Have you ever seen someone get really injured? Like working in the kitchen, cutting vegetables too fast, and their knife slips? The blade goes way too deep, and the wound doesn’t bleed right away? Have you ever seen bone showing through?

To me, that’s how it feels to see bedrock. 

This surface, lightly colored, buried deep (or not so deep) beneath the sediment, being slowly revealed with pickaxes and hand tools and little brushes. Hard, smooth, undulating, seemingly impenetrable. It doesn’t feel like we’re supposed to see it. It should be hidden. But in one trench, there it is, laid bare. This is not the trench I’m working. In fact, I don’t really like to go over there. The bedrock looks so vulnerable like that. Exposed, scraped, baking in the hot sun. A handpick comes down on it and my teeth hurt. It shouldn’t be out here like this.

The Ancient Greeks built their structures on it. My colleagues dig down and find walls resting on top of it. Our professor mentioned that the Ancient Greeks sometimes carved holes into it. I feel nauseous thinking about that. 

Archaeology is about digging down and exposing the past, but somehow the bedrock feels too far. It feels cruel. Bedrock is often exposed naturally, and in fact there are outcroppings visible on the way up to the site. My own hometown dug into the bedrock to install The Arch. Why does it still feel wrong to me? Perhaps in the context of digging down in such small places below all that packed sediment, it just feels intrusive.

-Rachel