Sift This

---

00:01
George Gavrilis
This episode was recorded some weeks before the Taliban entered Kabul.

00:09
George Gavrilis

If you are thinking of becoming an archaeologist, you should know that it’s nothing like Indiana Jones. You are not going to be chasing down relics while escaping pits filled with vipers, or running from a massive boulder that's trying to crush you. If you remember those iconic scenes, you should know that they are utter trickery. Archaeology involves plenty of sitting and stooping and very little running away from things, as it turns out.

00:35
George Gavrilis

Laurie talks about her graduate studies and her first dig, where she spent hours and hours baking under the sun in Cyprus moving millimeters of dirt, and her time in Armenia dunking dirt in water to see what floats to the surface. And she loved every minute of it. What’s more, she bankrolled her work by slinging cups of coffee in an Atlanta café.   

01:00

George Gavrilis
This is Monuments Woman with Laura Tedesco. I'm your host George Gavrilis. Today, we are continuing on Laura's journey into Afghanistan. If you are new to this podcast, we recommend going back to start with Episode 1. For everyone else, welcome back. Let's jump in.

01:17
George Gavrilis
Where did your interest in archaeology come from?

01:20
Laura Tedesco
There was a little bit of an evolution to how I arrived at a deep passion for archaeology. And I'm going to come right out and say, I never saw the Indiana Jones movies until I was in my 30s. Sometimes people will ask, was it that Indiana Jones movie? Is that what got you going on archaeology? I wasn't avoiding those movies. I hadn't gotten to it. I just want to put that out front.

01:46
Laura Tedesco
When I started college, first semester freshman year— they've got the classes you must take, and then you got room for an elective. And I took anthropology, I think because it fulfilled a science requirement. And I wasn't super great at biology or chemistry. So I was like, oh, anthropology, that sounds interesting. And probably I'm not going to have to work with beakers and chemicals and petri dishes.

02:11
Laura Tedesco
Within the first two weeks of this anthropology class, and I thank to this day the professor of that class, 'coz her style of teaching had a tremendous influence on me. Within two weeks, I was totally hooked on anthropology. I never wanted to do anything else. I was— obsessed might be a little bit of a strong word.

02:35
George Gavrilis
Yeah. Why, why? I understand that you like that it wasn't a certain thing. But what was it about anthropology that you loved?

02:43
Laura Tedesco
As I became very gradually, and at first very superficially, familiar with the discipline of anthropology, I realized that it presented a way to address questions about the world that I had all along. I didn't know how to necessarily articulate those questions, or in what kind of intellectual scaffolding to place my questions. But as I was getting to know anthropology in a 101 class, George, so this is not deep stuff. It was the way the teacher taught it. Somehow I got the language, I got the vocabulary. And I was like, this is infinitely fascinating to me.

03:33
Laura Tedesco
And then you have the way anthropology is structured, there's four subfields, I won't go into that. One of those subfields is archaeology. And throughout undergraduate years, I was just taking every anthropology class I could. There was nothing that was not interesting about it.

03:56

Laura Tedesco

"May 27, 1990, Kalavasos, Cyprus. I've lived in the future to arrive here for too long. And now I am here and it feels funny being at this place because it's only been a fantasy so far. It's been an escape for what seems like ages. The fruitful labors of the archaeology— it's grueling and laborious. Here in the Kopetra Valley it's hot, tiring. But fruitful even if only for a tiny, shiny blue tessera. The tessera is the actual real part of the mosaic. It's the mosaic in my brain and in my body. It's excavation."

04:37
Laura Tedesco
The summer after my junior year of college, I was going to do summer school in a field school. I was fascinated by human evolution, and hominins in East Africa. I was also fascinated with archaeology. So I was like, what do I do? Do I go to Ethiopia for the summer on a field school? Or, do I go to Cyprus on an archeological field school? I never imagined that the decision would impact the rest of my career, but it ultimately did.

05:07
Laura Tedesco
For reasons that are too tedious to go into, I ultimately picked the archaeological field school in Cyprus. It was a combination— it was the physical labor, the physicality of being involved in an excavation, the being outdoors all day. And I was then, I mean, hook, line, and sinker. I was like, Okay, this is it. I don't want to do anything else. Archaeology is for me.

05:33
George Gavrilis
This was summer?

05:35
Laura Tedesco
Yeah, it was, must have been June. What year was this, 1989, I think? June 1990, maybe? I forget the precise year. 

05:47
George Gavrilis
Yeah, Soviet Union still around, innit?

05:50
Laura Tedesco
Oh, they are. Yeah. Anyway, so—

05:52
George Gavrilis
I'm sorry. Can I ask you, though— What on earth makes it possible for you to tolerate Mediterranean heat on the back of your neck as you're stooped over dirt, digging shit out of the ground? Every inch of my body would have been covered in sweat and sizzling.

