This post and style has been influenced by Svetlana Alexievich’s Second-Hand Time: The Last of the Soviets (Время секонд хэнд) publication released in 2013, a work of non-fiction prose which explores the personal impact of the collapse of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) in 1991 through the recording of hundreds of interviews transcribed into monologues. These were conducted with a wide range of individuals who experienced both life within the USSR and its modern-day constituents, including present-day Russian Federation and surrounding independent countries. I’ve previously mentioned the book in a recent blog entry here. Alexievich, a resident of Belarus and the winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2015, is no stranger to the impact of political persecution and has herself had to leave Belarus to seek sanctuary elsewhere for long periods of time. The Nobel Prize committee described her works as ‘polyphonic writings, a monument to suffering and courage in our time’.
The book, of which I’ve recently finished reading for the first time, offers insight into the continual flux of humanity and it has moved me deeply. If I’m not mistaken it is also the concluding chapter in a five-part cycle of work reporting on issues within the history of the USSR, although a number of the volumes have not yet been translated into English. Those that have include Alexievich’s 1997 publication Chernobyl Prayer (ернобыльская молитва), a volume which I’m currently reading. It is a book which examines the impact of the nuclear reactor malfunction in Ukraine in 1986 and its effects on the clean up crews, physicians, and local inhabitants within Ukrainian, Russian and Belarusian territories. The book includes material taken from over 500 interviews over 10 years, of which a revised edition was released in English in 2013. A new reprint of an English translation of Zinky Boys (or Boys in Zinc, Цинковые мальчики) is due for 2017, which looks at the impact of the USSR’s decade long war in Afghanistan from 1979 to 1989. It is a volume I am now keen to read and to learn from.
This post should be seen as an attempt to convey the methods that Alexievich’s employs; it is not meant to diminish the impact and importance of the individual and personal stories contained within the volumes that she has produced. Nevertheless there are parallels that can be drawn out between historical events and the personal viewpoints of our field and I was keen to explore, to hear voices from friends of their experiences of archaeology – as a career, as a dream, as a labour of love.
Part 2 can be read here.
The author’s monologue
– We’re exploring the past to divine the future, turning over the topsoil to see what lies below. The borders are closing, the opportunities to traverse and learn are being cut across the globe, and I find myself at a crossroads in my own life. Do I continue to pursue meaningful employment in the field that I so desire to join or do I keep my passion to one side, preserved with all the joy intact but with little difference made to my bank balance?
I find myself in a non-archaeology community that cares little for my achievements or my dreams that have been achieved. Instead I archive them within my own personal vault of fulfillment and seek the next challenge, doggedly pursuing what I see as a higher form of personal learning – uncovering the voices of the past, to gather and collect the tendrils of evidence, to disseminate the dead among the living. In my defense I am giving life back to the lost.
Life has assumed the standard pattern yet I yearn to break free, to feel the mud underfoot, the rising sun casting a glint off the blade of the metal tool in a field of crops. There is no shame for me to admit that I find myself in neither commercial archaeology or academia, I am between camps and of no camp. I am free to wander as my desires so take me and as my time so dictates. My work, not associated with my archaeological passion in any meaningful way, gives me the money for food, fuel and rent, and in return I give it the sweat, hard work and integrity as I can muster. My dreams are my own though, lying so tenderly outside the realm of reality.
So today, my dear readers, we shall instead dip into the minds of others . . .
The boundaries of history as an illusion of the future
The Galleon. Mid thirties. Field archaeologist.
– I started in archaeology a bit by chance. I always wanted to be an archaeologist but I thought it was a secluded works, reserved for the best of the best. When I met my ex-boyfriend he knew a guy that was supervising and I finally entered into this new magical world. My surprise was that, once I started to meet people I realised that, unfortunately, they were not the best of the best but quite the contrary. There’s good people, there’s bad people, and environment is everything if you have a shitty site. I come from another country, I have more than 10 years of experience but I’ve been treated nearly everywhere as if I was a newbie. If you don’t know the background of someone you should ask, that should be the rule.
Also, as everywhere, good workers are slighted and bad workers are promoted. Even if this happens everywhere, this is quite hurtful when you see bad decisions being made which can affect our knowledge of the past. The past is a limited resource. But it is difficult and exhausting to fight against the ‘establishment’ because builders don’t give a shit about it, engineers don’t give a shit about it, and people in general don’t give a shit about it. Yet everyone watches Time Team or laps up the burial of Richard III . . .
