Lives in Ruins...and no, I'm not talking about that one movie

Coming off my reading of The Death of Caesar, it seemed only fitting to transition to something more…lively. And quite coincidentally this audio book, which had been on hold for several weeks, came into the library just as I finished reading Caesar. 

Lives in Ruins: Archaeologists and the Seductive Lure of Human Rubble. The title itself was most promising.  In this book, author Marilyn Johnson doesn’t so much look at how archaeologists work, but rather why they do that work in the first place. The answer, she thinks, is a sort of infatuation that takes hold of you when you look at a remnant of the past and see the past through it.

She met with several different types of archaeologists throughout the writing of this book, from those studying cavemen to those excavating Ground Zero in New York. Although experts in their respective fields and obviously educated, intelligent, and hardworking, archaeologists are vastly underpaid and underappreciated.  The work isn’t so much Indiana Jones-running-from-giant-boulders as it is grunt work. Laborious, tedious, with attention to details that may or (more often) may not be there. Painstaking record-keeping that is time-consuming but hardly the sort of glitz that the public, foreign governments, or potential patrons find interesting. 

And yet the career of archaeology is akin to that of acting or writing: there are tons of people who want to do it, and competition for excavation sites, grants, academic recognition, and above all the possibility of archaeology being their “day job” rather than juggling other part-time jobs just to make ends meet. Like other artistic jobs where the chance of “making a living at what you love” is rather low, archaeology takes commitment, passion, and a certain amount of courage.

Indoor excavation site, Bryggens Museum in Bergen, Norway.
Photo credit: Me.

Depending on the specific archaeologists Johnson was writing about in a certain chapter, this book varied from fascinating to stressful.  Some of Johnson’s subjects came across as abrasive, elitist, maybe even pedantic. They seemed suspicious of an outsider’s interest in their work and discoveries.  Or they came across as judgmental of Johnson’s inexperience when she attempted to aid them in their work. 

I walked away from this book feeling judged myself. Several times the archaeologists in this book bemoaned the fact that even stepping foot on a dig site contaminated the site. They seemed bitter about governments meddling in their work, or industries trying to construct new buildings, or nonprofessionals poking around in the ground. 

To them, if humans would just stay away from historical sites, these sites could be preserved. They never addressed the fact that in time, weather erosion and animals and decomposition will eventually erase these evidences of previous civilizations anyway. But the true reason this upset me was because if someone really longs to know how people lived in the past, it seems wrong to be angry that people are still living in the present. After all, if we don’t create building or leave our junk around now, what will keep the archaeologists of the future busy?