I’m no Marco Polo. My colleagues at work have visited Russia, Guatemala and New Zealand; I once spent a night in Paris, Ky. A trip to exotic Pittsburgh in my early college years was ruined when a hobo brandished a knife at me for telling a bad joke. Chastened by this brush with the Other, I spent my study-abroad semester writing a screenplay in New Britain, Conn. I didn’t have a passport anyway.
I was, in short, America in the eyes of her enemies—parochial to a fault—and I knew it. So this June, at the urging of an exasperated friend, I flew to Greece to observe the Mitrou Project, an archaeological excavation managed each summer since 2004 by the University of Tennessee and by a Greek government agency devoted to preserving antiquities.
The dig site, Mitrou, is a tiny island (about a tenth of a square mile) in the bay of Atalanti in Southern Greece. It’s a preposterously lovely postcard of olive groves, bone-white stone escarpments and waves blending seamlessly with the sky. My friend, who studied classics with me at Dartmouth College and now creates three-dimensional digital models of holes in the ground, had promised paradise, and this was it.
One reaches Mitrou by wading knee-deep through the ocean, which is warmer than the shower in my Chinatown studio. If my friend’s aim was to heighten my regret at not having been a classicist, she succeeded. I have a water cooler; she has a diving cliff. My watering hole serves TV dinners; hers serves fresh octopus, just the thing after a hard day’s work. (The tentacles hang from a tree out front—just point to the fattest one and the lovely Maria grills it with pepper and lemon.)
The “hard day’s work” part did come as a shock. I’d always regarded “archaeologist” as a fantasy job, on a par with “treasure hunter” and “deep sea diver.” Wasn’t it just playing in a far-away sandbox at great expense to some university? I’d soon find out. Before arriving, I’d been promoted without my knowledge from “observer” to “volunteer.”
It was before six on my first morning in Tragana, the village where we lived, when I found myself hauling potsherds, pickaxes, shovels and computers from a gecko-infested “apotheke” (warehouse) to a big orange truck parked outside. When the truck was full, we headed off, a police escort alongside to protect us from hijackers—that is to say, from antiquities smugglers eager for our loot. We then unloaded it at a new, more spacious apotheke. There was no shame in such work: The second-century B.C. historian Apollodorus relates in his chronicles that one of the labors of Hercules was “to carry out the dung of the cattle of Augeas in a single day.” At least I was carrying significant artifacts—and all in the cause of history itself.
My taskmasters, Profs. Aleydis Van de Moortel of the University of Tennessee and Kerill O’Neill of Colby College, had purchased my toil for a cot and a few tomatoes. I didn’t know that it would be 104 degrees by noon. What is more, my previous night’s revels at a butcher shop-cum-restaurant had left me bad off, oozing ouzo from every sunburned pore.
The second day was spent removing backfill at the site. At the end of each season of exploration, the archaeologists put a tarp over the site and then cover it with soil to protect artifacts from the ravages of weather. I arrived at the beginning of a new season. I was on wheelbarrow detail (they prized my intellect, of course), and here I began to grasp how little of archaeology is strictly “digging.” As the dirt came out, these scientists paid careful attention to the profile of the tarp beneath it; even after a year, the trench supervisors knew what lay under every contour—a cist tomb, a fragment of wall, etc. The site operated as methodically as an ant farm and with every bit as much purpose.
What is the Mitrou Project all about? As the report on the 2005 season explains: “Mitrou is one of only a handful of sites on the Greek mainland with an uninterrupted sequence of Early Iron Age, Bronze Age and possibly even Neolithic strata, and thus an ideal place to study crucial and poorly understood periods of transition in Greek prehistory.” In other words, Mitrou allows us to study the gradual—though not necessarily smooth—development of a civilization, especially by way of its ceramics, tools, weapons and its methods of burial. (Sometimes all of the above, as in the case of a warrior grave discovered late this summer.)
As the days wore on—and my back wore out—I became more and more impressed by the range of knowledge that mere “digging” required. Archaeology cuts across the shallow trench that divides the hard sciences from the humanities. To get the full value of the Mitrou Project requires some knowledge of technology, history, language (both ancient and modern), classical literature, zoology, botany, geology and art. (And how can I forget the charming field of mortuary analysis? Easily, in fact.) One student speaks with a local in a mixture of Greek and German; another reads John Julius Norwich’s Short History of Byzantium; another explains how to date and distinguish two pieces of nearly identical brown pottery. The mind boggles at the sheer breadth of their learning.
Jeremy Rutter, a professor of classics at Dartmouth and the dig’s resident ceramics expert, said that he hopes to make the archaeology of Greece and the Aegean world “interesting and exciting enough to Dartmouth undergraduates that they might consider . . . a field other than economics, business, government, pre-law or medicine.”
Majoring in classics may not seem the most glamorous option for undergrads—indeed, that discipline is probably the last bastion of the real academic misfit, the student who wants to learn for its own sake. But Mr. Rutter and his colleagues do offer a way for such library-bound students to see and explore some of the most beautiful places on earth.
The rest of us will simply have to make do with the occasional getaway. Several days into the dig, I put down my wheelbarrow and found a pleasant little motel off the National Highway that cost only 10 euros a night. Freed from my instructive labors, I had time for the simple pleasures: a fish fry at the tire repair shop, dancing with gypsies and trying my best to appreciate the town clarinetist. There was no manual labor involved, or any ancient language study, but this part of the trip, too, was an education, and preferable by far to the Pittsburgh school of hard knocks.