When you study archaeology at University, one of the first things they teach you is that “archaeology means destruction”. The archaeological dig is irreversible. We can compare it to a huge book, a sort of manuscript whose pages are made of earth, where the past has been written by the hand of history, in a single copy. Once you dig a layer of soil and collect all the finds it contains, there is no going back. By the act of reading, you destroy the manuscript. It’s an anomalous way of reading!
Archaeologists need ruins, sedimentation, destruction. Archaeology cannot exist without all this. It sounds like a science in need of destruction and which destroys destruction in order to understand it. That’s how it seems to work, but its outcome is totally positive. Indeed, while destroying, archaeologists dig up not only ruins but also the very life of that place, through historical reconstruction. In the painful gestation of the earth, ruins, sedimentations, traces, prints, finds come to life in the hands of archaeologists, who give them back energy, strength, the breath of life. They make them talk and tell.
In a sort of journey from chaos to cosmos, you have to start from messy, scattered fragments, analyse and organise them in a sequence that gives them a sort of order, a cosmos of meaning. You go down deep, in order to transform, like an alchemist, the hard matter of earth and its hidden, inert sedimentations into the lightness of discovery, clarity, facts and knowledge. In this way, through this descent into the bowels of the earth, archaeologists bring the past back to life, bringing to light the materials of the realm of the dead that the earth had been preserving. After all, the earth is a place of rest and decay, where the finds are enveloped, dreaming and waiting to be recovered. They are awaiting and when we discover them, the earth opens up one eye. In a way, the common thread of archaeology is never ending life, it’s immortality.
Lezioni di immortalità by Flaminia Cruciani, Mondadori 2018, pp. 39-40