about a million miles away from the reality that most archaeologists inhabit, especially underfunded, undergrad programs. 

What you should be picturing instead is a damp basement in the smallest building on campus that occasionally floods. Our arch lab was an art classroom that never left the 70s. All the material from the dig sites was in paper bags, labeled in Sharpie, and piled up on wooden tables.

And it was heaven.  

Our treasures were pottery sherds, bits of stone tools, rocks, pieces of animal bone, and whatever else the prehistoric Mississippian people had left in their trash pile in what is now a cornfield in Southeast Missouri. 

There was a lot to be done and never enough time, hands, or budget to do it all. All of these tiny pieces of someone else’s existence needed to be washed, identified, separated, bagged, labeled, and analyzed. Sometimes things were even counted and entered into a spreadsheet. The thrill of it!  

What were you losers doing in college? Partying? Networking? Developing marketable skills? Pffff. 

I got really into ceramic analysis for a while because I’m just a wild and crazy gal. But sometimes I started to go cross-eyed because I didn’t want to see another broken piece of shell-tempered clay in my life. 

What fickle creatures we are. Here I was living a dream—getting paid to do archaeology right out of the gate!—and I was getting bored with it. 

I remember one particular morning when I was tired and probably hungover. The clock was taking an hour to move a minute and my back hurt from hunching over a table, analyzing broken pottery. Nothing good was on the radio and I was getting hungry. My mind was already out the door.

And then, I found a sherd with a fingerprint. 

An invisible hand reached up out of the past to slap me out of my ‘taking-things-for-granted’ stupor. 

It was instantly humanizing. 

A fingerprint. Someone had literally “left their mark” on history with a part of them that made them unique. It was poetry. Those little lines grabbed me by the collar and jerked me out of thinking in general terms such as “a civilization, a time period, and shell tempering techniques,” and they zoomed me in on an individual. 

I wasn’t counting a bunch of rocks in a humid basement. I was lifting a hand up out of the forgotten dark to make history a thing that had lived and breathed. 

And the mystery potter lived, breathed, and molded clay right here in what is now Cape Girardeau, so close to me in space and so far from me in time. How bizarre was it that here I sat, holding a fragment of what might have been her/his dinner plate all those years ago? She/he never could have imagined that the object of their day-to-day work would wind up as an object of awe hundreds and hundreds of years later, being drooled over by a dreamy college student. 

And then I zoomed back out because this person, although an individual, represents a people and their history, intertwined with the ground that we walk and live on today. This fingerprint is a snapshot of a buried past. 

Just a moment ago, I was toiling away mindlessly, separating sherds to build a resume and earn some extra cash between classes. And suddenly, I was frozen, staring at a fingerprint, shocked by the reminder of a fact that I should have always had present: behind the theories that archaeologists conjure up, there were individual people like us. 

Yes, like us. And that had implications. It stirred up thoughts about the impermanence of life the way we know it. I thought about how the world, as it is today, is our everything. But someday it will all be buried, broken pieces, just like the world that the Mississippian people lived in. This basement, this building, this campus—all gone, eventually.

And the contemplative free dive didn’t end there. I began thinking of our legacies. What am leaving my print on? Will it last? And does it even matter? For some, these may be daunting and morbid thoughts. But I found them liberating. If it doesn’t really matter, and if it will all be lost to time…if my life will be reduced to nothing more than a piece of ‘trash’ that I once touched, then I feel quite free to spend my time and my life as I like. Perhaps medicine, law, business, or IT would have been a smarter career path. But if I am to only get one go at this life, and if what I do with it will eventually fade anyway, well, I wanted to be in a basement sorting rocks.

The insignificance and temporariness of it all gave me permission to do things my way rather than follow the ‘should do’s’ listed in the life template that we often feel pressured to check off on a timeline. 

I wonder if 800 years from now, after the second robot war, an archaeology student in a shitty basement lab (because that part won’t change) will be holding a broken piece of my old Backstreet Boys cassette from the city dump and she’ll wonder what my life was like eight centuries before.

You’re probably thinking, “Good Lord, Caitlan. All of that from a fingerprint? Overthink much?” 

You have to get a kick out of how you spend your time. You have to find the wonder in it. 

There is so much beauty and tragedy in archaeology. Of course, there is. It’s the history of humanity. But how easy that was to forget when I was staring at a bunch of tiny pieces of clay for hours on end, bored out of my gourd. Be careful or routine will kill the things you love. Thank God for the fingerprint that was there to remind me why I was doing the thing in the first place. 

I still left archaeology in 2012 to spend some time with the living…