No news is good news?

But now I have some. First, I'm in Jordan. Not for fieldwork this time - truth to be told I am not yet in any shape for that - but for delving in institute libraries and getting a good kick-start for finishing my dissertation. It seems to be working, too: I have only been here in ACOR for a day, and I've got more work done than I have for several months (not withstanding a congress presentation and an article on which I worked for most of August). 

Second, I have an update on the dissertation: Five chapters are in various stages of "nearly finished". Two chapters need a little more work than that but are basically there. One is missing a half but the structure is clear and it just needs to be written. I still have no clue of what the final chapter will handle, but otherwise things look bright.

Remind me of this optimism in December when my three-month finishing-off-the-dissertation grant is running out and I am fighting every night with the illustrations, missing references and miscellaneous corrections. 

Assessment of the situation

I feel like I should wrap up this blog since I never seem to have anything worth writing about. This spring has been mostly about being seriously ill and trying to get some work done despite that. And having scary thoughts about whether I'll be fit enough to do fieldwork ever again. For me archaeology is really about doing fieldwork. I did not choose this subject to end up shuffling papers somewhere. If I can't go to field, I don't want to be an archaeologist anymore.

Last week I was in the congress in Paris. It was a very invigorating trip both academically and otherwise. I met many Names, and they were actually nice people. My paper was very well received, although, being me, I can't help but wonder whether it was really good stuff or everyone was just being nice to the poor sick girl.

I dare dream that it might be possible for me to go to Jordan next autumn with the rest of the team, if not for the whole three-week period, then at least part of it. There are some things to be done still in the field, and I could spend some time in the ACOR and British Institute libraries. But that remains to be seen, really. Although the treatments are now over, there is still a lot of being ill to do.

Critical mass

We are back in Amman. The work in the field was intensive but all went well. We even managed to squeeze in some time for seeing sights and visiting friends.

While staying here in the ACOR I have become aware of what an advantage it is for scholars to have an institute like this, especially when run by such friendly and helpful people as the ACOR currently is. The environment itself is stimulating for scholarly work. You casually meet other people in the same field over the lunch and are able to share information. There is a well-equipped library for research. Above all, there is a continuity of research and scholarly community. If you happen to need some information from someone not here, there are probably people who know them and can put you in contact with them.

At the same time I am also painfully reminded of the futility of trying to work on Near Eastern archaeology in Finland. There is no tradition, and no guarantee of continuity beyond the on-going project. It makes me a little depressed.

In fact the problem is related to a larger problem concerning archaeology in Finland as a whole. We lack the critical mass that would give rise to a more dynamic research community. There are altogether around a dozen archaeologists employed as teaching staff on permanent basis in the three universities in Finland offering tuition in archaeology. To have time for research they also have to secure research funding and drop teaching. Only so few can get a temporary fellowship from the Academy of Finland. The rest are left to apply from various foundations, but the sources of funding for post-doctoral research are fewer than stipends for post-graduates, and it generally helps in getting funding if you have an established position with a university. This means that although there are currently perhaps more PhD students in archaeology in Finland than ever, they - that is, we - will find it hard to continue research after we get our degrees.

I wish there were more positions for archaeologists in the universities, but I fear it is unrealistic to hope for that in the foreseeable future. That is why we need the international contacts, both near and far, to bring in fresh winds as well as to have a wider audience for our own research. That is the only way to a better Finnish archaeology. Good science is not made in lonely cells, it is made in interaction with other researchers.

In Jordan

The title says it all, really. We are doing a couple of weeks trip to Petra for additional documentation and photos in publication purposes. Ramadan ended just a couple of days ago and the eid festivities are still in full go. I am writing this in one of the ACOR guest rooms, listening to the habibi music carried in through the open window by the night wind (by the sound of it there might be a pop concert somewhere nearby). The day after tomorrow we will head for Petra.

I have had a lot in my mind recently, trying to tie loose ends so that I can start my dissertation grant in October without having them hanging around. Need I say I did not manage to tie them all? There are still a couple of research reports needing the final touch, and one abstract has to be written. Still, I did a pretty good job of it. I'm hoping this short field season in the landscapes of Petra provides the much-needed kick start for finishing the dissertation work for good.

Family matters

I was offered a chance to go to the Danish dig in Jarash again this year. After some consideration I regretfully declined the offer. The foremost reasons were financial, but there were also family matters to be considered. I was away from home a lot last summer, and I had sort of promised my son already that this summer would be different. I could not break that promise.

Last summer while in Jarash I was reading the biography of Gertrude Bell. She was a well-off and educated British lady who traveled widely in the Near East, especially Levant, in the late 19th and early 20th century. She documented archaeological sites - she also visited Petra - and did services to the British Army during the First World War. In her time, when most women devoted their lives to raising a family, she was most exceptional - and I dare say she would still be. Her life is fascinating. What began to annoy me when reading the biography, however, was the way how the biographer, Georgina Howell, seemed to think that all of Gertrude's achievements were just compensation for the lack of husband and children. That, in fact, the true vocation of every woman ever born is to raise a family, and Gertrude threw herself into her work just to sublimate that need. It made my hackles rise. Surely Bell could have married if she really was desperate to have children - I understand she did not lack charm or suitors. What if she chose otherwise - in those days combining family and her way of life would have been outright impossible.

