Punch in the D*ck

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00:04

Laura Tedesco
At the end of this summer, he asked me to marry him. And I was like, Whoa, whoa, whoa, slow down. And I said, you know, I'm not saying no, but I'm not saying yes. And I was like, I gotta go back to New York and start grad school. And, like, that feels like a little bit much. I was 23. And he was 33. And so I said, you know, if you can find a way to come to New York, then we can talk about it. Getting married at that age was just not what I wanted to do. It wasn't that I was anti-marriage. I just wasn't ready. Although I was intrigued, because I was like, well, maybe this is my guy.

00:52

George Gavrilis

Today, Syria is known for a brutal civil war that seems to have no end. But Syria was once a refuge for archaeologists who were fleeing turmoil in Iran and Iraq and eager to work on Syria's rich heritage sites. Tell Brak is one of those places. You might not have heard of it; it was one of the biggest cities in Upper Mesopotamia in 4000 BC. The artifacts excavated there in the 20th century wound up in museums in Britain and Syria.    

01:19

George Gavrilis

Laura, our archaeologist, found herself in Tell Brak in 1998 and 2000. In this episode, she explains why excavations there redefined how we see the history of Mesopotamia, and by extension, humanity. But to get up close and personal with history at a place like Tell Brak meant sleeping in tents, keeping wild dogs at bay, and getting detained by Syrian police.

01:44

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.

02:02

Laura Tedesco
"May 10, 1998, 6 pm, Tell Brak, Syria. I feel stronger, maybe even happier, competent. These days are good for me. Archaeology suits me, and I can feel it. The field work is good, and the workers at Tell Brak are frustrating and hilarious and beautiful. I so much love the dirt on me everyday. The shower is such a reward."

02:39

George Gavrilis
Take us to Syria. How did you wind up there?

02:42
Laura Tedesco
I was working at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the Met was sponsoring an excavation. Either I asked to go or I was invited to go. I was a little further along in graduate school at this time. And so I knew a little bit more.

02:57
Laura Tedesco

I ended up spending two summers in Syria. The first was in 1998. I flew to Damascus with one other person, and I was tasked with helping to set up the camp of the excavation, which was far in northeastern Syria, so pretty close to the border with Iraq, and with Turkey, there's that kind of little portion of Syria that juts out. 

03:21

Laura Tedesco

It was pretty rugged at the excavation. I mean, we were sleeping in tents, there was no running water. A toilet was a hole in the ground with a little tarp around it, but the tarp only came up waist high. Everybody was using the same toilet. 

03:38

George Gavrilis
And so at this point, are you like, well, I'm really glad I became an archaeologist?

03:41
Laura Tedesco
Somehow I didn't— it just was par for the course, I didn't mind that. What I didn't like was at night, wild dogs would come into the tent where I was sleeping. And there was nowhere to put your suitcase but on the ground. And I had some brownies in there that my mom had sent me in a care package. And the dogs ate my brownies. And I was like, godammit, I hope they get sick. That I'll say was pretty annoying. But aside from that, it was just thrilling. It was so exciting to be there. That excavation was in '98 and then I went back to the same site two years later in 2000.

04:22

George Gavrilis
And what does the area look like?

04:23

Laura Tedesco
It's very beige. Pretty dry. There's irrigated farming. Who controls water between Turkey and Syria— that's a topic for another time because that's very important. Mostly it was dry, barren. Conditions were not bad.

04:39

Laura Tedesco
They were better in Syria in '98 than I found conditions for the average Afghan in Afghanistan when I started working there ten years ago. Families had television sets and books in the house and running water. And beds, things like that. Gardens, lots of kids, everybody seemed to have lots of kids.

05:02
George Gavrilis
And steady electricity, I suppose.

05:05

Laura Tedesco
Steady, I don't know. But electricity for sure. It might have been steady. Although it's a much different place now, George, in 2021. Those were different days in Syria. 

05:16
George Gavrilis
Right.

05:16

Laura Tedesco

I remember there was a lot of litter everywhere. Why not just pick up the trash? But that's not how it works. There's no municipal services coming around every Tuesday morning to pick up your trash. It's different.

