19.6.04
Joining the fold
Four years ago I was still a semi-declared Latin major at Swarthmore. One of the perks of being in Classics at Swat is sometime in the middle of first semester, the department sends out an email listing "cool things to do during the summer". Within the one that I received my sophomore year was a listing for the Anglo-American Project in Pompeii.
This was not, however, the first time I had heard of the Project. After Summer Break, Alyssa (my roomie) had come back to school toting a slip of paper with the name of the group written on it in blue marker. A friend of hers at Duke had a friend who had been on the project and it had changed her life. So now with two recommendations, I applied to the field school.
About the Project itself. Every year, approximately 70 students of varying age and experience are accepted as feildschool students. Varying age translates to people between the ages of 17 and 78. The vast majority of the "kids" are mid college students, in their twenties, but there are always a handful of late high school kids, thirtysomethings, and one or two 40 and aboves. Some of them have dug in other field schools or are archaeology majors in college or gradschool, but most have never dug in the dirt, held a trowel, or even been to Italy. This is the beauty of the Project (and a system that I am a product of). Everyone comes in with some or no knowledge of how to go about doing research in the dirt and we teach them everything they need to know. How to hold a trowel, how to tell the difference between soil types, how to identify SU changes, how to read a wall, how to catalog finds and store them safely, how to work in a group and communicate all these things effectively. This is how I started with the Project.
All of the "kids" are divided among 7 or so supervisors and these smaller groups are assigned to Archaeological Areas (AAs), areas which have been set forth to be excavated during that field season. The supervisor does all of the teaching and leading of excavation and keeping of records and grading of students, the students do all the digging (or most of it). My supervisor was Amy Walters, a statuesque Bradford graduate student of Archaeology. And we had fun. We learned some serious Archaeology and I find myself now trying to think of how Amy would go about excavating things, how did Amy teach us this when we learned it, how did Amy grade my journal? She was great to have as a first teacher of Archaeology. Very confident in the dirt, very clear in her explanations of things, and very goofy. Of our group of ten in our AA, three of us came back as second year students. High marks for Amy for teaching us well and for instilling that love for the dirt that made us want to come back.
The Project is set up to allow students to climb the ladder of responsibility within the Project. First year students can reapply for a second year student (or advanced students) position. Of the 70 or so first years, about 20 come back as second years. My second year there were 11 of us. Second years are still students in all respects, but have done it once, so a good deal of teaching the new crop how to do things often falls to the advanced students by means of setting an example and showing by doing.
The third year of participation is by invitation. A very few are invited back to be Assistant Supervisors, are assigned a small AA (archaeologica area), get one or two students (who rotate out of a full sized AA), and are left to direct their own excavation with oversight by a full fledged supervisor. It's a wonderful learning experience with a good degree of freedom, but with the comfort of knowing that someone else is there to lend an opinion or help with interpretation and teaching. I skipped this step.
My third year (last year), one of the people slated to be a supervisor had had his gallbladder removed and was not in the best of positions to live in a tent all summer and dig in the dirt. So two weeks before I showed up in Southern Italy, Rick Jones, project director, emailed me asking if I would like to be a supervisor? After maybe 2 minutes consideration, I accepted, not entirely sure of my comfort level with the whole thing but certainly willing to try. And it went beautifully, or atleast very well due to Circumstances Beyond My Control in the dirt. And this summer I'm going back as a Supervisor again, hopefully to one of the same trenches I had last year. For stories of the woes of last year, read email I sent out last year. They're fun.