Fieldschoolphobia

On getting your hands dirty.

By Marvin Cho

Illustration by Justin Chen

Scraping away at the sediment separating my excavation square from the next, time slowed to a crawl. Even though I knew that the subtlest shifts in color could indicate the ends and rebirths of entire neolithic settlements, my job of jotting down any changes in color in the sediment layer did not excite me. Blinded by boredom, inexperience, and the scorching Bulgarian heat, I could not tell whether the lumps of dirt that I so carelessly tossed into my bucket were any greener or yellower than the one before. 

“Marvin, freeze!”

I froze. All eyes at the Tell Yunatsite archaeological site shot to me. Kamen Boyadzhiev, the director of the Tell Yunatsite excavation, hurried to where I was standing. He had spotted something that had clearly escaped my notice. With ever so much caution—a far cry from my own carelessness—he reached into my bucket, filled to the brim with dirt. Cupped in his hands was a tiny, perfectly rectangular, paper-thin sheet of gold.

Considering that a similar gold object, found at the same site in 2016, had been famously deemed the oldest evidence of gold metallurgy ever uncovered, there was a good chance that this one was contemporaneous at latest and possibly even older. The plate was transferred immediately to the Regional History Museum in Pazardzhik, Bulgaria, and our site was frequented for several days by every press organization in the vicinity. The crew celebrated my first ever archaeological find being so monumental and half-jokingly prophesied that the rest of my excavating career, if I chose to continue it, would be similarly golden.

I, for one, felt nothing but shame. I knew that Boyadzhiev had just barely rescued the artifact from a pile of my malpractice. When asked, I could not confidently report how many layers of sediment I had scraped through since the most recent GIS record. And as I read Boyadzhiev’s paper, published this past January and nearly two years after my time at the Tell, I was hit with a gut-punching reminder of my ineptitude: “[the find] may be attributed to level B1 but their exact context is unsure” (Boyadzhiev). It seemed to me that I had buried more knowledge than I had actually uncovered. 

Desperately seeking someone that could sympathize with me, I asked Roxanne Zaroff, GS ’25, who had participated in four excavation seasons as an undergraduate, if she had any similar horror stories from her first field experience. She, a diligent note-taker, had apparently never made such a mistake. But Zaroff did agree that archaeology can often be a frightening field for newcomers. Of course, there is a risk of embarrassment that comes with being new to any field: Zaroff recalled how, in her first excavation season at Antiochia ad Cragum, a Hellenistic and subsequently Roman city in modern day Turkiye, she found a Roman coin inscribed with a Latin C and proudly declared that she had found a Greek coin with a lunate sigma. But rookie archaeologists must also confront the fact that their inexperience could incur irreversible costs. Zaroff said, “The first thing that anyone learns these days in archaeology is that archaeology is inherently destructive. So, having had that drilled into me, and then being given the tools to chop up the land, was terrifying.” 

This is not to say that archaeology guards itself against newcomers. Zaroff told me that she never experienced any censure or unkindness from her archaeologist superiors. In my own experience, Boyadzhiev could not have been a sweeter and kinder teacher, and maintained perfect kindness to me even after I introduced an undeniable amount of uncertainty into his research. Indeed, considering the irreversibility of an archaeological stumble, it is fascinating that the frontiers and training grounds of the field are often one and the same. For instance, Columbia archaeologist Francesco De Angelis’ excavation at Hadrian’s Villa often hosts a summer field school for undergraduates both from Columbia and elsewhere, even though it was deemed a UNESCO World Heritage site in 1999. Still, a self-imposed “fieldschoolphobia” latched onto me from my time at Tell Yunatsite. 

When I first decided to study Classics at Columbia, I imagined that I would spend all of my summers digging away at ancient Mediterranean debris. I instead spent much of my first year staring at the webpage for the Hadrian’s Villa excavation with a hesitant mix of eagerness and worry. How devastatingly embarrassing would a similar blunder be at Hadrian’s Villa, the focal point of even more academic scrutiny than at Tell Yunatsite? The application window soon closed, and I was left planless for the summer. I told myself that I had always been more interested in philology anyways. 

But, a few weeks ago, Roman Lucarelli, CC ’27, a fellow student in my Ancient Greek class, happened to tell me that he had volunteered to excavate for the first time at Hadrian’s Villa this summer. I instantly felt a pang of revived regret and admired Lucarelli for his leap of courage onto the front lines of the field. I recognized then that I was still very much fascinated by archaeology and the prospect of a life in excavation; I recognized, too, how foolish I had been to chain myself from something that so enticed me, to watch enviously from the side as people like Lucarelli and Zaroff made triumphant find after triumphant find. Was my mistake at Tell Yunatsite really so bad that it proved me a hopeless cause as an excavator? Or was it just an untimely mark of my greenness on the field? My supervisor Brent had repeatedly declared that I “had an eye for archaeology,” despite the fact that my vision failed me when it was most needed. Was I going to deprive myself of the chance of ever beholding the field again because of a few seconds’ inattention?

As uniquely intimidating as archaeology may be, an irrational fear of the field is in no way uncommon among those of us that are just now knocking on the doors of academia. Any field seems full of fragile treasures to admiring eyes, and our own hands ever too clumsy to do them justice. Philosopher-hopefuls fear that they may grossly mishandle the shards of wisdom buried in the treatises they study. Avid readers worry that they may blaspheme their favorite authors with an erring interpretation, as if seeing a lunate sigma in a Latin C. Mathematicians and physicians doubt that they could ever spot a plate of gold that had escaped the notice of the Newtons and Einsteins. 

But as Hannah R. Chazin, co-director of the Columbia Center for Archaeology, wrote to me, “Sometimes students who are new to archaeology ask really intelligent and important questions about things that more experienced archaeologists take for granted or overlook, providing a new perspective that can be really important.” In the same way, first-year students have the power to admire The Odyssey from an angle inaccessible to the old guard of classical scholars, just as new cancer researchers can envision therapeutic methods that are unimaginable to more seasoned minds. How can we ever be sure that we will have nothing to give, if we never pick up the shovel and head to the field? 

If I choose to give myself another chance at archaeology next year, I may find that I am indeed too clumsy and careless to one day become a Kamen Boyadzhiev or Francesco De Angelis, or that archaeology was never my calling after all. But to forbid oneself from scratching an intellectual itch based on that anxiety alone is absurd. Whether we are trying out a field that tickles our curiosity or resolutely chasing after our intellectual passions, we must be prepared to crack a few shards along the way.