Of Rocks and Real Archaeology

Petra is amazing!
The clash and conga of nature and mankind is stunning.
Never before I laid my eyes upon her for the first time had I beheld such beauty and grandeur.

But she is also a dream, a utopia and a mirage to the scientific mind as Egypt is to archaeological thinking and doing.
No real challenges or questions remain when excavating the monumental, the true essence of modern archaeology lies, or should lie, in researching the methods, motivations and minds of the common man.
It takes guts (I was going to refer to a different region of the human anatomy, but I figured I might save Owen the editing.) to get up at 4am and drag your drowsy posterior (you’re welcome, Owen) to a high tell uncertain about what you will find, and takes even more “guts” to drag said body part down the same tell you just got up on the dig in its shadow.

Let’s take a moment to honour those dust-ridden heroes of the unsung sites,
those brave men and women that leave in their wake a dust cloud of unseen proportion and who, when the world still sleeps, have breakfast without dragging their chairs.

Here’s looking at you, kid.