Well, people, the reality is different: it’s hard, it’s difficult, it’s not well paid . . . But let me do my work! In an era when nationalism seem to be rising let me tell you where you really come from.
On the sensation of discovering the new and the old – A personal turning point in a friend’s life
Charles L. 31 years old. Former field archaeologist.
– It’s a fairly long-winded story, but it goes back to an early realization as a kid that the world was not just self-evidently fascinating, but also a seemingly endless mine of stories, processes and worlds. Delving into the past opened up incredible avenues for obsession. Everything imaginable had a reason for being, and an intricate history woven through the chaos of time.
My dad, also a huge fan of history, always endeavored to take me to historical and archaeological sites around the country, and whenever we were abroad, he’d always have several similar visits planned. The feeling of utter scintillation when I walked down roads that had seen sometimes hundreds of generations of wear, or standing in the remains of a hillfort created by cultures both alien and continuous to my own . . . It never left me. The feeling that, anywhere you go, you walk through the echoes of millions of other stories; it turned the world into a magical, vibrant place. I wondered whose story my essence would be floating through thousands of years from now. The door to my imagination was permanently kicked open, to let the world in.
Skip forward twenty or so years and life had occurred at me. I’d left uni with an okay grade and an unhealthy attitude to work. I fell into a retail job, then, after that, a fairly uninspiring administrative job. That child in me sat sulking in a corner of my mind, looking out of my eyes at spreadsheets and emails and pint glasses and insomniac nights and sadly fell to sleep.
I nearly closed the door of imagination. February of 2009, my dad, frustrated, asked me what are you doing with your life? What do you want to do? I replied that I did not know, but that wasn’t quite true. I knew I wanted to learn and learn and learn. I wanted to write and write and draw and see and live again. But all of that seemed so . . . Unrealistic. Childish almost. I vaguely said I’d thought of going back to university, which didn’t exactly elicit a positive response, but he was open to the idea if I had a goal. Initially I thought about a History MA, but decided against it. No; I wanted to see it and feel it. I wanted the hands on interaction with the past. Turns out, I wanted to be an archaeologist.
So, I got onto a Masters and, with a jolt, my life returned to me. Happiness, fascination, wonderment, hope, drive, purpose; it all returned to me in a way I hadn’t felt since childhood. It was difficult but brilliant. I was surrounded by wildly intelligent, funny, ambitious people with whom I made quick friendships. The literature, whilst sometimes dry, opened my eyes to whole past worlds and interpretations I had never considered, and I was getting to write about it all. Naturally, my first few papers were total garbage, but I got there slowly, and after a while I was interacting with the work in a way I had a grasp on. I felt I had something to give to the field.
And so went one of the most exciting years of my life. After the depressing lack of consequence from my first degree, my Masters was like a turbo-boost for the soul. At the end of the year, I volunteered on a couple of field-schools and after a stressful time of applying to all of the archaeology units in the entire known universe, I landed my first archaeological job through a personal recommendation. After all those applications, it came down to a good word from a new friend dropped to the right people. It was a godsend at the time, and remained largely representative of my winning method for getting archaeological work. It comes down to a very short and simple piece of advice: know people.
So, as I’m sure anyone who has worked in commercial archaeology is now thinking: perhaps this guy entered the field with an overly rosy view of things. You’re absolutely 110% correct. If perhaps I’d listened to a few more archaeological misery gutses, I might have had a slightly smoother ride. Alas, I didn’t and therefore I didn’t.
My first job was actually a total joy, however. It was only after a year or so that mission fatigue set in. I started off on a wonderfully academic site with an extremely ingratiating and friendly unit. I made a new city home and in the space of a few short months, accrued years of happiness. I had great friends, a great home and a great title, one I really enjoyed: archaeologist. Technically I was an assistant archaeologist, but I didn’t tell people that.
Some time, several jobs, mountains of financial uncertainty and seemingly centuries trapped outside in the bitter rain later, the shine had somewhat worn off. Travelling around the country is all well and good for a while, but when it becomes constant, it’s not so well and good. I have seen enough B & B’s to last a lifetime. I could draw a good, accurate map of England’s mobile dead spots. I have mattocked through ice on supervisory demand, destroying archaeology, and I have hoed away mud in torrential rain. Worse than all that, however, were the endless months alone in the middle of nowhere, watching a work gang open up pipe trenches. Sends you a bit funny, months alone in the middle of nowhere. Not good for relationships. Or, y’know . . . Sanity.