05:27

George Gavrilis
Oh right, you reminded me tomorrow's trash day. I got to put the trash out.

05:31
Laura Tedesco
Get on it, George.

05:32

George Gavrilis
But what a benefit to have a municipal service where I can reliably put the trash out and have it disappear, right? I take that for granted too, innit?

05:39

Laura Tedesco
Yep. 

05:46

Laura Tedesco

"March 21, 2000, Tuesday. Tell Brak, Syria. Here again, after almost two years, and it seems so familiar as if I am picking up a portion of myself again. It feels odd struggling with Arabic with the workmen, struggling to stay warm and cheerful. My life at home already feels so far away. People— friends and family— seem far outside of myself in this place."

06:19

George Gavrilis
What was it that you were digging up in Syria? 

06:22

Laura Tedesco
Oh. It was this fascinating site. Its name is Tell Brak. You know who was first part of the earliest excavations there in the 1920s or '30s?

06:32
George Gavrilis

Oh. I would assume it would have been the Italians or the French.

06:36

Laura Tedesco
The British.

06:37
George Gavrilis
British? Interesting. Okay.

06:39

Laura Tedesco
And the senior British archaeologist was married to Agatha Christie.

06:45
George Gavrilis
Oh.

06:45

Laura Tedesco
So Agatha Christie was working at that site way back. And it had continued as a British excavation off and on, you know, interrupted by World War II and then resumed over the years. I was there on behalf of the Metropolitan Museum. And then there was a small British team and a small Danish team that also joined. It was basically a city that we were excavating. 

07:10

Laura Tedesco

And it was very new and interesting discoveries at the time, because traditionally, scholars and archaeologists thought that the earliest cities, so let me just put a little time marker on it, let's just say roughly around 4,000 BC, to 3,000 BC, that those earliest cities were all founded and clustered in Iraq in between the two rivers, the Tigris and Euphrates. And people thought that because that's where all the archaeology was being done. That's what they're finding, and so that writes the story.

07:46

Laura Tedesco
Well, then there was the first Gulf War, and that really interrupted people's ability to do archaeology in Iraq. So all the archaeologists, the Brits, the Italians, the Americans, they had to refocus where were they going to dig now. If you can't get into Iran, Iraq's a little bit difficult, like, hmmm. So people started focusing their research in Syria with a more concerted effort. 

08:16

Laura Tedesco
And as that happened, it shifted what archaeologists were finding, and what people who could read ancient texts that were being found in Syria were interpreting, was that the story wasn't quite like we thought for a hundred years. And that north of Iraq, this area of northern Syria, close to Turkey, it actually was very much an antecedent of sophistication and urban development, just prior to the major cities that we think of in Iraq.

08:50
George Gavrilis

And it wasn't a major river.

08:52
Laura Tedesco

Tell Brak, the site where I was working, was not on a major river.

08:55
George Gavrilis
Was a major river even nearby?

08:58
Laura Tedesco
Might have been and we did have a specialist on the project, who looked at shifting water courses. It's been a while now, so I'm not super fresh on what the research was showing then, or even now. Well, no one's really excavated in Syria now for ten years because of the civil war.

09:20
George Gavrilis
Hey, Laurie, so— so when a civil war happens, as it did in Syria, where do archaeologists go? They can no longer work at those sites.

09:29

Laura Tedesco
Right.

09:30

George Gavrilis
Where did all the archaeologists working on Syria's sites end up going after 2011?

09:34
Laura Tedesco
Good question. I know one went to Sudan, and shifted focus to Sudan. The others? Maybe Jordan. So elsewhere in the Levant, maybe Lebanon. I lost track of what those scholars are focused on right now.

09:54

George Gavrilis
What did you dig up personally in Syria? What kind of things were you holding between your fingers?

10:00

Laura Tedesco
Yeah. I was digging through about a thousand years of history in the unit that I was assigned to excavate. I was sort of the "senior"— I put in like, extended quotations, the senior archaeologist in the area I was excavating. But there were ten Syrian men who were doing the hard stuff like the pickaxes and the shoveling and the heavy lifting, just to make that clear. 

