Journal of Urban Archaeology 2: The Backfill

Got a gag? Get a gig! Share your load at The Backfill ! Write to us at [email protected] The Backfill A Warm Welcome We have been thrilled to feel the warm welcome given by readers across the world to these humble pages, which we are honoured (but of course!) to share alongside the oh-so-important and posh Journal of Urbane Archaeology. Here at The Backfill, we are simply happy to serve. I know I, personally, am not in the least bothered that my office is only half as big as that of our distinguished colleagues at JUA, or that my table is two inches smaller than that of Mr Sid E. Dweller. After all, we know only too well that what starts at the bottom of a site is most likely to end at the top of the heap! Until that happy time, we at The Backfill will always provide a home for unsifted facts and be ready with a cheerful throwaway comment! We hope you enjoy sharing our load with us. Síri Ospley Editor-in-Cheap, City Counsellor Trowel Experiences A part of my vocation, which I always enjoy, is going around the world to visit sites in the field and to attend conferences. I like speaking to locals, and taking in the new perspectives on professional matters that can arise from unexpected situations. On a recent flight, I was redirected to Leeds-Bradford International Airport due to adverse weather. While waiting in the quaint old airport, I was approached by a friendly young gentleman with a pencil and a questionnaire. ‘D’ya mynd if a’ ask ya a few questions, sir?’ he asked in a singing northern dialect. I didn’t, and I certainly found no reason to regret it. To my surprise, it soon turned out that I had apparently bumped into a colleague, although to judge by his questions, he must have joined the ranks of the discipline fairly recently. Was I an experienced troweller? I proudly confirmed. Did I trowel for business or pleasure? That was a much harder question! After all, can any of us truly decide? With some hesitation, I told him that I would trowel for pleasure any time, but I was honoured to call it my business. He had many more questions. Had I trowelled any of the following destinations — Tehran? Yes! Damascus? Of course! Baghdad? continued on the following page The Backfill 2 Trowel Experiences continued from the previous page ‘Ah, it feels like only yesterday,’ I reminisced. ‘Adams taught me everything there is to know about surveying in Diyala’. The young man looked up, worried. ‘Ya better aeen’t tell the authorities’, he said. ‘Now whut else?’ I continued: Mohenjo Daro, Uruk, Taxila, Xi’an, Sardis, Teotihuachan… He looked up with a perplexed gape. ‘Those a’ nowt on me list, sir!’ ‘Well’, I said, ‘You better put them there, or you’ll never be able to call yourself a true professional, will you?’ He duly started taking notes while I continued — Kilwa, Cusco, Osaka, Novgorod, Bergen. ‘Ah, Ae’ve got that one!’, he exclaimed. ‘Brilliant!’ I said. ‘Bring my greetings if you go back. Is Herteig still around?’ The next question really made me reflect on the state of the discipline. Did I often trowel by car? Mechanization, I admit, is one of my favourite aversions. I told him that I would keep on trowelling on my hands and knees as long as I could. ‘But surely ya’ve got other wee’s o’ moving about than just kicking up the dirt?’, he asked. ‘Oh, in spades,’ I suggested. He smiled and ticked a long row of boxes. There was really no end to his queries. Was I into group trowelling? Educational trowelling? Back-pack trowelling? ‘Ah, I’ve tried’, I laughed, ‘but trust me, you’ll only hurt your knees!’ At this point, I could truly sense the young man’s uncertainty. As we were called back to our flight, I arose and looked at him. ‘If you want to take a good piece of advice from an old-timer’, I said, ‘don’t take my word for any of what I’ve told you. Get yourself a good Marshalltown and go trowel the world for yourself!’ I walked to my plane, but I could see my young friend gazing after me, as he crumpled up his questionnaire and threw it into a bin. It warmed me to see how profoundly he had taken our conversation to heart. It is a lesson we can never receive too often: stop theorizing, and take the matter into your own hands. And don’t forget your knee pads. Sid E. Dweller Columnist and architraveller Janek Sundahl 3 The Backfill Keep on Smiling Backlog Another Day at the Outdoor Office in Palmyra Harald Ingholt,, a widely famed and globe-trotting Danish archaeologist, who met his American-wife-to-be on a boat trip from Japan to China on his world tour, and who came to hold a chair of archaeology at Yale University, worked at the oasis-site of Palmyra in the Syrian Desert in the 1920s and 1930s. He boldly published his monograph on the site’s funerary sculpture in 1928 in his native tongue, and it remains today as a standard work in scholarship — it was widely read by non-Danes even before the age of Google Translate! This is testimony both to Ingholt’s scholarship and to the fact that Danish is less difficult than it sounds! His work detailed the portrait habit of the city — a habit that persisted for almost three hundred years, coming to an abrupt end only when the Roman emperor Aurelian sacked the city with his troops after Queen Zenobia had rebelled against Roman rule and cut the Romans off from the precious trade routes to the East. However, in this photo, Ingholt does not seem concerned with the heavy weight of Palmyra’s history — a site that has, in the intervening years, once again suffered great damage due to the conflict ongoing in Syria since 2011. In this shot (taken by an unknown photographer), which I came across in a file given to me by Ingholt’s daughter, Mary Ebba Underdown, when I visited her in her home outside New Haven to find out more about her father’s career, Ingholt appears as photographer-in-action with pieces of Palmyrene sculpture — his passion for decades. He seems to be enjoying another day at the outdoor office, dressed in immaculate attire, complete with strappy sandals. But another figure has sneaked in as well — to the top left of the image, a large lizard loiters, perhaps sunbathing or waiting for a fly to come by. Ingholt was clearly not afraid to lounge around with the lizards of Palmyra. Such an image reminds us that archaeologists are in for a bit of everything when on excavation, and that strappy sandals are perhaps not ideal wear in the Syrian Desert if you want to avoid animals in your pants. For camera-crazed enthusiasts, it can be noted that the camera used appears to be a No. 3. Autographic Kodak special model A (with thanks to Scott McAvoy for this particular nerdy detail!). Rubina Raja Centre for Urban Network Evolutions, Aarhus University