When I headed off to college over forty years ago, unsure of what I wanted to do with my life, my younger sister recommended taking a course in archaeology. If it didn’t pan out, I could always use the units to meet my humanities requirement. At the time, we lived with our paternal grandmother on her five-acre property on the outskirts of San Antonio, Texas. Long before I was born, my grandmother’s house had been in the country, but by the time we began to live with her, the city had extended its boundaries to her homestead and beyond. Every time I took my grandmother to the doctor and drove the length of what once had been a country road, she would relay to me how she once fetched cows where the Texaco station stood.
When she was younger, my grandmother grew vegetables near the main house, but there was a limit to what could be farmed due to a break in the land where a sliver of an opening lead to an aquifer carved in the porous limestone common to that part of the world. My sister found stone tools scattered there, thousands of years old and honed from chert. One of the pieces she found is six inches long, heavy, and comfortable in an adult’s hand. When holding this implement, it’s easy to imagine digging hard earth or slicing animal skin.
I fell in love with archaeology, although I never majored in the subject. However, I did garner enough credits for a minor. After years of poverty, I opted to major in physics, which seemed prudent and secure. But for as long as I could, I made the department of anthropology my intellectual home, enrolling in courses on human evolution and early civilizations, taking part in archaeological digs and field trips to ancient ruins, cataloging artifacts, and attending sparsely populated conferences put on by obscure archaeological societies. My passion never left me. Whatever I studied (and with a doctorate and three master’s degrees, I have explored many topics), I would find ways to use the lenses of anthropology and archaeology to measure and ground my newfound knowledge.
Yet even as archaeology gained its hold on me, I thought of physics as the grande dame of science, while archaeology was like a younger sister striving to measure up to her older sibling. On archeological digs in the Texas Hill Country, we used mesh-bottomed wooden boxes—the archaeologist’s colander for retaining ancient treasures—to sift the earth and dream of life before civilization. Archaeology was so much more playful than being holed up in a physics lab trying to repeat the oil drop experiment that measured the charge of an electron. In the lab, there were painstaking measurements that involved lasers placed in exact locations and equations we had to reproduce to verify our results.
In 1984, archaeology lacked such exactitude, nevertheless it was near zealous in its pursuit of objectivity. Each object that remained in the box after sifting was correlated with the exact location where it was found according to a grid of string overlaying the dig site and the systematic clearing of only an inch or two of sediments from the surface at a time. Objects large enough to be written on were numbered with permanent ink and catalogued along with their coordinates. With depth and breadth accounted for, every pottery shard, stone tool, or bone fragment could be portrayed according to its last resting place, creating a visual representation of the past, like a snapshot in time of what life was like before written history. Nevertheless, our conclusions lacked the predictive power of physics. No matter our efforts, the artifacts could not support universals about human nature.
Even with all the technological advances of the last several decades, archaeology continues to rely on plausible explanations derived from limited evidence and good imaginations. For me, that is the allure of archaeology: its undeniable combination of evidence and imagination. There is a special beauty and power unique to archaeology’s exploration of past peoples and civilizations in part because of how the imagination is trained to limit flights of fantasy, carefully balancing fact with speculation.
As neophytes on our first archaeological dig, we looked to our own bodies, habits, and relationships to understand human nature as it once might have been: what they made use of for shelter, clothes, and tools; what family life had been like given the relatively long period it takes humans to reach maturity; how they dealt with changing locations in pursuit of plants and small animals according to the seasons; how they might have felt freedom and belonging in ways unimaginable to us moderns. We tried to refrain from over-explanation and held the possibility that the remnants we found may have been left by people so radically different from ourselves that our imaginations and efforts at objectivity failed us.
Yet inevitably, the questions we asked about past civilizations and cultures reflected the ways we carved up our own world: how we balanced family with responsibility to community; how we dealt with sexual desire and finding a partner; our quest to create meaningful lives that would make us valued members of our community; our need to acknowledge and work with power differences; our fears of not being loved or appreciated. Still, we sought objectivity knowing full well our truth claims could never be fully protected from our biases and what we unconsciously projected on peoples we treasured in large part because we imagined them as purer forms of humanity, and thus somehow better than ourselves.
In our imaginings, one influence on the lives of early humans we omitted was the possibility of family violence. We did wonder if there was warfare and if men were more powerful than women, but we didn’t articulate how unequal power alters people, and what might be passed down through generations when children and women are treated inhumanely by men or other family members they depend on for survival. In our idyllic location, where live oaks sheltered us from midday sun and the sound of crickets drifted in the hot dry air, we felt protected and imagined they did too.
We didn’t refer to psychological trauma in those days the way it is commonly used today to describe childhood abuse and intimate partner violence. We rejected ideas that smacked of Lamarkianism and the hypothesis that events in one person’s lifetime could alter the genes they passed to subsequent generations. It would be more than two decades before the science of epigenetics became mainstream and revealed how an infant is (or is not) nurtured will impact not only that infant’s life, but her or his children’s lives as well. Our world was walled in silences that hid the ugly underbelly of patriarchal dominance hierarchies in which abuses of the least powerful were systematically silenced. As if caught in a collective fugue, we lacked an imagination for the intergenerational transmission of trauma and instead envisioned people freer than ourselves, without our psychological baggage, largely because we had no idea that such baggage could be unpacked. We just didn’t talk about the hurts some of us hoped to escape at university and existed as if speaking of what some of us intimately knew about family violence would somehow break the spell of objectivity.
I now think of the imagination, rather than objectivity, as the true foundation for science. The physicist Albert Einstein stressed this point: “Imagination is more important than knowledge. For knowledge is limited, whereas imagination embraces the entire world, stimulating progress, giving birth to evolution.” What we can and cannot imagine determines what we look for and how we see the world, what we describe as true, and how we mark discontinuities, distinguishing the end of one way of life and the beginning of a new era. More than through facts, we create worlds through similarity and dissimilitude. Every fact begins first with an association and a dissociation: As we find evidence for one assertion, inevitably we ignore entire worlds of possibility. We grow in much the same way, discarding old selves so we can make room for who we are becoming, a process that stretches across the lifespan.
Archaeology has replaced many of its early ways, even as sifting through soil still plays a primary role in its quest for facts. Lasers are used in the field to measure depths and create representations of what lies beneath the surface. Genetic analyses are regularly made from fragments of bone and hair. There are also studies of family and relationship dynamics not filtered through the assumptions made in the male-dominated anthropology department of my youth, as well as autobiographies and memoirs by people who live in cultures thought to be very much like the hunter gatherers I spent one summer trying to resuscitate back to life.
Interest in early human cultures and indigenous communities is having a resurgence. Yet as much as curiosity about the past, there is an urgency to use this knowledge to grapple with an uncertain future. With identification of the Anthropocene, an epoch in which human-created climate change has transmuted into climate catastrophes, the question of who we were often does not seem as pressing as the question of who we might become. Nevertheless, I find myself reflecting on that time when my sister and I were unloaded on our grandmother’s doorstep after years of abuse and witnessing domestic violence. To move forward, I learned, requires excavating the past, even as each day adds another layer. Yet because each moment is an opportunity to transcend what came before, whatever story we tell about the past, along with how we imagine creating a different future, gives birth to dissociations of what once consumed us. The path forward requires such moments of transformation—when we seem to spontaneously let go of old ways as we emerge in the unknown and the new—creating opportunities to witness the past as the past, if not also grieving what went before.
