An Archaeologist’s Reckoning with Science, Faith and the Inevitable
It’s a strange thing to be living through a timeline during which you can ask the question, “is the fucker dead yet?” and everyone knows who you’re talking about.
Meanwhile, every second of every minute of every hour of every day, decent human beings breathe their last, including my fine father-in-law, who embarked on his final journey on the weekend.
Tragically for a man who embodied dignity, kindness and strength his entire life, he didn’t give up easily, even though it was well beyond time.
His body was a husk. But his spirit wouldn’t let go.
As I watched him battle forces he would never defeat, it reminded me how ill-equipped so many of us in the West are to confront life’s last adventure: death.
“Life is a sexually transmitted, inevitably fatal, disease.”
My dad was a surgeon.
His favourite saying?
“Life is a sexually transmitted, inevitably fatal, disease.”
Because there are just two things that you can absolutely count on if you’re fortunate enough to take a turn on this great, big, spinning ball of rock we call home.
You will be born.
And you will die.
The “being born” bit is pretty much out of your hands. Although many spiritual traditions would disagree.
But there’s no quibbling with the fact that the death side of the equation is coming for you.
I know that for a fact because my first career out of the blocks was as an archaeologist. Yes, I know. If you’ve met me here before, you’ll know I’ve also done time as a historian, a university lecturer, an art auctioneer, and a journalist, and am currently doing the rounds as an author and screenwriter.
What can I say? I bore easily.
And I’ve seen things. Lots of things.
I also hate Nazis
You’ve seen Indiana Jones, right?
We archaeologists spit in death’s eye and flip it the bird.
We laugh in the face of mortality.
Nazis, not so much. We hate Nazis.
But death? A doddle.
I was fascinated by death as a child and couldn’t get enough of long-dead civilisations. It was inevitable I’d end up knee-deep in the dust wielding a trowel.
Top that off with a childhood crush on Han Solo which evolved into a teen obsession with Indiana Jones… and my fate was sealed.
Yeah. You’re sensing a common theme.
Harrison Ford.
Probably not the wisest way to plan a career path. Intergalactic piracy was off the cards. Because, physics. And count me lucky the crush didn’t persist into adulthood, or I may have ended up a shrink.
Instead, I got myself a degree in archaeology and headed off to the Mediterranean.
Along the way, I dug up my very own, real-life Indy. We were wed in a crusader fortress on the Aegean and have been blissfully happy together ever since… but that’s a story for another day.
This is about confronting the inevitable.
The end of all…. **this**
Archaeologists aren’t afraid of death
First, a ghost story…
It’s not that archaeologists don’t believe in the spirit world. We just don’t think about it too much.
We’re not superstitious, and we’re not squeamish.
But something happened one day that made me think differently about what I was doing.
We were excavating a Hellenistic burial—so, around 2,300 years old—in far-eastern Turkey. It was just one of many in an ancient burial ground. But what made it special was that a man and woman were buried together in the grave, side by side.
They were spooning; the man’s arm resting over the woman’s waist. We were witness to the final expression of love between the couple, and the people who laid them to rest.
Yes, I wept. It was impossible not to.
There were five of us working on the grave, and we all took photos, including the dig photographer, who had three professional cameras. The rest of us had our own SLR film cameras (yes, kids, that was what we had to do back in the days before mobile phones.)
We gathered up the bones and the two silver coins from the soil beneath the man and woman’s hips (the fee for the ferryman across the River Styx that would have been tucked into their clothes when they were buried) and packed them away in the dig house in plastic bags… yeah, I know.
As I said. Tears aside, it’s a very pragmatic profession.
That night, I was in a deep sleep in the room I shared with two other archaeologists.
A freezing blast of wind woke me.
I sat up. Both my roommates were also jolted awake.
“Hey, shut the window, would you, Lisa?” I said.
Lisa checked. “Not open,” she replied.
The door and the window were both closed, and there was not a breath of wind outside.
Weird enough.
But when we got home and developed our photos from that day, none of us had a single shot of the burial on our cameras.
Not. A. Single. One.