Trying to have it all is still not without its complications, at least for a woman. The idea of the mother as the primary caretaker sticks fast. When I do go abroad I often face questions about who will look after my son. I remind those who ask that the child has a father, too, and one who is perfectly capable of taking care of him, and try not to feel too bad about people who sagely say that a child should not be separated from his mother for more days than he has years of age. But sometimes I can't help wondering whether I am doing my son some irreparable wrong.

Home abroad

It is very good to be in Petra again. This is only a three days holiday in the middle of the excavation season, but it has been nice to see old friends and acquintances. And to move on my own - in Jarash we ladies are not allowed to go to the town without being accompanied by a male member of the team, due to some incident a couple of years back. Also, after spending altogether closer to a year here (in bits and pieces), this place has a certain feeling of being a home abroad. When I left in 2005 I had no idea when, if ever, I'm coming back. I did not quite fall to my knees and kiss the ground, but... yes, it is nice to be here.

After we come back from Petra, the students (and I) are being rotated to new squares. I might even get to do a little sounding of my own. I'm very excited about that! My previous fieldwork experience in Jordan has been almost exclusively survey, so this has all been new to me. Although of course most excavation skills are transferable to almost any environment. Speaking of which, I got to do my first Harris matrix since my own fieldschool in 1995 yesterday. Heh.

See Jarash and fry

Back in Jordan for the first time in almost three years. For those who haven't read the previous entries, or just forgot, I volunteered in a Danish-Jordanian excavation project. We are digging the remains of an early Islamic mosque, a Byzantine bath house and various other buildings just in the crossroads of the Cardo and the South Decumanus, so drop to visit if you happen to be walking past.

To tell about the conditions here in just a few words because the connection is really slow: The people are nice and the food is excellent - I have developed a taste for Near Eastern cooking over the years, provided there is some variation from the chicken&rice theme. The accommodation is not bad, by excavation standards - we have showers and toilets although of course water is scarce and the toilets do not flush but that is not really a problem. So far in the square I'm working in we have been just removing mixed layers of recent topsoil. The work is hot, dirty and backbreaking and far from glorious, which seems to come as a bit of a disillusionment for the field school students on their first dig. :)

So I am alive.

Reason to celebrate!

For a background, I have volunteered and accepted for a Danish/Jordanian excavation project taking place in Jerash next August, but have been uncertain whether my finances will stretch to that. Finally I was informed that I got the travel grant I had applied for! Yay! All praise the FIME!

I know, I know, last time I was in Jordan doing fieldwork in August I swore never again shall I do fieldwork in Jordan in August. Well, never say never it seems... I've never been to Jerash, so it is going to be very interesting, and once again I have managed to avoid the necessity of getting a proper job.

Shaping landscapes

I have had the privilege of doing archaeological fieldwork in Jordan since almost a decade ago now, in excellent company. I miss the camaraderie of our team, which I again and again mistakenly took as missing the actual fieldwork. This error resulted in spending five seasons - invariably in late summer which in the Near East tends to be hot - intensively surveying a very small area around a certain mountain. I can claim to have experienced that specific landscape very closely, and in a more embodied way than I would even care (btw, did you know that you can sweat from your eye sockets too?) .

If anything, this experience has made me more doubtful of our capability to understand the perceptions people in the past attached to certain landscapes or places; to put ourselves to the skins of a 1st century Nabataean or a 5th century Christian pilgrim, even less a Neolithic farmer-herder-hunter-gatherer (the last two having apparently been what the Neolithic people were doing in our survey area since they left little traces of themselves). In fact, I think we would be hard pressed even to imagine ourselves as the present-day locals, who can associate every place with a piece of family or clan history - even if we knew that history.

It is a widely accepted view in archaeology that places get meaning through human use and that meaning is deeply rooted in culture and dependent on the group, even the individual. When we went to our survey area for the first time, for us there were no places, only space. The landscape was alien to us before we categorized and labelled it in our own terms: sandstone, limestone, fault line, alluvium, barrage, terrace wall, lithic scatter... Some of the locations in that landscape later became places for us, but they are places of our own making. Such as the places we used to have our tea-breaks in, or the rock that we dubbed "the Indian head" because, from a certain angle, it looks like the profile of a face with stereotypized "Indian" features.


I think this example aptly illustrates that we are 21st century western academics with a scientific mindset and what we are, we are thoroughly. We cannot be anything else. We may learn to walk the paths and we may see the same landforms and monuments or try to reconstruct them in our mind's eye or through the use of our sophisticated technologies. We may try to empathize with the perceptions of past individuals like actors would to a role. And still they will not mean the same things to us. We may get a tantalizing glimpse of meaning through archaeological remains, but our constructions of what past people would have thought rest on our ideas of what they were like and what they should have been feeling and thinking when they perceived something that we, from our own cultural background, consider impressive or important, which probably tells us more about ourselves than them.

(Well, this was supposed to be a rant but ended up more as a musing...)