If you have chosen to study the past through archaeology, rather than, say, rocks, it's probably because you are interested in people.
That's the core of good archaeology, and good Christianity, too: a deep and genuine love for humanity.
Working for the wellbeing of creation
True Christianity, the example set for us by Christ, is about compassion - to love others as we love ourselves. Tragically, there are many ways in which archaeology has not been compassionate. You may already feel outrage about the illegal exhumation of Indigenous cemeteries and theft of artefacts and human remains, even those belonging to people who still had living relatives. But beyond the stories that make the headlines, there is a vast history of the silencing of Indigenous voices in Western academia.
As you study, you will find Indigenous artefacts left unprovenanced, even those only a couple of hundred years old and removed from communities where they were still in use; simply noted as "purchased" or "acquired" with the name and identity of the crafter erased. You will even more often find Indigenous people's explanations of their own culture are left out of Western academic texts, seen as unimportant by archaeologists and anthropologists who believed that theories of structuralism or processualism enabled them to understand a culture more deeply than actually living in it.
You may be wondering how this applies to cultures from the astonishingly distant past. The people who carved deer on the rocks of Scandinavia and erected the stone monoliths of Gobekli Tepe died thousands of years ago, taking with them the precise meanings of their rituals and art. But we need to challenge the idea that these cultures truly have no living people with a connection to them. The interpretations of people who still live in those places and are immersed in societies descended from those cultures produce archaeology that is contextualised, not isolated in an English academic institution. Doing good archaeology requires humility and a willingness to listen.
Did you know that using the word "mummy" to refer to mummified Egyptian remains is offensive to modern Egyptians? I'm telling you that because no one ever taught me when I was at university. In fact, we rarely read texts written by Egyptian archaeologists. You have the chance to do better than that. The God of the Bible is not just a God of one nation, but of all. We see right at the beginning of Genesis that humanity has been given the breath of God and is made in God’s image. This means we are called to treat all people groups with the dignity and respect they are deserving of, ensuring that we do not flatten them to concepts or ideas.
Worshipping the God we work for
Good archaeology is an act of empathy with the past. Older forms of archaeology and antiquarianism sought to create a hierarchy of cultures, often misappropriating concepts from Darwinism to create warped and deeply racist ideas that more recent forms of culture (such as industrial capitalism) were superior to older ones. The archaeology we do today has to reject that legacy – we have to love the cultures we learn about.
When I was at university, I had a professor who loved ancient Mesoamerica so deeply that even the profound violence that was part of the ritual lives of several Mesoamerican cultures could not make her feel less passion. I didn’t understand that at the time - now I do. She wasn’t a Christian, but she was loving the way Christ does, seeing our value more than our faults. I might not have quite got there when I was at university, but nonetheless through studying archaeology and anthropology I grew so much in love for the world around me. Every culture is beautiful and precious in the eyes of God, and now I was seeing so much more of that beauty than I would have if I had only ever known about the culture I live in.
People in prehistoric Scandinavia used the landscape around them to create images of spectral deer that seem to walk on the water or appear out of the rocks. People in Mesolithic England created masks out of deer skulls and antlers, maybe for use in performances or dances that blurred the identities of animal and human. People in ancient Egypt believed that the death and restoration of the god Osiris allowed them to enter the afterlife. Everywhere, we see people trying to understand the world around them; to find meaning, to believe in magic and divinity, to tell incredible stories, and create profound art that left a record of who they were and what the worlds they inhabited were like. God created a humanity that is curious and creative, and the joy of that calls me to worship him.
Witnessing to the world
Archaeologists tend to be relativists and agnostics who see value in all kinds of spirituality and take interest in learning about people’s personal beliefs, which means they are often very easy to talk to about Christianity but are often uninterested in the idea of a singular truth, because they feel that would mean dismissing the truths found in other faiths.
So prove them wrong.
Good archaeology is not about what WE think is true: it is about what the people we study believed was true. It is an attempt to reconstruct people's worlds as they saw them. We do not do archaeology just to learn what happened, but what people thought was happening. We don't just seek to comprehend the structure of Egyptian temple rituals, but to understand what it meant to believe you were joining with the gods to hold back the forces of darkness and chaos.
The best witness you can give as an archaeologist is actually not to view every culture through the lens of your own culture and faith, but to lay aside our own way of looking at the world and view it through the eyes of a Norse warrior who believes the god he worships might one day betray him, or a medieval Icelandic writer recording tales about men who become bears. When we do so, we see that people from thousands of years ago and radically different cultural contexts to our own are not alien to us, but trying to live through the terrors of war and uncertainty, and find meaning in that, in much the same ways that we are.
That too leads us back to Christ: Phillips Brooks said it better than I ever could when he wrote of the newborn Messiah: the hopes and fears of all the years are met in Thee tonight.
Ultimately, God knows more about archaeology than we ever could. He created the cultures that you learn about, He was there when they lived. You’ll never be able to love those people more than God does, but trying is only ever a good thing.
Reflect and discuss
Think: Think back over what you have studied so far in your degree. Where have you seen God's fingerprints? Where have ideas presented to you challenged what you believed to be true?
Live: What do you think your coursemates would know about what is important to you from the way you live? Is there anything you want to change here?
Speak: Are there topics in your subject that are closer to talking about your outlook on life, God or the gospel? Pray for people on your course and for opportunities to share about Jesus with them this term.