The Typical Indian Reaction to Archaeology and What it Really is by Shriya Gautam

Tell people you are a doctor, and their eyebrows shoot so high on their foreheads, you’re scared their hair will swallow it. Tell people you’re an engineer, and they have the choicest words of praise for you. Tell them you are an archaeologist, and you’ve hit the goldmine of blank-faces, confused looks and stoned eyes.

Hain? You dig graves, beta?

Or worse! They mistake it for architecture! (Nope, not kidding!)

Archaeologist? Achha achha! So, do you design bridges? Or buildings?

My typical reaction to this: What the devil were you doing in Grade 5, when you first came across the words, “Archaeologists are yet to decipher what the Indus Valley Script means!”?  

Seriously, sometimes I wonder, whether I was the only one who heard my teacher explain what an archaeologist truly was! However, you’d be surprised, there are other oddballs like me who took the teacher seriously when he added in an encouraging way: “Well who knows? Maybe you can be an archaeologist tomorrow and decipher it!”

The School of Archaeology, both in Delhi and in Oxford and surprisingly many other countries in the world, is full of such oddballs.

What do we do, you ask? Simple: we use the entirety of our knowledge that we’ve gained through our educational careers and put it into practice. Yes, meal planning, waste management,first aid and art classes included!

Being an archaeologist, is probably one of the coolest professions and I am not saying that because I am one! No, quite the contrary! Of course, we dig in the mud and get dirty and need a shower everyday, and yes, our skins go dry and patchy, hair gets brittle and we have sore hands and feet that last for months but, that isn’t even 1% of what we do.

A typical excavation involves a geo-physical survey of the site using cool gadgets that trap and transmit satellite images of the place we intend to excavate. So, if you make crude MNREGA jokes about me, trust me, I’d whack you with the back of my mattock! We do NOT start digging anywhere and everywhere and no Sadhu babas tell us about buried treasures that they dreamt of/had maps of! No archaeological team will start digging blindly without a geo-phys until they know for sure that something in there is worth digging for.

Step two generally is planning how much to dig? We make test pits and if something is found in that first few inches of the earth, we use the cool Bob-the-Builder kinda Machine to cut a predetermined size of land and create what is called a trench-a rectangular area of definite measurements which will again be pegged at every 5 metres, so that it forms small grids at every 5 metres. The East and the North angles are measures and labelled at every peg and the initial trowelling begins! No, we don’t go, “Haiii yaaa!” Ninja style and start digging like feverish dogs looking for a bone. Most of the times, there is NO bone! We only scrape the first few centimetres of the soil and if something is found, we go slower.

Usually the place is left to the forces of nature after the initial trowelling is complete. If there has been a human activity on a certain spot in the past, it shows, because the colour of the soil at this particular spot will be different from the natural colour. For example, if the natural is yellow, and there is a dark black deposit in the middle, you’d know Fred Flintstone probably partied here, won’t you?  

And then, this is the area, you’d attack! You go slower if there are finds (centimetre by centimetre) and faster if there are none (inch by inch or simply mattock it away!) but you’d NEVER dig it all out! You will half section it (i.e. peg in two nails through the middle of the whole bit and tie a thread to kinda draw a section line and then, you dig half of it leaving the other half intact. Then, with all this done, you’ll plot it on the graph (yeah, those grid pegs we pegged before were for all the measuring and calculating!) You combine your art classes with statistics, math and physics, measure the height of the feature above sea level, using an ultra cool, leveling device called a dumpy level, draw your pit, record whatever you found in there and analyse stuff (even soil) and determine whether it’s sand, clay, silt or a combination, acidic, basic or neutral or rich in iron, manganese or copper. (Yes, chemistry and geography come in SO handy.)

If you’ve been lucky, you have found a bead, a brooch, a pot or a decomposing bone (mostly, you might not be that lucky but if you are…) you get to do cooler stuff, like finds processing, washing the washable and treating those that need conservation; and in case of organic samples in the soil, you get to analyse your samples in a floatation tank. No one who has enjoyed gardening, playing in the dirt or splashing in water would hate archaeology. Plus, if you enjoy trekking, walking, camping and staying outdoors, you’d have fun! The best part of the digs are volunteers, people who just come and try their hands on “the very archy stuff,” but don’t do it professionally! You’ll find teachers, doctors, engineers, kids and sometimes even honeymooning couples, and complete families from everywhere and almost every country. No other professionals will welcome you into the crowd to live a day in their lives like we archaeologists do.

And what when all the work is over?  Do archaeologists slump in their tents smelly and sore? Well, only if you are a delicate darling and don’t have a life. Back at the campsite, we sing and dance around the campfire, play guitars and ukuleles, play music on devices charged with solar chargers, invent card games and since a few always happen to be good cooks, we get to taste the best of food from all around the world!(Occasionally, you’ll also have a dare-devil in the group who will smuggle in crates of booze!) You think you’d get tired of it but you don’t because there is no end to the variety you find at a dig. So, no, we don’t dig graves, we don’t live like vagabonds or go Ninja on the earth. We dig out the past, the history of how things were so that we can understand our present better. (The six months that we are not digging into fields, we live our lives in offices,studying, reading, and writing articles and research papers, so that’s where the knack of writing and the love for literature comes to our rescue!) We travel. We explore. We’re people who are passionate about everything that concerns humans. What’s archaeology, you ask? It’s a comprehensive study of how humans live life!