Day 7: Wednesday 31st May 2023
The dreams of archaeology students…
Archaeology is a fascinating subject which can be subject to many interpretations and changes in how we view the world of the past. As such it can be the root of many peoples dreams. So I decided I’d find out what some of my fellow archaeology students dreams are. Though naturally with such a broad subject so were peoples dreams. We had many from ‘discovering Atlantis’ to finding out the way people behaved in the past by viewing their botanical food remains.
Though on the darker side of dreams is archaeological nightmares, talking to Alex I found out that not all finds are good finds on a dig. Whilst many of the students, when asked what they would like to find replied with ‘a human skeleton’, Alex said that this is normally a nightmare to find, though not because any spirits will be haunting your sleep but more because of the paper work required! Other than the large amount of paper work required, if one is found you often have to excavate it and this can be an agonising task for an archaeologist who may have another trench which has definitive finds in it and all you can think about is the other trench. Also plans for reburial must be made and sometimes even a coroner must be called!
Just like the field of archaeology my question was left somewhat to interpretation and I also heard about what people had actually dreamt about archaeology. Some tasks in archaeology can be quite repetitive (the magic dust of causing dreams). Sometimes archaeology can be buried quite deep in the ground and troweling through meters of soil to get to the archaeology would be quite inefficient, so a 360 excavator machine will be used instead (aka a digger). One of our site supervisors Joel on another site was tasked with this job and said, ‘I watched a 360 excavator all day dreamt about watching it all day to wake up and watch it again.’ Another dream I heard about was from Izzie who said that after spending days troweling out the dirt from the walls, she dreamt that her pillow had turned into a rock and she had to trowel out the dirt from between it! She thinks she was actually half awake while dreaming about this and actually doing the action.
More unexpected insights to follow – stay tuned it!
