As Rachel and I sit at Terra Umbra, hunched agonizingly over our brightly colored plastic basins, feverishly scrubbing away at millennia-old sherds of amphorae and cookware, I can only think of the last hands to hold or wash this pottery, and how the people who last touched the very things I hold in my hands now likely held their washing basins on their hip to fill it, and scrubbed their wares, in just the same ways I am now. 

In the trench, speculation about soldiers making friendship bracelets and cows building shoddy walls makes me giggle, then we genuinely ponder what the ancient people could have been doing here, in the very spot I stand, centuries upon centuries ago. Was this a cooking space, were these bones and olive pits leftovers from a feast enjoyed shortly before the site was abandoned? I don’t always clean up perfectly after a big meal. Some of the dishes show visible paint strokes, and fingerprints made before firing. Some of my favorite dishes I use are the ones I painted myself.  I bet they giggled with their friends here too.

I can’t help but be constantly overwhelmed by the feeling of oneness with the people who were here before me, using these things for the last time before we’re holding them now. Nothing makes me feel so human as seeing and touching the raw, unearthed lives of people who were just like me. People have always been people, and though the technology changes and the ways we do things is so different now, I know that there is something eternal and beautiful about the human experience, and I KNOW that I am lucky to be here to know that. 

Annika Schramm