My first day of washing pottery made me feel a couple of different things. One of them was a sore back from all the hunching and scrubbing. Another was a deep connection to humanity, both past and present. Let me explain.

When my groupmates and I arrived at Terra Ombra, we were each given a bag of pottery sherds found at Vigla last year, and a wide, shallow, plastic bucket. Across the way was a metal water faucet coming from the ground where we could fill our buckets. We went and got our water, sat down cross-legged on a shaded section of cement, gently poured our pottery into our basins, and began scrubbing each piece. We sat in a circle. As we worked, we talked. “How was yesterday on site? How are you feeling? What’s going on in your life? What are your interests, your passions?”

It slowly occurred to me that we were doing what humans, often women specifically, have done for thousands of years: gathering water, sitting together, talking, and connecting while doing the washing. How many people before us have done this exact thing? Well, maybe not this exact thing. They were probably washing the clothing and maybe cookware of their family members, not other people’s old, broken dishes. But on our walk home, something that one of my groupmates, Annika, mentioned really struck me- how many of the women whose very dishes we were washing that day had sat and talked and connected in the same way that we just had?

Some things never change.

-Rachel