In The End

A 2015 ten-pence piece.

In best archaeological practice, we excavate to the point where archaeology becomes quaternary geology. Depending upon how limited our time and how ambitious our goals have been, this may or may not occur, but it is always a shame to close a trench before reaching what is termed “the Natural” level. 

Today in Trench F, we reached a deep fissure in the bedrock against the wall of the tower, which despite containing fragments of brick, was judged to be below the deepest level in which we were likely to still recover more finds given the large amounts of unmixed, blueish-gray glacial clay constituting the layer. Therefore, we closed the trench by backfilling.

Before backfilling though, we always “salt” the trenches with modern coins. For two weeks before the excavation, I carefully went through my change in Cambridge and pulled out all the low-denomination, 2015 coins for this purpose. Swedish coins were added as well. The purpose—half in jest—is that if any future archaeologist excavates in the tower again but has not read the report for whatever reason or has chosen to re-excavate because they believed we missed something (both of which occur from time to time), they will find evidence of the deepest level we reached. 

However, this is fantastically unlikely to occur. On a philosophical level, the coins will rest just above the bedrock under the tower at Stensö until the end of time. They are, in the larger scope, some of the only things I ever possessed that I know the location of, precisely and definitively, in time after my death. And after I cease to know that, well, they’ll be just like everything else: an artifact that in the absence of a historical record—and even then—will never, under all powers of scientific scrutiny, reveal my identity. 

Coins and backfill aside, that’s the archaeological conundrum. As W.G. Sebald wrote in The Rings of Saturn, paraphrasing the East Anglian antiquarian Thomas Browne,  “We study the order of things… but we cannot grasp their innermost essence. And because it is so, it befits our philosophy to be writ small.”