The process of digging, unearthing, or uncovering something – to “excavate”, which was exactly what we did for the better part of a month while working on the site.
Sounds fairly straightforward, right? You use a pickaxe, or a trowel, and you move buckets of dirt, in order to unearth a buried treasure, which in our case, was most frequently pieces of ancient pottery or animal bones. That’s what I thought too, until completing my time on the dig site.
When we first started this course, we knew we would be excavating an ancient Roman burial site. Our instructors warned us from the very beginning that this would be hard work. We would be working outside in the heat doing manual labor for hours every day. The work would be tough, both physically and mentally exhausting. And yes, it’s true – it was hard, it was hot. Yes, I dug. Yes, I moved dirt – buckets and buckets of the stuff. But “excavating” was more than just that.
Somewhere along the way, I started to see the world differently. I’m not sure when exactly, or how, but after digging in the dirt for hours in the Mediterranean sun, I started to see opportunities for excavation everywhere.
A fountain in Barcelona suddenly seemed in need of excavating. Not that it was covered in dirt, but I now saw it as an opportunity to unearth something new. A paved path between our house in Old Town Alcúdia looked appealing too, the perfect place for some excavation to occur. Or maybe on the roof of our house, at night, with a bottle of wine and some friends, excavation might happen there too.
And there was excavating to be done within myself as well. I started imagining taking a pickaxe to my thoughts, sifting through the dirt inside myself, with the goal of uncovering a hidden gem. What I was looking for, I’m not sure. But the point was that excavation was less literal than I had imagined at the beginning of this course. Sometimes our tools weren’t pickaxes and trowels, but words, and stories shared amongst friends. Perhaps “excavation” was best done alongside others.
We dug literal trenches together, yes, but we also unearthed more about ourselves in the process. Maybe it was the hot sun, or maybe it was the feeling of community which comes from being together in a new environment, but somehow, our group started to excavate a lot more than just dirt.
We started to uncover ourselves along the way.