10:28
Laura Tedesco

When you're digging through a thousand years of history over the course of say, eight, ten weeks, you're finding a lot of different things. I went through a couple levels of houses, small, modest houses, and then you get below that, and oh, this appears to be something that was a space where animals were kept, because here's a trough and a watering hole. You have to kind of interpret it. So there wasn't one single thing I was excavating. You're looking through, going in reverse order through time.

11:04

Laura Tedesco

"May 18, 2000, 2 am. Hasaka, Hotel Sanibel. Back at the hotel after hours in the police station. I'm sitting by the window, and I can see the minder just outside. After hours of questions they brought in the translator, and he was sympathetic to me. But they said they'd bring me back tomorrow for more questions. I hope this ends soon and I can go on to Aleppo."

11:43

George Gavrilis
Syria at the time is a police state. I'm wondering if you had encounters periodically with Syrian police.

11:50

Laura Tedesco
I did. I did indeed, George. I didn't understand how severe a police state it was, and how oppressive it was for the Syrians, until I had a personal experience with it. I was leaving the excavation. I was traveling by myself and I was taking a bus from the city Hasaka, which is close to the border with Turkey. And I was taking a bus to Aleppo. I was traveling not just with my personal suitcase, but I also was tasked with bringing a couple of plastic bins full of equipment from the excavation, and I got stopped at the bus stop by the police. 

12:33

Laura Tedesco
At first, I thought they were curious because I was a foreign lady by herself at a bus stop in rural Syria. It became clear that it was more than that. And they opened up everything I had in the parking lot of the bus stop, which was creating quite a lot of attention. People were coming by and watching and I barely spoke Arabic. I could make out some. 

12:55

Laura Tedesco

And they went through everything in my suitcase—my toiletry bag, they were pulling out tampons, and face cream. And then they went through the bins of the archaeological gear and there was a bag of pottery sherds in there, which were to be taken to the States for research.

13:17

Laura Tedesco
I could not produce the paperwork that satisfied the police to confirm that this was legitimate, that these pottery sherds— they were broken pieces of pottery, so nothing that was ever going to show up in a museum. They were strictly for research value, but you still needed permission rightly so, to take those out.

13:38

Laura Tedesco
I was brought to a police station in Hasaka. And interrogated, is the right word, for about six hours, it might have been longer, it felt like a very long time. I was only allowed to make one phone call. It was not an international phone. I don't remember the option of calling the States. I called the only Syrian whose number I had.

14:04

Laura Tedesco
I didn't realize this till later, I was now implicating him, right, because the police— it's so oppressive. They've got this American lady in a police station way out in eastern Syria, for suspicion of looting or smuggling. And she wants to call one Syrian. So I called him and I have a feeling the police really harassed him and his family after that. And there really wasn't much he could do for me.

14:32
Laura Tedesco

After the questioning, the police let me go. They brought me to a hotel in Hasaka where I stayed the night by myself in a room. I knew I was being watched just outside the hotel. I wasn't allowed to leave the hotel. And the next day, they put me on a bus. I took the bus to Aleppo and I had a minder, they sent a minder with me, who sat a few seats back on the opposite row. 

14:58

Laura Tedesco

He wasn't stealthy. It wasn't intended to be stealthy. They wanted me to know I was being, you know, escorted out. I got to Aleppo. That's where I met up with the others on the archeological dig. And I was, wow, listen to this story. Sorry I'm late, guys.

15:17

George Gavrilis
Did you show up with or without the fragments?

15:19

Laura Tedesco
Without.

15:21

George Gavrilis
So they kept them? The police kept them?

15:22

Laura Tedesco
They did and George, let me put this in context. Think of a quart-sized Ziploc bag. That was it. I had like survey equipment, which if you don't know what survey equipment is, it can look like surveillance equipment. But it was archaeological survey equipment— a tripod and dusty tools and a quart-sized Ziploc bag of broken pottery sherds.