Decades later, I still get goosebumps when I think about it.
Why so squeamish?
In the West, we’re so fucking squeamish about death. Sure, we’ll line up to see slasher pics on the big screen and beat our breasts about the loss of innocents in wars far outside our borders.
But as for the thought that death will one day be knocking at our own door?
No thanks. Move along.
I’ve got a theory about that.
Nothing unusual about that. I’m full of them. Theories, I mean.
Hear me out.
During the Renaissance, the big brains of the day tapped into the wisdom of the Ancient Greeks and Romans.
From that, the West got humanism, which places humankind at the centre of the universe.
Human beings made in God’s image.
That gives us the idea that the planet is our plaything. We are masters of all we survey.
It seeped into all aspects of our lives. For one thing, artists were no longer just craftspeople… talented people who made beautiful stuff. They became “geniuses,” channelling God’s creative spirit here on earth. So, Michelangelo, Raphael, Leonardo and Donatello became household names. They also became Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles.
This couldn’t be less like Islam, where under the strictest interpretation of the law, it’s seen as blasphemy to paint anything from nature because it challenges Allah’s divine power as creator of all things on earth.
Christianity, by contrast, applauded human achievement as a “gift from God.”
This thinking also set scientists off the leash. Armed with new technology—microscopes (invented in 1590) and telescopes (invented in 1608)—they started asking “why?” to questions that had, until then, been answered with the catch-all response: “because it’s God’s will.”
I mean, human beings were God’s favourite children, so, sure. What could possibly go wrong?
The blink of a cosmic eye
The scientific advances since that time have been truly extraordinary.
But from a chronological perspective, four hundred years is nothing… The blink of a cosmic eye.
It’s no wonder the reality of the 21st century world we’ve created for ourselves in the West has given us all a chronic case of whiplash.
Think about it this way. If you’re fifty or so, your grandparents were probably born in the first decades of the 1900s.
Presuming you knew them, imagine you high-fived your grandma when she was still around. That’s you “touching” 1900.
If your grandma knew her granddad and high-fived him, it takes her back to 1800 or so. Do that another two times between generations, and it takes you back to 1600.
So, just four high-fives, and you’re in the Age of Enlightenment. The person you’re connected to back then may have been peeling apples with Isaac Newton.
See what I mean? Blink of an eye.
The greatest puzzle of all
Even though it’s only been four hundred years since western science started strutting its way across the global stage, we’ve thrown all our hats in that particular ring.
Got a problem? No worries, friend. Science will find an answer.
But there’s one puzzle that’s stumped us. Not because we’re missing a piece or two.
Because we’ve got nothing.
Death.
We have a fair idea why it happens.
We can even have a guess when it’ll happen.
As for a cure? Forget about it.
That terrifies us. Because even people of faith don’t really know what happens afterwards.
And the rest of us have replaced faith in God with faith in science. Yet neither can give us an answer.
That’s troublesome. Because most of us suspect that death is not the end.
Life is brief, but we all make a mark
Even if you don’t believe our souls persist after our bodies wind down, we all leave pieces behind in our wake.
When I was an archaeologist, I saw it in the thumbprint of the potter who, four-thousand years ago, shaped wet clay into an urn.
I felt it in the chisel mark in the block of stone chipped by a stonemason from a quarry hundreds of kilometres away then carted to a hilltop to become one of thousands in a vast temple built to a god long since forgotten.
And I sensed it in the worn leather of a sandal we discovered; its sole rubbed to a dull patina by whoever abandoned it on the plaster floor of a home two-and-a-half-thousand years ago.
Those people were here. They made their mark. And then they departed.
One day, it will be me.
And one day, it will be you.
Regardless of what you believe happens to our soul after we migrate from our body, that is all that remains: the marks we made while we were here.
Our suit of skin will be a car abandoned by the side of the road.
Without a driver, it will simply rust away.
It might sound odd, but I find that comforting.
Death doesn’t frighten me. Perhaps, in part, because my husband and I fell in love as we used dental picks and trowels to scrape dirt away from the mortal remains of a girl laid to rest five-thousand-years ago.
