Maybe… just maybe… my views on archeology have been skewed.
Maybe… just maybe… it’s not all booby-trapped tombs and edge-of-your-seat thrills.
Maybe archaeology is more like Kingdom of the Crystal Skull and less like Raiders of the Lost Ark. Maybe it is just oddly disappointing.
This morning I trudged out to the Ancient City of Kition, an archeological dig site roughly a half kilometer from the present day Larnaca city center. This was where civilization started in Cyprus… or at least that’s what the dirt tells us. The artifacts. The broken foundations uncovered by diggers.
To me, it was a big hole with some carved rocks in it. “I paid €2.50 to see a big hole with rocks in it?” I kept thinking. “I could see the hole just fine from the fence line before the turnstile! Plus, it’s just a bunch of rocks!”
I wandered around what could best be described as a vacant lot with a couple of ropes cordoning off areas, the informational plaques weathered away into incomprehensible Wheel of Fortune answers, letters were missing, words were missing, meanings were lost to the ravages of the elements.
And that’s when I felt like if Indiana Jones hadn’t quite prepared me for all this, his rival Belloq had. There’s a scene in Raiders of the Lost Ark when Indy and Belloq square off in a Cairo bar. Belloq lectures our despondent hero, pulling out a pocket watch. I’ve often used it and it shows I haven’t really learned many new tricks; two decades ago, I used this quote to help justify my Senior Honors Thesis in college, a deep dive into Saved by The Bell as Shakespearan comedy.
Belloq: Look at this [watch]. It’s worthless – ten dollars from a vendor in the street. But I take it, I bury it in the sand for a thousand years, it becomes priceless. Like the Ark.
Kition is the watch. Larnaca and its surroundings will be the watch to some extra-terrestrial archeologists generations from now looking to see what happened here on Earth. They will find foundations of homes, of restaurants, of literal walls built long ago and more recently, painting a picture of who we were, extrapolating a sense of what we were like.
And I realized those aliens will probably be like me and think, “Is that all? Is this all that they did, all that remains?”
Then I bought socks as I didn’t pack enough pairs and didn’t feel like tracking down a laundromat.
Cosmic insights on a local scale. Tiny concerns amidst the vast reaches of time and space.
Seven pairs of socks for €8.50. Sigh.