My bank account was permanently empty on account of extremely low pay and extremely unreliable work. More than once I found out that work for the following week had been cancelled so, due to being on a zero hours contract, I simply wasn’t going to get paid for that week.
It wasn’t all terrible. I still had some amazing times with amazing people. I still saw fantastic things and some of the sites I worked on, even late into my archaeological career, are treasured memories for me. The people are almost universally brilliant company, with whom I often laughed until physical pain. Some of my all-time favorite conversations were out on rain-soaked fens, in wind that was trying to blow us over.
But my life changed. I got serious in a relationship and being poor, stressed and itinerant were no longer compatible with personal happiness. I had reached the end of my archaeological journey, and with an extremely heavy heart, I laid my career to rest. Admittedly, I strung that process out – I didn’t know what I was, post-archaeology. That terrified and depressed me deeply, and the year or so after leaving was a tailspinning, roller-coastering, gut-punch, vertiginous freefall of a time, but I made it through.
I don’t for a single second regret my time in archaeology, and some days I still miss it. I’m forever glad I took the plunge, leapt for that childhood dream; it’s given me courage to do the same in different areas and aspects of life. In a big way, it laid the foundation for my adult life.
Would I go back into commercial archaeology now, given the opportunity?
Not a damn chance . . .
Would I change anything, for better or worse, about my time as an archaeologist?
I would change nothing at all . . .
The light at the end of the trench or the beginning of a career never dared dreamed of
Natalie F. 29. PhD Researcher.
– Academic archaeology is a route that I happened to fall into due to a sequence of quite unlikely events, a great deal of luck and sometimes astounding timing. As someone who has always had an inclination to play happily in the mud, and who loves the thought of bringing objects and people from our ancient past out of their tomb in the ground and into the light of modern day, I would never have thought I’d end up where I am; a postgraduate student who you sometimes have to prise out of the lab . . .
Originally, I was encouraged by someone to apply for an MA at my alma mater, which I did with the knowledge that I wasn’t going to make the cut. My 2:2 meant that academia was theoretically cut off from me, the minimum being a 2:1 in seemingly most institutions; in theory, the ivory tower of academia was locked . . .
But I wrote my statement, stressing how much I’d loved my time there and archaeology in general, and sent off the application. I expected nothing, nothing at all, but what I got instead was a phone call from the postgraduate admissions director for Archaeology saying that he was more than happy to push my application through the board. So off I went, with an appropriate amount of imposter syndrome.
From there, two chance run ins, one when I was hunting down an elusive lecturer and instead found someone who would later be a very dear friend, and one at a launch party after far too much wine with a man who would again become someone I would care for and admire a great deal, led me here. The first person pointed me in the direction of a funded PhD advert and the second gave it to me, I suspect partially as a way to get me to stop following him around and asking to play with the 3D printer.
So that’s where I found myself, suddenly a full-time researcher with no real idea what to do. I knew that, sooner or later, I would be uncovered as a fraud; surely all these lecturers who had suddenly become my colleagues would know that I had no idea what I was doing, that I was just a lucky idiot? But no, they didn’t. Because the vast majority felt, and still feel, the same way. The stresses and strains of academic research, anything from your isotope data hasn’t been done yet so you’re 5 months behind to the fact that people keep taking the tea spoons in the staff room, have different sources but are felt by everyone. The genius who worked for NASA still gets stage fright, the cool, collected expert in her field sometimes cries by the shrubbery outside the building.
Academic research can often be stressful and isolating. Particularly archaeology, I think, as everything revolves around the long dead; who they were, what they did, ate and believed. We spend so much time looking backwards that it can be difficult, when the microscope won’t co-operate and everything’s going wrong, to notice the people around you in the present… No matter how alone you feel, grabbing a nap in the staff room at 8 at night when all the world seems quiet, you’re really not. Everyone understands, and occasionally leaves a cup of tea for you when you wake up. There’s always someone who “gets it”.
I would never have guessed that such a real, strong sense of camaraderie existed in academia, albeit alongside some minor competitiveness; I believed, as I said earlier, that the door to the ivory tower had long since closed for me. It came as a surprise, then, to find out that all I had to do was knock and the door would slowly start to open . . .
The author rejoins
– These are just a few of the voices I have managed to curate views for. We’re still searching for individual stories, so a second entry will be posted in due course.
These Bones Of Mine 