Digging My Grave

As I left off the account of my sojourn amongst the living and the dead of Spain last week, I was enjoying the beginning of a blissful Monday of rest after a week’s worth of toiling with pick and shovel under the unrelenting sun of the north central plains.  (By the way, I have, in fact, discovered that My Fair Lady is dead wrong.  The rain in Spain definitely does NOT fall mainly on the plain.  We have has scarcely a drop in two weeks here.  But I digress…).  After Monday’s rest, our hosts took us out again on Tuesday for an excursion.  The previous Tuesday was devoted to an excavation of a Roman villa, a trip to the Cantabrian coast for a dip in the Atlantic and, to round things off, a visit to Altamira and the Paleolithic cave paintings which rival the more famous cave art of the French cavern at Lascaux.  The next Tuesday trip was to the picturesque town of Segovia, perched in the central Sierra de Guadarrama just north of Madrid.  More on that and our other excursions later.  Today’s focus is properly on what I came here to do: dig the dead of Pintia’s La Ruedas necropolis.

This is a place that my new friend Carlos rightly calls magico, and that word has stuck with me as the most apt.  I already feel that a part of me will always remain here communing with these long gone Vacceans, these enigmatic Iron Age people of over two millennia past who built impressive walled cities, struggled against the irresistible encroachment of the Roman

The  view north from our dig site.  Each of the stelae in the foreground represents
a previously excavated tomb; a constant reminder of what we are about here.
This view is part of what makes Pintia so magical.

Empire, and left no written records of their own.  We have only fragmentary and tantalizing mentions here and there by Greek and Roman chroniclers who themselves were often relating second and third hand information and were biased besides.  There is one account of the siege of a Vaccean town by Hannibal, the Carthaginian general and scourge of the Roman Republic. With the town surrounded by Hannibal’s army with its war elephants and state-of-the-art military tactics, a warrior from the town emerged from the gates and rode back and forth in front of the enemy host shouting taunts and insults and demanding single combat.  A champion from the besieging army took up the challenge, and the two soldiers faced each other alone –  one clad no doubt in armor and wielding his sword, the other most likely nearly naked, brandishing his spear.  The Vaccean was slain and the town opened its gates and surrendered; but not before the fallen warrior’s son claimed his father’s body for the honor of a sky burial where his soul would be transported to the afterlife by the sacred vultures.

A collection of human bone fragments collected at the
necropolis.  Most of these have gone through the cremation
process.  The pale white bones were exposed to the elements
and the vultures in a 'sky' burial.  (For more items from the
dig, see my Pintia Artifacts album).

See what I mean?  These are the forgotten people I and my fellow volunteers are coaxing back out of the earth of north-central Spain, and they warrant remembering.  With every pot shard and fragment of wrought iron, with every piece of grey or black cremated bone or bleached white sky burial remains, I feel we are making that many infinitesimally small steps towards understanding these people on the western fringes of the Celtic world.  We may never truly understand them; these ancient dead will likely never relinquish their last secrets.  But we sweat and toil in the dirt to that end; in the process we are becoming a well-coordinated, cohesive team in which every individual discovery is, in fact, the group’s discovery and celebrated as such.  We are now down deep enough that we are beginning to uncover actual tombs with their grave goods and the excitement is palpable.  As it turns out, our site has proven to be a rich one.  We have already excavated two tombs, and are in the process of digging two more; we will likely not get to the three, perhaps four other tombs we strongly suspect slumber just under our feet.  Needless to say, we step very gingerly in the 4 x 8 meter hole we have created.

My corner before excavation.  The three limestone slabs were
thought to be capstones to a tomb.  (For more pictures of
Tomb 261, see my online slideshow)

My first real jolt of contact with the dead here came, as one might expect, from finding human remains.  We had been finding bones all along, but they had been animal bones, to the best of my knowledge, from graveside funeral feasts and offerings.  Then one day early in the dig, while screening the dirt for artifacts, I picked up a bone that looked decidedly different.  This bone fragment – the size of the end joint of my thumb, was a dark grey on the outside with black charring on the inner part, and was quite hard (mineralized).  The staff archaeologist I showed the piece to initially thought it was rock, then maybe animal bone.  However, I had a hunch that this bone had undergone intense heat for an extended time – not just a cooking fire.  So we showed it to Carlos I (the head of the Centro de Estudios Vacceas), who confirmed that it was human bone that had survived the cremation process.  As I turned this little fragment over in my hand it came to me.  This is part of a person.  That the person had died over 2,000 years before was immaterial to me at that moment.  This bone represented someone who had walked the ground I was standing on, had gazed northwards to the hills I looked at as I dug the dirt of the Duero Valley.  This was someone who had perhaps raised a family, had loved his wife, someone who had doted on her children and smiled as they played with the toys we had already begun finding.  I felt an onrush of complicated and contradictory emotions that all vied for my attention: exultation at the discovery and my ability to correctly interpret it, wonder at this intimate contact with the past, discomfort at holding what was left of a fellow human being.  In the end, I of course went right back to work, but not without a newly acquired and sober realization of just what we were doing here.  I sent a small prayer back through the ages to ask for understanding from those whose millennia of slumber we were disturbing. 

