Zoe Trexel 27′

The process of excavation is sometimes uneventful. My teammates and I spent a long time in the recesses of our two sub-ops, F and Q, carving up the dirt carefully with our trowels in order to uncover the residuals of the 18th century. Perched on the edge of the square unit, we chat about our lives, our plans for Halloween, and other mundane things. At the same time, we slowly extract that which was once mundane to Philander Chase and other founding members of the college, who once inhabited this structure. The banality of some of these items is not lost on us, as numerous rusted nails, slate fragments, glass pieces appear out of the midden. Upon initial excavations, these pieces were at first exciting. As James Deetz calls them, these small things forgotten, no matter how commonplace underneath the ground, were still decidedly novel for those of us who had not excavated before.

In the past, I’ve done lab analysis before of ceramic sherds and faunal remains, or animal bones. Seeing these pieces emerge from cloth bags, but without being able to visualize their origin in the soil, their appearance felt almost mystical. After trodding home from excavation now every Monday, my dirt-layered jeans and fingernails tell a very different story. Despite this up close and personal experience with the dirt, the landscape, and the retention of objects in the soil, the mystic element still remains to a certain extent. For me, ceramic sherds feel the most rewarding to come across. Usually, a white line appears in the soil, but until you have extracted the sherd, the design is unknown. Most of the designs are plain white glaze or floral in nature.

Even more interesting to me are two unique ceramic sherds that I’ve uncovered throughout the process, each depicting “exotic” scenes. The first find in Unit F consisted of three sherds found in association which were refitted, showing a “savannah” scene with giraffes and palm trees abound. A few weeks later, in Unit Q, I rediscovered another sherd depicting two women carrying parcels under the arms under a background of low-lying shrubbery and huts. Neither of these scenes are of course common to Gambier or England, where these ceramics likely originated – however, they are nonetheless representative of the interests of those who purchased these ceramics. The designs are of an exotic, Othering nature, showing that the owners had some interest in places outside Gambier and even the West despite their isolation.

In the same way that the imagination of the Other in these two sherds seems absurd to me, I am equally abstracted from the objects that I remove in the excavation process. As I interrogate this interest in the exotic, I am also reproducing it in a way, privileging the objects that are the most “unique.” The creators of these ceramics and their purchasers were interested in the distant and far-away, much in the same way that we look upon these pieces now, entirely abstracted from their makers and owners.