Since going to Egypt in 2016 and especially after my trip to Israel last October, archaeology has become much more interesting to me. It has a point – making history come alive.
And recently I had a bout with archaeology in My Village, even though that one raised questions about the past and didn’t give answers. At least not yet.
You see, My Village is a relatively new village. The adults know the people who first came and founded the village. When those people came, there was no one living in the area and it was just out in the country in the middle of nowhere. However, as my language helper was digging in the dirt to make mud bricks for a new house, he found shards of pottery that were obviously from some time period before the current village was founded. So he and I both started to wonder – Who used to live here? What ethnic group were they from? How long ago was it? Why did they leave? (Well, I’m not sure that he wondered all of those things, but I did.)
These are the kinds of questions that I think they try to answer using archaeology. But I don’t know enough or have enough time or tools to do more archaeology in My Village, so these are questions we may never know answers to. Who knows?