She was around ten when she died. She lay on a straw bed on top of a slab of flat stones. A spiral of bronze the girth of your forefinger lay in the dirt behind her; a fastening for what would have been a braid of hair long since disintegrated into the soil.
Beside her head was an ornate painted pot, burnished black with geometric designs, crushed flat from the thousands of years of pressure from the soil above her.
We’ll never know who she was, or who buried her with such care and love. And it doesn’t really matter. She was just a girl passing through a fertile river plain with her nomadic family in the far east of what is now known as Turkey.
But she was a human being, no different to you and me in a physical sense.
What did she dream?
Was there a flower she particularly loved that grew beside the stream her people returned to, year after year, on their migration to the summer mountain pastures?
Did she seek out the sweet taste of wild honey on her tongue from hives tangled in the top branches of the poplar trees?
No idea at all.
It’s enough that she was here.
Butterfly wings, and all that.
Who knows what her birth—and death—meant for the people around her, and what small things she may have done that reverberated through time to reach us today? In the smallest way, she may have changed the world.
What I learnt most of all that day was that humanity—the connection between people—is universal and eternal.
It was there in the effort it took to hack a hole in half-frozen soil deep enough to make sure scavengers didn’t disturb the grave.
It was there in the grave gifts; they were prized and valuable possessions. Yet they were not carried away and used as exchange for food, or beasts of burden. They were left, instead, for the girl they buried that day.
Most of all, it was there in the way she was curled up with her hands tucked carefully beneath her head.
Not dead. Just sleeping.
Whoever did that for her loved her. And would miss her.
We need to talk about death.
Because without death, there is no life.
Everything on our planet is in a state of constant flux. Glance down at your hand for a moment. You are looking at atoms that may once have been a dinosaur’s hide… a falling star… a chill wind… a boulder tumbling down a mountainside… the breath of someone you love.
No matter how you feel about the idea of reincarnation, the truth is that even if we put the human spirit to one side, we are literally walking around in a case made of atoms that have existed since the beginning of time.
We borrow these bits and pieces from the cosmic tub of Lego and form them into something else for the time we are here.
After that, we return them to the planet and they are transformed again.
And again.
And again.
And they will be forever more.
That is what living for eternity means.
So why all the mystery?
We know that Neanderthals were burying their dead 70,000 years ago. We’ve since come up with almost as many ways of disposing of human bodies as we have had civilisations.
In sky burials, our bodies are fed to vultures.
We expose our flesh and bones to the elements, or bury them beneath the soil, then gather what remains and stack bones in charnel houses.
We ritually consume pieces of flesh to preserve the spirit of our ancestors, then burn what remains.
We remove the organs and dry our bodies in salt, then wrap our remains in linen bandages and store them in decorated caskets.
We use plaster to reanimate our skulls, and set the eyes with shells, setting them in altars in our homes as shrines to our ancestors.
We burn everything and hold the ashes in Chinoiserie urns on mantlepieces.
We section bodies and inter them in terracotta urns… alabaster jugs… hollow painted timber logs.
But human beings are much more than animated skin suits.
That’s why we need to let go of our fear of death.
Think of someone you love. Those physical bits are not the first things that come to mind. It’s the intangible things that exist within.
Where do those things come from? No fucking idea. Just as I know that no matter how much science has given us, it is still a long way from mapping the human soul, much less explaining where it goes after our body taps out.
Because one thing is certain.
Life is an extraordinary thing.
I still marvel every time I take a seed and drop it into the soil.
It’s been sitting in a paper sleeve for months. Years, even.
Yet add water, sun and light, and it knows it’s time.
Something magical happens as it bursts through its desiccated skin and sends a green tendril reaching for the sky.
Life never dies. It just changes form.
This is true no matter your faith. Or lack thereof.
The closer we westerners come to embracing this, the less terrified we’ll be about shedding our skin.
And wherever my wonderful father-in-law is now, I trust his spirit has found peace with his departure from his earthly woes and discovered a lasting peace.