06:10
Laura Tedesco
I don't remember the heat at all. I'm sure it was hot. Maybe it's because I grew up in the south. I don't know. I easily acclimate to heat. I prefer hot climates. In my memories of the first excavation in Cyprus in the middle of summer, nothing about the heat comes to mind. What comes to mind is the excavation and the quality of the sunlight. And that everything smelled like oregano or thyme, and you're up before the sun, and all of that. So it may seem odd, like maybe not everybody would like things like that. But it was tailor-made for me.

06:52
George Gavrilis
That's funny, because I've been to places so hot, it almost ended my relationships.

06:56

Laura Tedesco

[laughing]

06:57

George Gavrilis

You know, where you're so miserable, uncomfortable that you're bickering and hating on each other the whole time. Good for you. Good for you. 

07:08
George Gavrilis
You've painted this relatively romantic picture of going off to Cyprus, Mediterranean sun, gorgeous waters, digging statues out of the ground, gold wreaths. Not exactly what happens, right?

07:21
Laura Tedesco
No. Hardly.

07:23
George Gavrilis
Okay, give us a one-on-one, what it means to go on a dig as a student and to dig stuff up. What do you do? 

07:29
Laura Tedesco
First of all, it's very tedious, it's extremely tedious. Some people would even say boring. Not to me, but I could get it if someone would say it was boring. It's physical labor. You are tediously using small tools, let's say a trowel. An archaeologist's trowel looks a lot like a brick mason's trowel. Picture it as a flat triangular thing. Archaeologists' trowels are a little bit smaller than brick masons' trowels.

07:59
Laura Tedesco
You're scraping millimeters of dirt at a time, over time, to try to reveal what is buried in that dirt. Now, there may be instances where you're using shovels and things that can actually move larger quantities of dirt. But there's something a little bit Sisyphean. Is that the word, George? where ...

08:22
George Gavrilis
Yeah, Sisyphean. Yeah.

08:23
Laura Tedesco
Thank you.

08:24
George Gavrilis
I think. I should know, right?

08:26
Laura Tedesco
You should, Greek man. Come on.

08:29
George Gavrilis
Yeah. Sorry, Greek heritage.

08:31
Laura Tedesco
Yeah. You can atone for that later. Anyway, you're drawing and you're taking notes and you're having to think spatially in reverse while you're excavating down into the earth. And as an undergrad, trying to learn the nuts and bolts of archaeology, I was tasked with tedious stuff. Here's a bucket of dirt. Go sift that, Tedesco. Here's a pile of pot sherds. Go wash those and lay them out to dry. It's not glamorous. It was the process of it that really captured me. There's nothing about archaeology that I find uninteresting.

09:09
George Gavrilis
Remember that Italian videographer who knocked over a Buddhist statue at Mes Aynak and broke it?

09:16
Laura Tedesco
Oh yeah.

09:17
George Gavrilis
How many archaeological relics have you broken over the years?

09:20
Laura Tedesco
Hmmm.

09:21
George Gavrilis
Accidentally.

09:22
Laura Tedesco
Oh.

09:23
George Gavrilis
Even small ones.

09:24
Laura Tedesco
I don't know. Probably it's happened. I'm sure it has, but I don't— I can't say. I'm just guessing  maybe three, where you accidentally drop something. None of my mistakes were catastrophic. It's not like I would have been kicked off and sent home as like, okay, she's out.

09:44
George Gavrilis
Hey, thanks for your honesty.

09:45
Laura Tedesco
Yeah.

09:46
George Gavrilis
So how did Cyprus end? You left after discovering or learning what?

09:50
Laura Tedesco
At the end of that season, I determined I would go to graduate school for archaeology. I was like, if I want to do this seriously, I'm gonna need a graduate degree to do it. Soon after I came back, I started applying to graduate schools. And I ended up going to New York University.  

10:13
Laura Tedesco
I didn't go to graduate school for a couple of years. I got into NYU, I deferred. I was working.

10:21
George Gavrilis
What were you doing?

10:22
Laura Tedesco
I was working at a cafe serving coffee.

10:25
George Gavrilis
Oh, okay. I didn't know that. That was unexpected.

10:28
Laura Tedesco
And I was volunteering at the local museum. My paying job that put gas in my car was serving coffee and cake at a cafe.

10:38
George Gavrilis
Well, right. That's what a lot of actors do before they become famous actors.

10:43
Laura Tedesco
It's what a lot of people do, even when they don't become famous.

10:48
George Gavrilis
That's very true. And I have my own story, not of serving coffee, but of folding t-shirts and shirts and sweaters at a store at the local mall, in between college and grad school because I had no idea what I wanted to do. But I needed to do something and I lived in a town without any jobs at a higher level than that.

