It is just like Heidegger says: things are literally ‘torn out of hiddenness’ or ‘struck by openness’. They really do emerge out of darkness into light. And it is through encountering such emergent and unfolding entities - with all the resistance, recaltritance and sheer otherness that they sometimes present - that we truly encounter and transform ourselves.

But Heidegger was also right to point out that any uncovering always involves the covering over of other things, other aspects. As well as an un-folding there is also an in-folding - a collapsing of material possibilities. In taking a particular form, the many other forms that the emerging evidence could have taken – if it had been excavated at a different time or by different people or in a different way – will never now materialize.

Excavation is a crucial moment in the archaeological process. It is where theory is grounded in practice and conversely where practice is enmeshed in theory. It is an encounter in which the applied force of archaeological knowledge meets the resistance of material evidence. Against that resistance practical skills can be honed and theoretical ideas tested. If we didn’t have this and other clearings as a kind of touchstone, or footing in reality, archaeological theory would be largely free-floating or groundless. This is where we ‘touch base' - in our embodied perception of material evidence. And when we do, something emerges into the domain of culture and knowledge and everyday practicalities (what Heidegger calls ‘the world’) from the domain of everything which, at least up to that moment, existed independently of our cultural universe (what Heidegger calls ‘the earth’). Something that was previously buried comes crashing into the light.

¶ 7:49 AM