15:45

Laura Tedesco
I went to Aleppo for a couple of days and then I had to fly to Yerevan, because I had onward research to do in Armenia. So I go from Aleppo to Damascus by a bus. I get on a flight in Damascus to Yerevan, and the minder was still there. The minder was on the flight with me from Damascus, to Yerevan, all the way to the little hostel I was staying in in Yerevan. And it wasn't until I got to Yerevan that I could actually call somebody in my family and be like, I'm fine. I'm in Armenia. But that was weird. Let me tell you what happened.

16:24

Laura Tedesco
And it never occurred to me to contact the US Embassy in Damascus. I wish it had, but it hadn't occurred to me to do that. And now I work for the State Department, and that would be the first thing I would tell somebody to do. But at that time, I just didn't want to get in trouble or I just wanted to leave after that.

16:42

George Gavrilis
Did you end up going back to Syria after that?

16:45

Laura Tedesco
I didn't. I did stay in touch for a while with some friends that I made there. But I never have gone back. I'd love to go back one day when it's possible.

17:04

Laura Tedesco

"April 23, 2000. It's Easter. My only acknowledgement was a treat of some Easter candy, and I caught a glimpse of the Pope on TV. Abdel Jalil brought me a horse today for riding. He'd promised he'd do so, but I don't know what he did to find a horse. And I jumped on, galloping along, and then she stopped dead and dropped her head. And I flew over, landing safely, but pretty bruised. The highlight was seeing Abdel Jalil."

17:40

George Gavrilis
What about the Syrian dude? Did you stay in touch with him?

17:42

Laura Tedesco
I did. I did. We had a really lovely friendship. And he would write letters to me in Arabic, which I couldn't read. But I had a good friend in grad school who was an Arabist. So she was fluent in Arabic and she would read the letters for me. And then tell me what they said. They were really love letters. And very sweet and I have kept them all.

18:09

George Gavrilis
So you dated.

18:10

Laura Tedesco
We didn't date, George.

18:11

George Gavrilis
You courted. 

18:12

Laura Tedesco
We didn't— We didn't even—

18:14

George Gavrilis
He courted you unbeknownst to you.

18:16

Laura Tedesco
Kind of. I mean, I think I caught on later that he was interested. Because once he invited me to his sister's house, where I went, he did say there that monotheists, so Christians, Jews, and Muslims, he had checked, and it was okay for a Muslim man to marry a Christian woman. And he knew I was Christian. 

18:38

George Gavrilis
Yeah, he was getting ready.

18:39

Laura Tedesco
This is a part of Syria, where there were quite a few Christians, you know, so it's like, it was—

18:44

George Gavrilis
Right, yeah.

18:45

Laura Tedesco
It wouldn't have been unheard of, to have a mixed religion marriage.

18:51

George Gavrilis
No, not in that part of Syria. There were a lot of interfaith friendships, relationships, and so on.

18:58

Laura Tedesco
Sure. Yeah, sure. I even remember visiting a church in Hasaka. So. And I liked him also. I think I probably did in my mind go to be like, well, what would this be like? I mean, he's kind of a farmer. And he was very handsome. And he also had only one arm.

19:20

George Gavrilis
I like the way you just threw that in.

19:24

Laura Tedesco
Yeah.

19:25

George Gavrilis
Just by the way.

19:27

Laura Tedesco
His right arm was severed, just above the elbow.

19:30

George Gavrilis
That's pretty hard if you're a farmer, and you only have one arm.

19:33

Laura Tedesco
Yeah. That was something we would talk about sometimes, what that was like for him. And he asked me once— did I think that God punished him for something when his arm was severed when he was 11 or 12 years old and a donkey cart fell on top of his arm and injured it to such an extent that the rest of it had to come off. He had asked me once, did I think that he was being punished cosmically. And that's why his arm was severed, and it didn't happen to one of his brothers. I didn't think it was he was being punished. That's what I said to him.