11:09
Laura Tedesco
Sure. So it's not a bad skill to have if things fall apart, George. 

11:14
George Gavrilis
I'm really good at folding laundry, you should see me. 

11:17
Laura Tedesco
I can make a mean cappuccino.

11:20
George Gavrilis
We'll trade. 

11:21
Laura Tedesco
Yeah. 

11:25
Laura Tedesco
"September 20, 1994. Surprisingly contented today. I'm walking silently, quietly along my path. I checked out the new apartment, trying to make it my own. I'm emerging back into school and life at last, immersing myself into the archaeology and trying to make something better. It's 65 St. Mark's Place, Number 9, my address in the East Village. At last, having wanted to live there and acquired it at least for now. There is no chance I'll save money this year as I had hoped."

12:06
George Gavrilis
You eventually decided it's time for grad school?

12:10
Laura Tedesco
I did. I did. And I was so excited to move to New York City. I had wanted to live in New York since I was 11 years old. I was just waiting for the opportunity that I could move to New York City. And finally I had an anchor, like grad school. I wasn't just flitting around New York. I had an anchor to be there. 

12:30
George Gavrilis
What's New York like in the '80s? Remind us. 

12:32
Laura Tedesco
Well, okay. Don't make me that old, please. This was the early to mid '90s.

12:39
George Gavrilis
Okay. So you made it to New York, early '90s. I apologize for adding two years to you.

12:45
Laura Tedesco
No, you added four or five years, but we'll drop it. 

12:49
George Gavrilis
I was assuming late '80s, you know.

12:51
Laura Tedesco
George, George. You know what New York was like? It was affordable enough that I could live in a studio apartment in the East Village on a grad student salary.

13:02
George Gavrilis
Wow. Okay. Yeah.

13:04
Laura Tedesco
There was still a grittiness. But you knew if you just scraped a little bit of that grittiness away, the cool factor ran deep. And the creativity ran deep. And that jazzed me like nothing. And grad school too, I mean, it was thrilling. But it was the environment in which all of that was taking place. So it was great in the early-mid '90s.

13:36
George Gavrilis
Yeah. Wow. How was it that grad school, though, triggered an interest in Afghanistan?

13:41
Laura Tedesco
My main professor in grad school, her name is Rita Wright. She was my PhD advisor.

13:46
George Gavrilis
Another story for its own time, I think.

13:48
Laura Tedesco
Oh, it is. Talk about legend. Rita, she's still alive, and I'm still in touch with her many, many years later. But yeah, a topic for another time. Rita had cut her teeth in archaeology in Afghanistan in the late 1970s. And then, when the Soviets invaded and she could no longer excavate in Afghanistan, she then moved her research to Iran. 

14:14
Laura Tedesco
Well then, there was the Iranian Revolution, and she could no longer effectively do her archaeology in Iran. So she moved her research to Pakistan. So her entire area of focus of research of emphasis for archaeology was that region, and as one of her students, that was what we were taught, that was the regional focus.

14:40
Laura Tedesco
Early in your graduate school, you've got to pick your own research topic and what sub-area are you going to be interested in. The Soviet Union had just collapsed and the Caucasus region was opening up to Western researchers. And I had an opportunity to join the first American-run excavation in Armenia at that time. I jumped on that bus. I went on an excavation in Armenia. And again, I already had natural excitement. 

15:12
Laura Tedesco
Armenia was brand new to me. I mean, I didn't know the capital of the country before I arrived there, honestly. We didn't learn much about the subtleties of the Soviet Union in school. It was just one big entity. Armenia charmed me. So beautiful. Right?

15:30
George Gavrilis
Outrageously atmospheric, outrageously.

15:33
Laura Tedesco
It's so beautiful. And the food. My finest food memories are from Armenia. And then the archaeology, too, that was a driver, because it presented so many possibilities for good work and discovery.

15:48
George Gavrilis
Afghanistan's not a possibility at this particular time because, I mean, there's a civil war, there's an active Civil War—

15:55
Laura Tedesco

Right.

15:56
George Gavrilis
—mujahideen running around the place.

15:58
Laura Tedesco
Oh, it wasn't even on my radar. And you have to take into consideration, at that time, a young woman independent graduate student researcher going to certain countries wasn't tenable. It was a little bit of a bridge too far. I had to be conscious of that. And working in Armenia, post-Soviet era, women had for decades and decades under the Soviet system played prominent roles in scientific life. A woman archaeologist was not new or freakish. I could function there, I would get access to museum collections. I could interact with the Armenian men archaeologists and it wasn't strange or weird. Armenia presented just a really interesting area of opportunity.

16:45
Laura Tedesco
The problem was, I didn't speak Russian, or Armenian. If you're going to be serious about your research, you have to know the language. So I spent nine years learning Russian, so that I could do reputable and serious research. And I got through it, but please don't ever speak to me in Russian, because I will have no idea what you're saying.

