The archaeological artefacts I am writing on this week are special. Why? Because I participated in their excavation back in March 2013 as a student at Quaid-e-Azam University’s Taxila Institute of Asian Civilizations. It was my first field excursion – and also my most memorable.
March 2013
It was still cold in Islamabad. We had begun packing our bags to leave for Taxila, the town nearest Badalpur – our destination. The university department’s van, with its cargo of excited “personnel”, left after noon and reached Taxila that evening.
The team manager’s first challenge was to find a suitable place for the dig participants to stay the night. Don’t be fooled: this was no mean task. With limited funds and a town that offered very few options, we were truly stumped. Finally, we put our faith – a little gingerly – in the youth hostel. Tiny compartments with three charpoys, reeking blankets and – most worryingly – a single electricity socket awaited us that night. I am glad we were tired enough to doze right off as soon as we hit the sack.
Welcome to an archaeologist’s life.
Archaeologists painstakingly at work at a dig site in Taxila
A true archaeologist might use the same knife to scrape mud off an artefact as to chop vegetables for dinner
The dig
The morning of the dig was fresh and crisp. With no warm water in the hostel’s bathroom, a shower wasn’t on the cards – and wasn’t really missed. It was cooler in Taxila than it had been in Islamabad, which was a blessing, considering we were going to be spending the entire day at the site. The looming grey clouds, however, were less welcome.
For breakfast, we were taken to the team’s headquarters: a three-room house with no furniture and a bathroom that offered barely any water. But archaeologists have seen worse. What was heartening to see – other than the steaming parathas and hot tea – was the team’s high spirits. Despite the tough conditions, none had voiced the slightest complaint – at least not that I heard. I remember joking to one of the dig’s most experienced participants that I hoped he didn’t use the same knife to scrape mud off artefacts as he did to chop vegetables for dinner. “Oh no,” he replied, adding in all seriousness, “But to us it really doesn’t matter – we can use the same knife for both purposes.” A true archaeologist, I thought.
At about 8.00 that morning, we reached Badalpur, a Gandharan site dating back to approximately the 3rd century BC – making it nearly 2,300 years old. Some of the artefacts excavated from the site indicate that it may have been occupied by the Kushans (30 AD to 375 AD), believes Dr M. Ashraf Khan, the dig’s chief orchestrator and director of the Taxila Institute of Asian Civilizations. He says it was likely built during Taxila’s heyday as a world centre of Buddhist learning – there is a monastery on the site too.
Oh the things you might find…
Playing with 2,300-year-old mud and a pair of untrained hands is not easy – it involves a great deal of risk. It was thus admirable of Dr Khan – whose passion for archaeology is refreshing in a country that cares little for ancient monuments – to let his students take a stab at digging at his beloved Gandharan monastery, if only to give them field exposure.
It was the first time I had ever seen archaeological tools – the shovels and trowels, the scrapers and the screens – and it was a very enlightening experience. Most people imagine that archaeologists find artefacts lying there in the dirt, waiting to be picked up. Sadly, that really isn’t how it works.
During the four hours we worked at the site – before the rain came pouring down – I can’t remember finding anything other than burnt mud plaster, stucco, terracotta and small pieces of pottery. These, too, were considered valuable material for dating the site and were separated from the rest of the rubble, later to be sealed into small plastic bags and catalogued. The cataloguing was done mainly according to the trench in which the “artefact” was found, and the layer. The layers are important because they can tell one how old the object is.
Just before the rain began, in another trench, some fortunate diggers chanced upon a grinding mill. It was a Eureka moment – a grinding mill was a fine prize for any archaeologist on a site that usually yielded little more than charred plaster. I still remember the acute care that went into extracting the large stone mill out of the soil, mostly using a duster to remove the earth from its sides until it was ready to be lifted out.
We were strictly advised against pulling artefacts out of the soil since – it could break or damage them – and it was deemed best to remove all the earth surrounding the object without ever touching it. The in situ method ensures that the artefact is revealed in the same state in which it was left all those years ago. No, archaeologists certainly don’t find things lying around – it takes days of physical work to strike something worth getting excited about.
The prize
After working at the site for nearly half the day and subsequently visiting other Gandharan monuments, we were taken to the dig’s “headquarters” at sunset. Ravenous and with not much to do, we went to the room that housed all the excavated items. Naively, we expected to see nothing short of a museum. But inside the room lay numerous pink cloth bags tied up at the mouth, and small plastic ones with pink tags inside. On the walls were pasted bright pink sticky-notes marked with trench numbers. Pink was clearly a theme here.
Most of the parcelled artefacts were organized by the number of the trench from which they had been excavated. This is what an organized archaeological dig looks like – never mind the shabby conditions of the room. In one corner lay the grinding mill along with half a broken pot, both resting inside steel containers. Looking at them – then and now – brought forth memories of the field: a gentle reminder of all the hard work that goes into the excavation of the artefacts we see sitting neatly on museum shelves.
When I was fifteen, I remember reading on the website of a renowned international media company that modern archaeology had very little scope because most of the world’s artefacts had already been excavated. Now that I’ve been to the field and back, I can only chuckle and think of what Charles Holland Duell reportedly said about scientific inventions: “Everything that can be invented, has been invented.”
