Bones

Yesterday I found a stowaway in my pottery bucket.

Tammy and I were sitting under a tree at the Cretan Archaeological Center, washing buckets full of pottery, just as we do every afternoon after working at the site. Hundreds of sherds of pottery pass through our hands, get scrutinized under our careful eyes then tickled with a toothbrush (the archaeologist's cleaning tool of choice) before being classified as “clean” and sent to the pottery experts for examination. Most of the time, stones, bones and other materials get sorted out from the pottery we wash, but occasionally we’ll get some stowaways and you just throw them out or pass them on to the right person.

I reached my hand into the bucket for another piece of pottery and picked up a white, smooth, concave object the size of my palm and thought to myself: “This can’t be pottery. Its not red, and the texture isn’t right. What are those little speckles? And layers? And why is it…oily?” And then I screamed a little and dropped it back into the bucket. Yep. Bone. That was not a rock. That thing was most definitely part of somebody’s skull.

Never having touched a real skull before, one can understand my consternation. Blech. Eww. Yucky. Blech blech blech. It gave me the shivers. When we finally fished it back out of the bucket and poked at it with our toothbrushes, fascination overcame the morbidity. Little bubbles had broken the surface over time, and layers of bone growth overlapped one another to create an aged look. Brown speckles gave it the oddly familiar appearance that one sees in National Geographic but never expects to actually dig out of the ground.

The cranium fragment was safely transported to the forensic anthropologists to ooh and awe over, and Tammy and I went back to washing pottery. But it struck me as rather a profound moment. As much as it’s awesome to discover the past through studying its remains, I sort of felt like we should leave those burial sites alone. Individuals were buried at those sites, mourned over there by those who loved them. Holding that bone had made me kind of sad. How did they die? Part of Gournia shows marks of burning, maybe telling of its destruction by the Myceneans. Was this person killed when their village was attacked? Even if their death wasn’t violent, their remains deserve respect. I’d almost rather leave them untouched and undisturbed. Nobody should be unburied.

Gournia as a whole has taken on a new reverence to me now as well. While peaceful now, and covered in my footprints and those of curious tourists, it may have also been a place of terror and death to those who called it home thousands of years ago. People were born here, lived, ate, laughed and died, on the soil we dig up every day. And like other archaeological sites all over Crete, Gournia also saw destruction.  Its inhabitants either fled, or were massacred by invaders, leaving its mysteries to be solved by archaeologists and untrained hands like my own. That makes Gournia a cemetery, even if it is one of memories.

When I walk to site every morning now, I will do so with a deeper appreciation for the gravity of the history, both beautiful and tragic, that this place has seen.