Letter: To Archaeology

Subject: The Edge of the Trowel

To Archaeology,

I have spent six seasons in your company, watching as you peel back the layers of the earth to reveal the stubborn, physical facts of this place.

As an incumbent of this place, I have come to respect you as a vital tool in the work of heritage. You are the mechanism that allows us to interpret material things, providing a frame that brings the blurry history of a site into a more focused understanding.

However, you are a tool, and every tool possesses a specific geometry.

If one were to attempt to peel a potato with a bar of soap, the progress would be non-existent and the observers would look upon the effort with rightful confusion.

To use you correctly, I must understand your limitations as clearly as I understand your strengths.

You are excellent at the work of elimination. You can slice away interpretations of the past that are physically impossible. When an idea is placed upon the table as worthy of entertainment, you provide the evidence required to increase our confidence. You turn a "hunch" into a widely accepted reality by showing us the posthole, the shard, or the foundation.

Yet, there is a clear boundary to your reach.

You struggle when we look at the conceptual—the moments that, even as they happened, possessed no physical component. There is generally no archaeology to prove that a poem was read aloud in a specific room, or that a person stood upon the hill to watch a sunrise. These are the ghosts of human experience that leave no chemical signature in the soil.

I worry that there is a danger in how we look at the past. We live in a world where different processes for discerning the truth exist. There are different streams of epistemology running at different paces within different communities. We risk ceding important territory if we decide that a thing is only true if a detector goes "beep."

If we rely solely on the physical remain, we ignore the cognitive technology of the people who preceded us. We must be careful not to let the silence of the earth be mistaken for a lack of activity. You are the firm ground upon which we stand, but you are not the entirety of the horizon.

You help us frame the truth, but you cannot be the only voice that speaks it.