The New Criterion’s Stefan Beck is featured on the Taste Page in today’s Wall Street Journal. Always honing the edge of his prose with wit and vinegar, Stefan dishes up the dirt of his summer experience during an archaeological dig in Greece. Drawing from experiences at his alma mater, Dartmouth, Beck writes:
As the days wore on–and my back wore out–I became more and more impressed by the range of knowledge that mere “digging” required. Archaeology cuts across the shallow trench that divides the hard sciences from the humanities. To get the full value of the Mitrou Project requires some knowledge of technology, history, language (both ancient and modern), classical literature, zoology, botany, geology and art. (And how can I forget the charming field of mortuary analysis? Easily, in fact.) One student speaks with a local in a mixture of Greek and German; another reads John Julius Norwich’s “A Short History of Byzantium”; another explains how to date and distinguish two pieces of nearly identical brown pottery. The mind boggles at the sheer breadth of their learning.
Jeremy Rutter, a professor of classics at Dartmouth and the dig’s resident ceramics expert, said that he hopes to make the archaeology of Greece and the Aegean world “interesting and exciting enough to . . . undergraduates that they might consider . . . a field other than economics, business, government, pre-law or medicine.”
Majoring in classics may not seem the most glamorous option for undergrads–indeed, that discipline is probably the last bastion of the real academic misfit, the student who wants to learn for its own sake. But Mr. Rutter and his colleagues do offer a way for such library-bound students to see and explore some of the most beautiful places on earth.