Found in Situ

Still of Hylas and Heracles (Christopher Harris and Simon Turner, Sydney Dance Company) from Mythologia, by Jeff Busby

I.

I am standing in a grave, straddling a body of bones found in situ. I am not the one who found the grave; in fact, my team is the third group to have excavated and re-excavated this Grecian hill. Yet, somehow, perhaps in my macabre enthusiasm, I’ve been selected as the one to start digging up the skull. We’ll all take turns, our director says, so that everyone can get a chance to unearth part of the body.

Everyone from the dig team gathers around, their shoes loosening dust from the edge of the grave. I lean over, bringing my brush to sweep dirt from the cracked ivory skull. There is no time to be sentimental, to lock eyes with the empty sockets of this skeleton, to consider that the bristles of my brush are the first thing to touch her face in thousands of years. There is no time to catch my breath, to wonder if this Byzantine woman, her bones finally exposed to the sunlight, can see me excavating her from heaven. I have to remind myself that I don’t believe in heaven when hovering over something so holy.

In ancient times, the temple had been alive with the music of procession, the pouring of milk and honey libations, and voices singing in religious unison. The site was partially excavated twice before, once in 1917 and once in 1967—but these excavations were neither complete, nor well documented, so our directors were awarded a grant to revisit the holy site. The gray stone temple floor that we outline with brooms has already sat uncovered for years, has already been slept on by homeless Greeks, has already been written about in archeology textbooks. Some of the ancient pottery shards that we wash with toothbrushes have been found in contemporary strata, the residual evidence of previous excavation groups. But this Byzantine woman, she is the first body we find in situ, or in its original place. My hands are the first to lift her skull from the dirt since she was buried there, sometime during the Eastern Roman Empire.

We are a group of university students and alumni, each with an incurable enthusiasm for Ancient Greece. Some of us have long forgotten what it was like to worry about our GPA; others have reached the legal drinking age during a nine-hour flight. Two of us have just graduated college, prepared for a summer of getting tipsy off pitchers of mojitos in order to forget the stacks of job applications that were rejected months prior. We are bound together by the slender corridors of the hotel, by the dinner checks we split equally, by the way that we can resurrect the maps of ancient Thebes through