The magic of paying attention
I spent most of the last week in the Caribbean, reporting another story I can’t quite talk about yet. I’ve been traveling a lot since April, with two trips that were two weeks long (one vacation, one work). It’s been great, obviously, but I am very glad to be home for a while. I have a hard time writing on the road, and I have some projects I really need to drill down on—including the two long stories I’m supposed to write from some of these trips!
I was with archaeologists again, this time at an excavation. The project is historical archaeology, meaning that it’s an archaeological study of a time period for which historical records exist. For the Americas, this typically begins in the 1500s or 1600s, when Europeans arrive and start recording stuff in ways that researchers today can more or less understand. (If a zillion Maya books weren’t burned by Spanish priests, or if anyone could still fully interpret Inca khipu, we wouldn’t be so limited in what “historical” means, but you know, colonialism ruins everything.) The archaeologists I was with were excavating everything from tossed off Heineken bottles to ceramics made from local clay 200+ years ago. Their artifact trays were piled high with broken bits of porcelain, animal bones people threw away after meals, tiny fragments of metal, and shards of glass bottles. My favorite were the bits of long clay pipe stems, which people would slowly break off and toss aside as the tip got clogged; they are the cigarette butts of the colonial period. (Image from tobaccopipes.com)
If your last encounter with archaeology was Raiders of the Lost Ark, you might be surprised to hear that these archaeologists weren’t dodging booby traps in search of gold idols, but were digging around in the dirt picking up 300-year-old cigarette butts and broken wine bottles. In fact, archaeologists love trash. It’s most of what they excavate and study. Finding a really old garbage dump (politely called a “midden”) can be a career-making discovery. Many of the pieced-together pots and the like you see in museums came from middens. If they’re old enough, they can still look exotic and special. But the thing about historical archaeology is that most of the artifacts are familiar enough to still look like trash to you and me. Especially right after they come out of the ground, all dirty and broken to bits.
You’d never know it from how archaeologists react to them though. Their eyes light up with every artifact. Every single thing is reverentially counted, cleaned, analyzed and protected for posterity in climate controlled rooms. Because if you know how to look, every pipe stem or rusty nail or piece of porcelain carries the whole history of the modern world with it. How did porcelain get from China to the Caribbean? Who sewed this button onto their clothes, and did they make it themselves or buy it from a market? What kinds of meat were people in the rich neighborhood eating as opposed to the poor one? This is why I love historical archaeology—you can see the world we live in being born, with hints of futures that didn’t come true shimmering around the edges. All you have to do is look a little harder, a little more thoughtfully, than you normally do.
The first time I went to an excavation, I was a little stunned at how tedious it was, and just how un-special the artifacts seemed. But five years and many excavations later, archaeologists have taught me the magic of paying attention. Their special blend of focus, curiosity, and imagination unlocks something special in the objects and landscapes around them. It can make literally anything interesting. It’s made me think differently about not only the artifacts that come out of the ground in a dig, but the things that surround me in my house, the things I’m tossing in the trash, the layout of buildings and streets in my neighborhood. We’re all obsessed with attention these days, because we (rightly) feel like we’re losing control of ours, or even having it stolen away. I’m so grateful to get to see up close an example of what attention, properly applied, can do. How it both makes the world a special, magical place, and reveals the specialness and magic that were always there, waiting for us to notice.
My writing
This week I wrote for Science about what is maybe the oldest Homo sapiens fossil discovered in Europe. Speaking of the magic of attention, the study painstakingly reconstructed two fossils that had been sitting on a university shelf in Greece since the 1970s. One is likely a 170,000-year-old Neanderthal, which is not super surprising. The other is maybe a 210,000-year-old Homo sapiens, i.e. our species. We tend to think of Homo sapiens as the winners of (pre)history, and that as soon as some of us decided to leave Africa we were instantly successful in settling everywhere else we wanted to go. (Where do you think that story came from? Drumroll please……colonialism! Ragging on colonialism will be an ongoing theme of this newsletter.) Well, this discovery suggests that waves of Homo sapiens might have failed to survive in Europe, or just not liked it very much, and were “replaced” by the far more successful Neanderthals for 100,000 years or so before they tried again. BUT some experts doubt the old date, as well as the interpretation of this fossil as a Homo sapiens skull. The intrigue continues!
Recommendations
“On the Hunt for the Lost Wonders of Medieval Britain.” In this Atlas Obscura piece by Sarah Laskow, the writer sets out with a geographer to hunt for the Wonders of Britain, a catalogue of “natural phenomena and small miracles” written between the 9th and 12th centuries. It’s the ultimate story of how paying attention to the seemingly insignificant can unlock something magical. “The wonders list can act as a decoder for the landscape, revealing secrets in a nondescript underpass, a featureless field, an ordinary intersection. These places might seem like they have no history, but once they were remarkable.”
“The Horrible Place Between the Apps.” When you’ve half-quit Instagram, Twitter, and the like—and do things like logging in and out every time you look at an app, combined with giving yourself a password you need to look up. I have tried every single one of these tricks and more, and frustratingly the only one that has really improved my life is full deactivation (Facebook). From the New York Times.
Aztec Empire: This independent digital comic recounts in incredible detail the conquest of Tenochtitlan, the Aztec capital that would become Mexico City. The visual representation of Tenochtitlan at its height is simply stunning and has really enriched my vision of what the city was and could have been. It’s an ongoing project, coinciding with the 500th anniversary of the events depicted. I support it on Patreon, and you can too.