Imagine yourself 1,000 years from now. You, like every other warm-blooded human being of the day will be long dead (unless modern medicine takes one hell of a leap forward, but still, I'm not sure you'd want to live that long anyway). So 1,000 years from now, in the year 3010, you'll be dead and the only evidence of your existence will be the pile of your bones decomposition decided to leave alone for awhile. That's all. Just your bones. And now let's imagine that your burial spot ends up becoming an archaeological site in the year 3010. A team of archaeologists begins to excavate and lo and behold, they find a human burial (you). Now, things can go one of two ways: the first option involves the lead archaeologist looking down at the exposed portion of your right maxilla and saying "Eh, just another pile of bones; won't tell us much. Cover it back up and move on." While this may be a generalization, most people would like to think of themselves as a bit more than a pile of bones. If you find yourself in that category, the second option may be more appealing. The alternate ending to your discovery would entail the lead archaeologist seeing the exposed right maxilla, understanding the wealth of information your burial would bring in interpreting the site, and calling in the bioarchaeologist for specialized excavation.
Now, think of all the times you've opened up a history book. You see the big names like Napoleon, Genghis Khan, Hatshepsut, Lao Tzu, Martin Luther, Maimonides, Mohandas Gandhi; the list goes on, but you get the idea. Now think of the nameless individuals who followed these extraordinary people. The average men and women who hung on the words of great leaders and those who fought against tyrannical figures. The young men in the armies, the average people who performed the laborious tasks which built the empires and cities of our past. Were they not extraordinary too? Were they not the numbers that made the movements possible? And yet, we don't know their names. We know they existed, but we don't know who they were.
The point is, many people go through their lives thinking about themselves and those that come into contact with them. What is most striking to me however, is the fact that most of these people are completely unaware of the past; they don't see how our lives are essentially mirror images of our ancestor's lives. And too often we forget about the people that came before us. Go back 300 years, go back 3,000 years. It doesn't matter how long ago these individuals lived, they were still human. They loved the way we love. They hurt the way we hurt. They laughed the way we laugh. They became angry and agitated. They discovered. They made love. They created, they pondered, they wrote, and they spoke. They believed, they hoped and they aspired. They saw the beauty of nature and they felt the heat of the sun upon their skin. They worried about life. They wondered about death. They were once in the middle of their lives just as we are now.
Now think about the pile of bones.
It is human nature to preserve and protect our lives at all costs. Our capacity for emotion and our ability to consider the future has enabled us to regard our lives as more than the biological cycles they are. And because of this unique ability, we also possess an eminent fear of being forgotten and disolved into the creeping nature of time. But it's important to realize, that whether we like it or not, bones is how we end up. Once we come to terms with our mortality and our own impending situation of disarticulation it becomes a little easier to understand why the work of bioarchaeologists is so crucial. The bioarchaeologist gives the average individual of the past another chance to live and chance to help change the world. My decision to go into bioarchaeology then is centered around the belief that I will be able to give a voice to the forgotten. With my work, I can re-create the story of an individual whose existence has been lost in the annals of history. And while we tell the stories of these people, they will reciprocate by aiding us in our endeavor to piece together the history of our species.
So this blog will be an account of the beginning years of my career as a bioarchaeologist. But it will also tell a tale. A tale where I help piece together the stories of lost ancestors and in the midst of my work, they help me find myself and piece together my own story.
