The Daydreaming Archaeologist

Anne of Green Gables once stated that she hates surprises, because half of the fun of something is getting to look forward to it. To dream about it, to get your hopes up. Despite the amount of times that getting my hopes up has backfired on me, I ultimately have to agree with Anne. In fact, I believe there is something very important about getting one’s hopes up and allowing your imagination to run amok, especially as an archaeologist.

I first began to get my hopes up about archaeology as a sophomore Classical Archaeology major in Waggener Hall, home of the Classics Department at UT Austin. There was a hopeful, somewhat frantic energy amongst me and my peers as we planned for our summers. We read each other’s application essays and discussed the infinite possibilities that lay ahead of us. I knew that I wanted to go to Morgantina, but the Agora Valley Project was just beginning, things were just opening up again after lockdowns, times were uncertain. I should have a backup plan. Don’t get your hopes up.

Except my hopes were totally up.

*Sticky Note my Roommate Left on my Mirror When I First Got into Morgantina in 2023 (My hopes were totally up)*

Returning to Anne (Can you tell that this was my favorite childhood book?), many of the adults in her life admonished her to restrain her overly active imagination. It only led to disappointment. As the growing Anne began to mature, she proudly announced to her father-ish figure, Matthew, that she was outgrowing her childish ways. Matthew replied, very wisely, to not outgrow them entirely, and to never lose her romanticism.

I think getting your hopes up is a risk. Many people grow out of it, because after all it is painful, when that 8th grade dance you imagined as Cinderella’s Ball is in fact just a bunch of awkward preteens in braces barely swaying to Drake’s Hotline Bling, or the extensive world map you planned to unlock once you got your driver’s license ultimately amounts to the parking lot of various suburban Targets. So we let it go and learn to lower our expectations. Moving in with your best friends will look more like arguments over dirty dishes and color-coded chore charts than an endless sleepover, the first date will be awkward, the snow you dreamed of as a child so beautifully dusting the trees will instead shut off your fragile Texas power grid for a week and cause a tree to fall in half right on top of your car. Who could dare to get their hopes up in an environment like this?

Only the bravest amongst us still dare to let their imaginations run wild, to miss half of the lecture for the sake of looking out the window and daydreaming, to truly believe that they would look just as cool in a brown leather jacket and suede fedora as Harrison Ford, to see a grand temple in that crumbling line of stone blocks, to see a grand feat of architecture in a pile of fragmented ceramic cylinders. These very brave, very few members of our society are called archaeologists.

*Some Morgantinoi in their Very Cool Outfits*

Because the power of imagination doesn’t mean that the dance in your school’s cafeteria becomes a ball in a grand palace, or that Anne’s world full of shimmering waters and trails of vibrant flowers replaces the dull parking lots of your hometown. The power of imagination means that the giant, grey, impressively ugly parking lot becomes a prime roller-skating rink after hours, or the perfect canvas for you and your best friend and a pack of chalk.

Your career as an archaeologist will look less like cool leather jackets and swinging from vines and much more like dorky UPF protective shirts and long-term knee problems, but you have downloaded John Williams’ entire discography on Spotify and you’re rolling over the endless hills of Sicily. If your imagination can’t make up the difference for you, then how will it make up the difference of the once-grand buildings having crumbled to ruins, or the fragments of bones that speak to an animal species, an environment, that can no longer be seen?

Never learn to not get your hopes up. Getting your hopes up is one of the most important things you can do. The trick isn’t to set your expectations lower, but to put the power back in your hands. You aren’t just waiting for something to come and crush your expectations. You make it how you want it to be.

*Covered in Dirt but Still Smiling: Selfie after First Day of Dig in 2023*

Hard-boiled eggs are decidedly disgusting. The smell that emanates from them as soon as you crack the shell does very little to prime our stomachs, still in another time zone, and at any rate unaccustomed to eating at 5:00 am, for a meal. But I hope we never stop eating them at Morgantina. In fact, nothing could be so dire of a mistake.

Because hard-boiled eggs are exceptionally community-minded. No other breakfast is so easy to mass produce and clean up after. No other easily-mass-produced and easy-to-clean-up breakfast could also give you the protein and vitamins you need to fuel your early morning big-pick pass. And no other breakfast comes wrapped in a hard, biodegradable shell, the perfect canvas for us to draw dinosaurs on with sharpies and write encouraging messages to each other.

Just a Few of Many Decorated Eggs...

An archaeologist sees the potential in everything they do. You see the potential in a fragment of pottery, in a fallen wall of rubble. Suddenly your overly active imagination and your propensity to get your hopes up becomes a superpower, and you are uniquely adaptable, you are an adventurer. A horrendous heat wave caused you to wake up an hour earlier to capture the cool hours of the morning; a horrendous heatwave allowed you to capture the red sun, just as it started peeking over the top of Mount Etna. You imagine how it must have felt to see this so long ago, in the civilization you studied, once living on the land you are digging, evidenced in the coins, cursed tablets, and tile floors.

I can’t say that every moment I’ve had at Morgantina for the past two summers matched those daydreams I had when I was supposed to be learning about the middle voice in Greek class. But I can say that those daydreams were very important to building my soaring hopes as I traveled to Aidone for the first time, and for allowing me to appreciate every moment I had there, even if my feet were tired and my back was aching. Those daydreams changed the way I saw the bumps in the road. Running through the streets of Taormina to catch the last Sunday bus back to Aidone became a tension-building part of our adventure, meant to be paired with an intensifying musical score. A crisis became a challenge for us to tackle as a team and bond over. The interesting (and often disturbing) array of vintage artwork that decorates the walls of our Aidone home became material for our end-of-season talent show skit, or an inside joke shared with a lifelong friend.

Some things won’t require your imagination at all. In fact, some things you couldn’t have created in your imagination if you tried. When Anne first arrived in Avonlea, she told Matthew that it was “the first thing she saw that could not be improved upon by the imagination.” I felt very much the same when I first looked over the endless, golden hills of the Sicilian countryside, watching the colors change with the setting of the sun.

Golden Hills and Purple Hills

And if the hard-boiled egg is particularly hard for you to stomach, just know that dinner awaits. For many people have also described Andreas and Izzy’s pistachio cream pasta as Anne described Avonlea, unable to be improved upon by the imagination.

Tl;dr: get your hopes up! You’re going to Morgantina!

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