My long post.
I have wanted to be an archaeologist for most of my life. I've never thought about it, questioned it, or analyzed it. I also never thought it was something I could actually do. Now, that I'm on the threshold of reaching for this goal, I find it's necessary that I examine my reasons and desires. I have to ask why.
Ancient history has always held my fascination. First, it was dinosaurs, of course. There are few children who don't love dinosaurs at some point in their lives. Those giant, almost mythical creatures that could have been conjured from a child's own fertile imagination. Dinosaurs are like a storybook made real, a fantasy given life. They're the next best thing to dragons, honestly, except the dinosaurs were real.
Then, Egyptology took hold--again, another stock fascination for many children. Egypt's pharaohs and mummies, their gold and lapis lazuli, their animal-headed gods, exotic rituals, and hieroglyphics represented a world both similar to my own and yet fabulously different. For a child who loved cats and wrote notes in code to her best friend, a love of ancient Egypt made perfect sense.
After becoming engrossed with Egyptian history, I developed a desire to know how Egyptologists and archaeologists learned what they knew about ancient civilizations. Everything I read or learned I looked at and asked, "But how you can you be sure?"
In the 1970's, my elementary school caught fire and parts of it were destroyed. By my time in the late 80's and early 90's, the building had been rebuilt, damages repaired. However, in certain parts of the playground, pieces of painted cinderblocks could be found buried, one side a light brownish tan, the other painted a sea foam green. There was a drainage ditch that ran through part of the playground, and this was the best hunting ground for pieces of the old school building. Areas where rain water had washed away the topsoil were the richest finds. The pieces I found... were they from the bathrooms? The main hallway, a classroom? Was this sea foam green the colors other children passed as they went to their classrooms? Or had this color been a part of a larger pattern of paint? The only bricks I found were this color--were they all originally this color? What else was their to find in the dirt in that drainage ditch? Were the blocks definitively from the old school building? From the fire? Subsequent demolition and rebuilding?
I always wondered. I never found out.
In high school, it was ancient Greece and Rome that held my attention. I took Latin, and I loved reading through the Latin texts and deciphering the language. I never quite memorized all those ablative uses, but I always looked forward to the class. Archaeology was always something I wanted to do. However, in my search for a college, I never thought about whether or not there was an archaeology or anthropology program at the schools I considered. I was gifted in literature classes--I assumed I'd be an English major. I didn't want to be one, but I sort of assumed. For some reason, I'm not sure why, I never thought archaeology was real. It was the realm of dragons and dinosaurs.... a child's dream, but not an adult's life.
Why? Why did I think that? My friends encouraged me, my family supported my interests. My grandparents gave me old National Geographic magazines and my father shared documentaries he would see on television with me. So why wasn't it real to me? My grandmother shared with me old civil war bullets she'd found on the mountain near her house growing up and arrowheads found right alongside the bullets. I grew up surrounded by history and archaeology, and never thought it was real.
Social pressure. Children grow up to become doctors, nurses, lawyers, teachers, firefighters, police officers, engineers, veterinarians, husbands/wives/fathers/mothers. Not archaeologists.
Television. Indiana Jones, while exciting and adventurous, is not a real archaeologist. He says to a classroom at the start of The Last Crusade that most of archaeology is done in the library in the form of research. Then he goes on an exciting adventure to exotic locales seeking a mythical and supernatural artifact. He lives a double life, one real and the other fantasy. This is the stereotype of an archaeologist.
Lara Croft, sexy yet anatomically impossible, is not a real archaeologist. She's a self-proclaimed tomb robber, and the bane of real archaeologists. She also fights monsters that guard the treasures she seeks to steal and sell. She's a gun-toting ass-kicking bitch and no one had better get in her way. She's Indiana Jones with breasts and a smaller waistline.
Being out in the field, whether you're male or female, is not sexy to anyone who isn't an archaeologist, and it's not sexy because of the company. It's sexy because you love your work. Who torments themselves if they don't really love it? Indiana Jones got one thing right--most archaeology doesn't happen in the field. It's not in a library, these days, though--it's a lab. Analysis is most of the job.
I learned this in college. And I'm okay with that. The job doesn't seem tedious to me. My first anthropology class, World Prehistory, taught me a lot about anthropology, archaeology, and my own interests. Ancient eastern civilizations still fascinated me. Give me Sumerians, Egyptians, Hittites, Assyrians, Phoenecians, Minoans. The civilizations surrounding the Mediterranean have always drawn my eye. I learned about archaeological methods in that class, and found that those fascinated me.
In a school that has no anthropology department and two anthropologists on campus, I decide to be an anthropology major. Why not transfer? The university I attended is a liberal arts institution, and that liberal arts approach to education melds well with anthropology and archaeology. Both disciplines segue perfectly into any number of other fields, which in return, can be applied within anthropology or archaeology. Biology, political science, economics, geology, sociology, gender studies, history, classics.... After one anthropology class, I saw connections everywhere. I could take what I wanted or needed out of other classes I took and apply it within the field of anthropology, of which archaeology is most often found as a sub-field. Archaeology is both scientific and interpretive--there are facts, there is evidence, there is procedure, and there are unknowns that must be accounted for through theories, hypotheses, and testing observations.
And sometimes, there's almost a storytelling element to archaeology. A story based on facts as well as educated guesses and inferences. It's the story of human history, as much as that sounds like a cliche. People like having a connection to their past. Maybe it's a southern thing, growing up as I did in the South. However, I doubt it. Identity is often based on the past, especially group identity. Archaeology has certainly been used to justify many different group identities, often at a national level.
My independent study my senior year was a study of ethnicity. I didn't really choose this topic. My advisor, in a laid back sort of way, guided me toward ethnicity. I also couldn't think of any other topic I was interested in to which I could then match an advisor on campus available to guide an independent study. So it was ethnicity. At first, I was uninterested. My first paper, in my eyes, was an utter failure. My advisor didn't seem terribly impressed, either. After that humbling experience, of turning in and discussing a paper I had written with no interest and certainly had no interest in discussing, I forced myself to approach the topic in a more mature and academic manner. Interested or not, this was the topic I had agreed on and I would get whatever benefit I could out of investigating it.
I gradually became more engrossed with the subject. How do we define ethnicity? In some cases, there are concrete markers that delineate the boundary between one group and another. In many cases, the markers are less clear. I couldn't find a definition that anthropologists seemed to all agree on--everyone had their own definition, and applied it to their own research areas.
Now, in seeking to begin a career in cultural resource management, I also wonder at the role that archaeology plays in creating or maintaining ethnic identities (or, potentially, in changing or even destroying ethnic identities). Research has been done on the role of archaeology in the rise of nationalism, but nationalism and ethnicity aren't the same concept. Ethnicity seems more fluid. What defines one group may not define another.
Mostly, I wonder if I'll end up doing what I want to do with my life. I wrote the preceding paragraphs as I was attempting to come up with a statement of purpose for a graduate school application. I am not using that particular piece of writing, but it helped me get a few things clear in my head.
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