20:12

Laura Tedesco
I never saw him again. I did continue to receive letters. I would write letters to him. I think he received them. I know he received some of them. And I don't know what's become of him. And I do think about him.

20:27

George Gavrilis
Yeah, the country's been at war for ten years. 

20:30

Laura Tedesco
It has.

20:31

George Gavrilis
You wonder.

20:32

Laura Tedesco
Yeah.

20:32

Laura Tedesco

"April 6, 1994, New York. Tumult right now, nervousness in my life about the schoolwork and all the deadlines. I feel grotesquely mediocre, as if school has eclipsed so many facets of my creativity. And I am yearning for light. I just need time and solitude. If I allow myself the distance to see what it is I want, I don't even know what it is."

21:20

George Gavrilis
Tell me about Rita in graduate school.

21:23

Laura Tedesco
So Rita— Rita Wright was my PhD advisor at NYU. She was, she is, brilliant, and a little bit formidable. I was definitely not her star student. There were other grad students who seemed to be really excelling in a way in graduate school that— I was doing fine, but— Rita, I didn't know it at the time, I just thought she had like the most exacting standards, and nothing was going to be quite good enough. 

21:55

Laura Tedesco

What I think Rita was very, in her way, in her kind way, trying to groom her female students, to that, you're going to have to work twice as hard and your work is going to have to be exceptional in a field that's dominated by men, so don't mess it up.

22:16

Laura Tedesco
I didn't understand that until much later. She cut her teeth at Harvard in a graduate program that was almost entirely male-dominated, and I think she really learned some probably difficult lessons. And she maybe was trying to help her female students learn some things that maybe she didn't know at the time.

22:43

Laura Tedesco
"February 16, 1996. Today, while in conversation with a senior colleague at the Metropolitan, a good familiarity between us, I think a mutual respect, certainly on my side, and we spoke on the state of the field of ancient Near Eastern archaeology, and he told me the most important characteristics are moral integrity and academic integrity. I think Rita has these traits."

23:19

Laura Tedesco
One of the kindest things Rita did for me was— I was a young fellow at the Metropolitan Museum, I was a second or third year grad student. I had this fellowship at the Metropolitan Museum, where I got to study some artifacts that were in the museum's collection. And I ultimately wrote my master's thesis on that. That's beside the point. 

23:41

Laura Tedesco
As a fellow, you are invited to give a talk on the topic of your research. I was young, in graduate school, and was my day to give a talk. And there were all these very fancy curators in attendance. It wasn't open to the public— or it might have been open to the public, but I don't remember really many public being there.

24:01

Laura Tedesco
It was mostly the very learned curators of the Metropolitan Museum and this one male curator— I won't say what department he worked in, but he was in an archaeological-ish department. And he was sitting in the front row right in front of my podium where I was delivering the talk nervously. Like, get it, George, you're a young graduate student, and you're presenting your research to the most senior respected people in your field.

24:30
George Gavrilis
And that's terrifying already, and then add a gender difference to that. And it's double terrifying.

24:35
Laura Tedesco
A little bit, yes. And the curator, this famous in-that-field guy— while I delivered the talk, he shifted in his chair from left to right, he sighed audibly, he crossed his arms. At one point, he tilted his head back, like he might have been, I don't know, dozing off. But his gestures and his noises, while I was nervously giving this 20-minute talk, were so distracting and upsetting.

25:08
Laura Tedesco
And at the time, Rita didn't come to that talk, she might have been busy with something else. But when I got back to NYU, so you know, you go from uptown to downtown, and I go back to Rita's office, and she's like, how did it go? By the way, she had had me practice that talk 10 times in front of her. 

25:26

Laura Tedesco
And I told her, oh Rita, there was so-and-so he was sitting right in front of me, and he did you know, x, y, z, like I just described to you. And she went ballistic. She was like, he did that on purpose. He was definitely trying to distract you and diminish your presentation. It was her way of sticking up for me. If she ever followed up privately and contacted that guy, I have no idea.

25:54
George Gavrilis
So I get it that you don't want to identify him by his department. So just tell us his name.