My tomb at end of day, with curve of the top
of a black clay jar visible.

Last Wednesday afternoon I was given a corner of one of the units to excavate where it was thought a tomb might be hiding.  Another possible tomb in the same was assigned to a couple of other volunteers, while the remainder worked on leveling and defining and exploring the other unit, from which the big stone stelae had been removed the previous day. 

The reason my corner was thought to contain a tomb was the presence of three flat, overlapping pieces of limestone; such an arrangement usually indicates that these are the capstones covering and protecting a grave, even though there was no stele over it (this was thought to have been shifted due to plowing).  So the first task was to excavate around the capstones and carefully remove them one at a time.  As soon as the first limestone slab came off and I began to clean the area, my trowel exposed the unmistakable curve of the lip of a black clay pottery bowl or jar.  We had to close up for the night at this point, leaving me with tantalizing visions of what lay beneath the other two capstones....  Meanwhile, 'my' grave, the first of the 2013 season, was officially designated Tomb 261.

Posing with artifacts in situ.

Thursday, needless to say, I eagerly got back to work on the remaining two slabs.  Once they were removed, I was free to gradually expose that jar by bringing down the level of the earth around it.  In doing so, I uncovered another bowl – this time of the polished black variety – and then a third.  Pretty soon I had exposed a small hoard of grave goods: four larger bowls and jars (three of the lovely polished black), a perfect little goblet, an unusual small decorated ‘bird’ bowl of uncertain use (perhaps an oil lamp), and a tiny clay box of the type thought to be used to store and serve salt.  The staff got pretty excited because several of the pieces were either unique or quite rare and different. 

Once exposed though quite careful, delicate trowel and brush work, then came the really nerve-wracking, painstaking process of removing the dirt around and under the pieces and one-by-one strategically remove them so as not to disturb the other artifacts.  Kind of like high stakes pick-up sticks and Jenga combined.  At times I was using my tiny dental picks and removing just a few grains of sandy soil at a time to get under the more delicate ceramics. 

Perfect goblet in foreground with red clay bowl and three bowls and jars of the
'polished black' variety that is my personal favorite type.  

So intent and absorbed was I in this meticulous work, that I entirely failed to note the arrival of the project documentary team until someone told me to look up.  Look up I did and found myself staring straight into the lens of a big video camera – just about jumped out of my Timberlands!  The videographers wandered about filming all the activity and coming back to my corner now and again.  Then came the extractions.  When a tomb’s artifacts are removed, the all other work on the site halts and everyone gathers around above, while other key people help out in the pit.  So I had an audience for my first removal of delicate, only partially intact 2,300 year old grave goods.  I was petrified; I think whole minutes went by without my taking a breath until I had finally cupped my hands under an artifact, ever so gently lifting it out of the soil which seemed reluctant to relinquish its treasure, and handed it up to competent, experienced hands above to be packed up safely. 

A view from the 'back' of tomb 261 showing black
clay jar (that did not make it out intact) small 'bird' bowl,
and in front left, the tiny clay box of the type used to
store and serve salt.

Wipe brow, breathe, repeat.  In the process I exposed yet another piece hiding underneath and had to carefully expose that.  Wipe brow, breathe, repeat – seven more times until all eight pieces were removed, all the while being videotaped and having various instructions called down in Spanish.  Amazingly, the pieces that were intact came out still in that state; the cracked and broken pots I managed to transfer to the storage trays (ordinary Styrofoam) in one lump with the contents still in place.

The small pieces.  Bull box, bird jar,
and surprise ladle(?) found
underneath the other two.

The moment that I will carry with me always was the little clay box.  It was in the ground at an angle, next to the little bird bowl, and when I pulled it out the people above sighed and ooohed and clapped; I turned it around and came face to face with the stylized head of a miniature bull on the front.  I stared at it and thought of the skillful hands who had crafted the tiny box and had put that simple, elegant bull head on it 2,300 years ago.  What had he been thinking?  Had he made it as a special gift for his child?  Was this toy-like artifact made specially for the funeral of a loved one, or was it something that had been used every day, touched by curious young hands, perhaps?  The quotidian meaning of this object remains enigmatic, but for me it was another magical jolt of electric contact with the past, a frisson of communion with a long-dead potter.  I described this to a Spanish archaeologist later who smiled knowingly and ran his hand over his arm and looked a question at me – yes, I replied, I had felt the goose bumps, and I feel them even as I write these words.

Fellow Volunteers Ben and Jen working on
Tomb 262, which yielded 9 major artifacts,
including an iron blade and a tiny goblet.

Thus my first successful tomb excavation.  The whole team was pretty pumped and all the

other volunteers eager to get at their own graves (odd phrasing, that) and see what they contained.  That evening we got the second tomb done as well – a much more complicated job with more artifacts in more precarious condition all jumbled together.  Again, all other work stopped and we held our collective breath as each delicate piece was extracted one by one.  Another success for the team to celebrate.  The pub at the little town of Padilla del Duero was hopping that night!

Next day it was back to cleaning, leveling, exposing, defining, screening, mapping and drawing the site as we took it further and further down in search of the Dead of Las Ruedas necropolis.  More on that later….