Why Archaeology? (a Very Short Manifesto by Bori Mohácsi)

From time to time I like to think about why I have chosen the specific field I’m in (well, for now, on the side of). It’s part of my overthinking routine, sure, but it also makes me check in with myself if I still enjoy it as much as when I started some 10 years ago. Basically, if I still see the point of doing it, or I can quit without regret and do something corporate for way more money.

Aside from why not, it’s always been one of my favourite answers to give. Because archaeology is a wordless conversation with the past. It is, of course, history, in a sense that you study the past, and if there is a written source material of your studied era and location, you will have to use it. But archaeology is something different: it is conversing with the remains of societies, with what’s left of tools and cities and treasures and people, physical evidence. It is a methodology that helps you understand what these remains say without words and a tool that helps you interpret it.

Archaeology is data science and hard physical work and art history and anthropology and so much more, and, in the end, it is also storytelling. By connecting the dots of evidence we tell the stories of long lost people and their lives, people who otherwise would not have been remembered, not even as part of a certain population. People who have little to no voice in history books even after the invention of writing: women, children, lower-class people, ethnic minorities, people conquered by a stronger military – people on the bottom. The 99%. I remember when I first started at university, that was what fascinated me the most, and tickled my sense of justice. I get to learn about the non-elite! How they dressed and cooked and traded goods, what actually happened in the meantime of politics and military campaigns. You know, the really important stuff. Life, I guess.

And when you meet this kind of evidence: bones and gold and dust and bricks, stuff that, in the end, you and your beloved are made of… well, you want to do it right. You want to tell the right story. So you have to be good at it. 

That’s why you need archaeology.

Also, digging is a lot of fun.