25:58

Laura Tedesco
[laughs]

26:01

George Gavrilis
Come on, what's his name?

26:02

Laura Tedesco
I'm not saying.

26:04

George Gavrilis

Does it start with an A?

26:06

Laura Tedesco
No.

26:07
George Gavrilis
Does it start with a B?

26:09

Laura Tedesco
Stop it.

26:10

George Gavrilis
Okay.

26:12

Laura Tedesco
Yeah.

26:13

George Gavrilis
I almost wish we could talk to him, be like, what the fuck, man? Have you become a better human being since then?

26:19

Laura Tedesco
Yeah, I'd keep your expectations low.

26:22

George Gavrilis
Yeah.

26:23

Laura Tedesco
Yeah, but maybe he has.

26:24

George Gavrilis
You can always hope for a miracle.

26:25

Laura Tedesco
I don't even know if he still works at the Met. You know, this was what— 1995? That was a while ago.

26:31

George Gavrilis
Hmmm.

26:32

Laura Tedesco

It didn't undo me entirely. It was a good learning experience. And Rita's reaction— she never said to me, you're overreacting, Laura. She never said, Oh, yeah, just get used to it. She was furious. And I think on my behalf. And maybe for all the time something like that happened to her. And she was a MacArthur Genius fellow. So, you know, people need to sit straight and not audibly sigh when she's delivering a talk, but I can imagine that it probably had happened to her in life also.

27:08

George Gavrilis
What's his name?

27:09

Laura Tedesco
[laughs]

27:10

George Gavrilis
Just kidding. Okay, I'll lay off.

27:13

Laura Tedesco
I'll have to go back to my journal, George, on that one. I'm sure I wrote it down.

27:17

George Gavrilis
Yeah. Does it make me a horrible human being that I want to punch him in the dick?

27:20

Laura Tedesco
Please do.

27:24

George Gavrilis
Will you come with me, and deliver the second punch?

27:26

Laura Tedesco
Yeah. I'll punch him in the neck.

27:31

George Gavrilis
Well, Rita, Rita sounds awesome.

27:33

Laura Tedesco
She is.

27:35

George Gavrilis
And there's something so wonderful about having a strong mentor like that. I wish all human beings had a strong mentor in their life.

27:43

Laura Tedesco
Yeah, right?

27:44

George Gavrilis
With the right moral compass—

27:47

Laura Tedesco
Right.

27:48

George Gavrilis
I should qualify it.

27:49

Laura Tedesco
There was something I was able to do for Rita, in an un-verbalized gesture of thanks and support to her, in that I helped arrange for her to come to Afghanistan in 2011. And she had not been there since 1978.

28:08

George Gavrilis
Oh my God. Wow.

28:10

Laura Tedesco
She was there to do research at Mes Aynak on a little short research project. I really did a lot of background work to help facilitate her visit, where she stayed and made sure that a reputable driver was taking care of her and you know, working the network, calling in some favors. That was very meaningful to me that Rita could come back to Afghanistan, which is where she had her first archeological experience in the late '70s, and then I, much later in my career, and—thanks to Rita—was as far along in my career as I was, could help facilitate her return. And I loved seeing her there.

28:56

George Gavrilis
That is, that's very cool. Do you think she'd be open to talking with us about her experiences in Afghanistan back in the '70s?

29:05

Laura Tedesco
I think she would, I think that she would. She's retired now. And I know she's very busy writing books, and, you know, finishing articles, the way academics always have articles in the train. I spoke to her actually, just last week. She wanted to talk about Afghanistan on a Sunday morning. She sent me an email and said, call me, so I called her immediately and we had a long chat.

29:29

George Gavrilis
Nice. It's nice.

29:34

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.

29:50

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 17: Punch in the D*ck — Love of Archaeology, Part 3 of 3

Topics Covered in this Episode
Syria, in 1998
Syria, Tell Brak excavation
Archaeology and civil war
What Laura was digging up in Syria
Getting arrested in Syria
Syrian friend Abdel Jalil
Rita Wright, Metropolitan Museum fellowship

Recorded on July 19, 2021