17:07
George Gavrilis
Why is that? Nine years is a long time.

17:09
Laura Tedesco
It is. If you don't use it, you lose it. I can read a bit. We'll just leave it at that.

17:18
George Gavrilis
Yeah, and what was it you were digging up in Armenia? What kind of a site was it?

17:22
Laura Tedesco
Oh, so it was— it was a mixed site, some late Bronze Age, early Iron Age settlement. That's what our excavation was focused on, the Urartian civilization. Have you heard of the Urartians?

17:35
George Gavrilis
Oh, yeah.

17:38
Laura Tedesco
Okay, you have because you did your focus on Turkey. And you know the region. 

17:41
George Gavrilis
That's true. Yeah. 

17:42
Laura Tedesco
Anyway, it was a Urartian fortress. But also adjacent to this enormous Urartian fortress were these Bronze Age tombs. I was excavating both parts of the ramparts of the fortress for part of the season I was there.

17:57
George Gavrilis
What does Bronze Age mean? Like, what—

17:59
Laura Tedesco
Yeah.

18:00
George Gavrilis
What centuries are we talking about? 

18:02
Laura Tedesco
So— so glad you asked. So Bronze Age, alright, to give it a ballpark— think five-ish, thousand years ago. Okay? We could go into more detail, but that's just to put a point on a calendar.

18:15
George Gavrilis
Okay.

18:16
Laura Tedesco
So 3,000 BC, give or take, a few hundred years.

18:20
George Gavrilis
Wow.

18:21
Laura Tedesco
With respect to the fortress, I was in a portion of this enormous site. There were sub-teams of archaeologists, mixed American and Armenian, in different areas of this large architectural structure. By large, let's say, a big mansion, to put a size on it. I was in one corner of this mansion, so to speak, and corner walls constructed from solid blocks of stone. It's what you would call a cyclopean fortress, just enormous stone blocks stacked up to make a super strong defensive location.

19:00
Laura Tedesco
I was involved in excavating one of these corners. It's not just you're digging to find chase walls and the outline of a building. There are subtler things going on. You're looking at what artifacts are you finding along the way — pieces of pottery, glass, stone tools, bits of metal, for example. And you want to look at even subtler aspects while you're excavating. Are you finding any remains of animals? Are there animal bones that might indicate what people were eating?

19:30
George Gavrilis
And were there?

19:32
Laura Tedesco
There were. Then one step further, we would collect samples of soil. And we'd dump them in water and see what would float to the surface. We were looking in particular for seeds. Were the seeds wheat, barley, were you finding any lentils? What else was coming up? That gives you then a further insight into the natural environment at the time of the Bronze Age. The Urartian site was actually late Bronze, early Iron, it's not early Bronze. So that's a little further in time along the timeline.

20:07
Laura Tedesco
So all of these bits of information that archaeologists gather, you're trying to piece together a story, a civilization or a community on incomplete information. But you need to patch that story together, as best you can based on the architecture, the animal bones, the artifacts, the seeds, etc. All of that takes a lot of time. You've got to be able to hold multiple lines of constantly evolving information in your mind at the same time, and be a natural storyteller.

20:44
George Gavrilis
The Armenia story that you've started to tell is just the beginning. Because there's a lot more to come and to happen in Armenia, including a love interest.

20:53
Laura Tedesco
Yes.

20:54
George Gavrilis
And that's before you even get to Syria.

20:57
Laura Tedesco
Correct.

20:58
George Gavrilis
So there's a long road ahead of us to Afghanistan.

21:01
Laura Tedesco
Yeah, yeah. To be continued. Maybe.

gre21:05
George Gavrilis
Maybe. I'll get it out of you one way or another.

21:13

George Gavrilis
You've been listening to Monuments Woman with Laura Tedesco. I'm your host George Gavrilis. Don't forget to like and subscribe wherever you get your podcast. To stay in touch, also follow us on Instagram at the_monuments_woman. Join us next week when we dive deeper.

21:30

George Gavrilis
This show is produced by Christian D. Bruun and May Eleven Projects. It is recorded by Audivita Studios, and edited by Shaun Hettinger and Greg Williams. The theme song is This Love by Ariana Delawari, featuring Salar Nader.

Ep 15: Sift this — Love of Archaeology, Part 1 of 3

Topics Covered in this Episode
Interest in archaeology, college freshman year
Cyprus archeological field school
Learning to dig as a student
The Italian videographer at Mes Aynak
Cappuccinos and cake
New York City in the '90s
Graduate school, Professor Rita Wright, from Afghanistan to Armenia
Armenia, post-Soviet era, open to Western researchers
Learning Russian
Digging in Armenia, Urartian civilizations

Recorded on July 9, 2021