Urban Acrheology

I recently attended a lecture by Dr. Rebbeca Yamin. Her presentation dealt mainly with the historical excavations in my favorite city, Philadelphia.

"It's like I'm playing in the sandbox," said Yamin as she attempted to explain her job in the dark auditorium filled with student and faculty on lookers alike. But she isn't exactly playing with sand. No, in reality she's dealing with dirt, rock, and human feces, which Yamin playfully refers to as "goo."

The lecture begins the process, the meticulous removal of the aforementioned, layer by layer, inch by inch. As she moved from slide to slide it was apparent that Yamin loved every second of it.
"What are you doing now?" asked a student in the back of the crowd.
It was then, if even for a second, you could see some gleam of eye, some reluctance to answer that only foreshadowed her answer. She's not working in the field currently.

Though I found her presentation compelling, despite her reliance on dishes, it was that moment I found inspiring. I mean, this woman loves her job, "I can't believe they pay me."

But why shouldn't she? She's dealing with important things. She's taking pieces of the past and making them come alive. A dish isn't just a dish. It's a pathway to a person. To a life. No, let me correct myself, to a whole lot of lives. This is history of the undocumented. A Romantic approach to the past. A way imagining our forefathers' generation that isn't based on written document, per say, but rather through the incorporation of the human soul.

"You'd be surprised about what you own says about you," states Yasmin, though taken with a fine grain of salt, and it is true. The market place,and it's spectrum of goods, itself is open and what you choose to buy might not define your life but it can allot an insight to your society, your world.

At times she read her narratives aloud to the crowd. But she wasn't trying to define the well known historical figures of our nation. Instead she writes and learns about the common man: the barber, the priest, the accountant. Instead of focusing on dominant views generally analyzed by dominant political authors she explores the depths of the working class; what did these beliefs, such as federalism and abolitionism, mean to the average man-- history's unsung heroes -- and how did it effect their lives both socially and economically.

These are important ideas. An individual can define history but only if you let them. Archeologists and historians like Yamin are something that the field of history needs. The public needs a perspective with people they can relate to. Kids need to learn about how the political ideals of a time can affect the society of the common man just as much as they need to learn of History's prominent figures. These are the real movers, these are the people who fuel the engine, who pump the blood into the heart of change. They just aren't the face.