Digging and the Archaeology of Writing

It was one of those slick popular magazines, thrown down on a table in the dentist’s waiting room.  I was twelve,  as frightened of the dentist as any twelve-year-old, and looking for things to distract me - and there it was, a picture of a young woman, brush in hand, gently sweeping away, grain by grain, the dust and dirt of centuries from the remnants of an ancient stone wall. I don’t remember anything else about that dentist visit (ok, that’s a lie - I also remember swatting away the dentist’s hand when he first poked the needle inside my mouth, and then getting the lecture of my life from him) - but that picture, the words around it, the thought of remnants of ancient times being buried under our very feet - all that stuck with me.  I wanted more.

Typical of my young self (and, well, my old self now) I spent months researching, reading everything the sparse school library and the only-slightly-less-sparse city library could give me on archeology.  I dug through my parent’s set of The Book of Knowledge for everything even remotely archeological, read encyclopedia articles, ordered books on interlibrary loan, which sometimes arrived, sometimes never did.  And, as is the way with all things for twelve-year-olds, I eventually moved on to other fascinations.

Sort of.  The thoughts of those neatly-arranged grids at dig sites, the shovels, the brushes, the tables laden with shards and bones and - gasp - intact pottery of ancient times, stayed in my mind, leading me to pick  up any article on dig sites, to subscribe to reading lists, listservs, and blogs for years to learn more, read more, understand more. Until, finally, I put in an application to volunteer at a dig site - and was accepted.  For several years, I went to dig after dig, sifting through dirt, hauling buckets of dirt, sleeping with dirt in my hair. I discovered a number of things about myself in the process:   I’m tougher than I thought I was, I have more patience than I thought I did, and, most surprising, I really like to dig.

At most of the digs I’ve worked, (note well:  worked, not attended) the volunteers, grad students, junior archeologists and any other odd crew are divided into “pit teams” - each section of the area to be excavated is marked off in a grid, and each team (three people each) gets one section to excavate - one person in the pit, digging and brushing, one hauling the excavated dirt to the screens, and one person sifting the dirt through the screens to discover any artifacts so small they may have gotten lost in the dirt.  I hated screening (some loved it), and was fine with my turns hauling dirt to

and fro, but was near ecstatic about my turns digging in the pit. I’d argue that my turn was not over.  I’d grump when on any given day I didn’t get as many dig turns as someone else.  I’d pretend not to hear them when they were calling me to get the holy hell out of there.  I wanted to dig - I wanted, grain by grain, to remove the dirt and rock until I found that shard of arrowhead, or section of  pot, or, once, an entire intact firepit from more than 3,000 years ago.

It was the bit by bit of it, the inch by inch, the level by level anticipation of discovery.

That is the same with writing.  It is easy for any of us with moderate skill with words to throw out shovelfuls in an essay to meet a deadline, or to just dump a bucket on an issue or a simmering idea.  Like the archeologist who knows the layout of ancient villages and hence knows where to dig, we know the structure of essay, the arc of story, and we can toss it out, without screening, when need be.

Don’t let need be.

I’ve been away from this blog for more than a month.  I wish I could tell you that it’s because I’ve been churning out dozens of pages and couldn’t stop.  But I can’t tell you that, because what I’ve been doing is digging, scraping up dirt by the shovelful, hoping that some small grain of it is that

artifact, that essence of memory and history that sparks the thought, paints the picture that lights up a whole other way of being….magic on paper.  I am still screening, still sifting, still taking the dirt, the grains, the small ideas joyfully removed and going through the excruciating process of sifting.  I’m finding patience for discovery, because like the many archeologists I have now worked with at digs, I know the layout, I know when I’m approaching a “find,” and being in that almost-there state is near as exhilarating as words flowing on the page.