This month has taught me a lot of things. I never thought of myself as a hard worker, honestly. I know I’m smart and I know I can get things done when I have to, I’ve always held it against myself that I don’t feel like I work as hard as I could, or should. I was scared going into this trip that I wouldn’t be able to do the work asked of me and I would fail. But that’s not what happened. Instead, I showed up every day to the best of my ability and had a good attitude and genuinely wanted to work. I didn’t even have to push myself, because it just felt like it made sense. Not to say that it wasn’t hard work, of course it very much was, but I have to say that the feeling of picking and hacking away, then realizing you’re finding something and switching into careful mode is exhilarating enough to make it feel like the only thing that matters in the moment. In those moments when the focus took over, I got to feel like the archaeologist I wanted to be as a kid. Hunched over, articulating a wall or a piece of pottery, I almost couldn’t stop even when I knew it was time.

The dig was made up of little moments like that, every hour or so when something new came up, I got to invest myself in bringing it up and understanding its story. Each little moment made the process so worth it. What I may have loved the most though, was standing back and seeing what we had spent the month doing. Doing the stratigraphic drawing and looking hard at the each layer of the baulk dug all the way down to bedrock, seeing each little moment tell the whole story, and getting the satisfaction of turning it into data and measuring correctly and marking it correctly and seeing those millennium that we just dug up translate onto the page was so exciting to me. 

Annika Schramm