By Jeffrey W. Baron, MA candidate, University of Colorado Boulder
In July 2017, I had the great fortune of joining students from Newcastle University, the University of Granada, and Bournemouth University, on the Alhambra Royal Workshops Project, an excavation in Granada, Spain.
My first year as a master’s student in Religious Studies at the University of Colorado, Boulder had provoked research questions which seemed to demand conversation with archaeology. After a generous invitation from Dr. Alberto García Porras, one of the project’s directors, I was quickly put in contact with co-director Dr. Chloe Duckworth and project coordinator David Govantes Edwards, who kindly welcomed me to the team and brought me up to speed. I soon knew my Marshalltowns from my WHS trowels and I had sought out and secured the right footwear, dig clothes, and sun-block for the 40+ degree temperatures which are not uncommon for an Andalucian summer. Before I knew it, I was being passed around the skilled and specialized hands of archaeologists Professor Kate Welham, Dr. Derek Pitman, Ben Moore, Eleonora Montanari, and Laura Martín Ramos, who each offered me a crash-course in their particular expertise. The first few days of uncovering backfill from previous digs quickly brought me to familiarity with the variety of excavation tools and were a welcome jolt in the early morning working hours.
Before long I felt I was getting a taste of all that goes into an excavation: I was drawing and measuring masonry features around the site, logging GPS coordinates on furnace corners, and analyzing soil with a magnetometer endearingly called the “brain-scrambler.” On one day I carefully removed pieces of a ceramic jug, and on the next day, I was cleaning and piecing together the same find. I couldn’t have asked for a better learning experience as a first-timer to excavation.
As the dig progressed, our team uncovered all sorts of glassware, glazed ceramics, animal bones, and metalwork among a variety of furnace, masonry, and plumbing features. I failed miserably to draw these artifacts and features to scale(!), but I was thrilled to give it a try. And after years of wondering what the hell those orange tripod and corresponding mage-staff things were, I was introduced to the total station! (If you’re curious about the total station, see our introduction to it here)
I was clueless going in to this dig, and I feel I have left with at least half a clue as to how archaeologists function both in their individual specialties as well as how they come together to form a well-oiled excavation machine. As I head back to the research library, I am already nostalgic for my experience digging in the Alhambra Royal Workshops Project. I love the hermitic life of a historian as much as the next guy or gal, but the excitement of direct engagement with the past, physically touching the strata of various centuries, has left me feeling something like Bilbo Baggins coming back to the Shire after a great adventure.
Neither of the East nor of the West 