Choosing the most amusing tales from my excavation field days presents challenges. First, many of you will believe I’m just making this stuff up. Second, how do I pick my favorites stories? I have optimistically described this blog as “part 1” since, no doubt, my children will ask me why I didn’t include this story or that one. Nevertheless, names have been changed or avoided lest I succumb to the third challenge: avoiding vendetta from those involved. You'll notice that the best stories have to do with the archaeologists themselves.
As writer Agatha Christie, wife of well-known archaeologist Max Mallowan, might attest, nothing will make one contemplate murder more than an archaeological excavation. The group of people that assemble to excavate a site generally have several dangerous qualities in common. Any time you concentrate those qualities by aggregating archaeologists, shenanigans begin.
Archaeologists tend to be fearless, ambitious, comfortable with risk, and opinionated. Most of them are also introverts who “live in their heads.” Yank this type of person out of the library, irritate them with heat and privation, then force them to live in social groups…well, you’ll soon have the perfect habitat for mischief.
I’ll start my list of short stories with Tales of Satan. Satan is the nickname some of us gave an elderly architect at a certain excavation in Jordan. While his many advanced years should have earned him a kinder title than “Satan,” his complete lack of judgment lost him all points on both the social and intellectual scoreboard.
I won’t even begin to mention the fact that Satan felt it was beneath his dignity to flush whenever he used the community in-ground “Turkish” toilets. Likewise, here, I will not at all remark on how this was discovered and announced--the evidence utterly unavoidable--during dinner when all 20+ of us were enjoying after-dinner watermelon. No, such a discussion would be indelicate. I’ll start, instead, with Satan and his toothbrush.
Excavating in Jordan is not a task for dainty people. There are bugs, grit, heat, bugs, sleeping on sketchy foam mattresses on the floor, and bugs. Showers are available because somebody hooked garden hoses over the tops of in-ground toilet stalls. Clothes are washed in buckets during rare intervals of boredom. Days begin at 4:30 am so we can crawl into our excavation trenches before the sun is up.
Dinners were important times to recover a sense of ease. After dinner, we’d sit at the table on the porch to tell stories as we sipped hot cups of mint tea or sweet black tea. Others—parched from the sun--would gulp glasses of cool refreshment from the enormous ceramic communal jug of boiled/purified water. This was the jug we would return to each morning to fill our canteens for a day in the field. A big aluminum mug was kept on top so we could respectfully dip out our share of water and pour it cleanly into our glasses or canteens whenever we liked.
Our evening meals on the porch were lovely. We sat next to well-loved rose bushes and carefully tended mint planted by our cook for evening tea time. Tales from the day’s excavation, however, would be typically interrupted by Satan. He preferred to go to bed at least an hour or two earlier than everyone else. We whippersnappers (anyone under the age of 60) were told to clear off and quiet down…by 7 pm. Our excavation house was in the middle of nowhere. The only other place to convene was on the roof exactly 20 feet above that same porch but with a good view of the courtyard and improved breezes.
One time after a bit of early-evening-fist-shaking from Satan, we relocated to the roof but decided to pay careful attention as Satan finished his evening ritual trudge to the outhouse and then a return to brush his teeth.
Wait. Why is he brushing his teeth on the porch? The only available running water supply at the camp could be found in the outhouse facilities which he had just left…or perhaps he is using his canteen water. A dozen or more of us, bored, lean over the edge of the roof, watching, nosy.
Satan is vigorously brushing his teeth with a toothbrush that dates to just before WWII. As he finishes the battle, we watch what comes next in horror. I still see it now—almost in slow motion. He dips the well-foamed ratty taupe-bristled brush INTO the communal water mug. He swirls and swirls. He tosses his used frothy water into the rose bushes. Next, he leans—AND SPITS HIS TOOTHPASTE---into the mint garden, spewing foam like a shotgun blast. Finally, he dips the now ill-used communal cup back into the water jug a second time and takes a glurgy swig—SLURP—directly from the communal cup. He sloshes for eternity and—AGAIN—spits a broad blast into the mint patch: Our tea mint.
It silently dawned on all of us at the same time. Ease suggested practice and constancy. Satan had been swirling his toothbrush in the community water supply and spitting on our tea mint since the start of the whole rainless summer.
Nothing will make one contemplate murder more than an archaeological excavation.
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