Greetings & Teachings

Before work may begin, we must first take care of some necessary responsibilities, to greet the friends we made on our previous visits and, for those of us for which it is our first visit to Atafu, to introduce ourselves to the community that is very interested in our stay and the reasons we have come here.

On our first visit, meetings were arranged with the taupulega, the council of elders, in which the details of our projects were explained. At that time they agreed to accept us onto their island and support our endeavors. Having completed this process, we are accepted warmly onto the island without needing to repeat the process. Instead we greet everyone more informally.

We have arranged our project to take place during the school holiday and at the time of our arrival the final formalities to the completion of the school year are taking place. We arrange a meeting at the school with any students who have taken an interest in our project to invite them join in our work and learn about archaeology. We explain briefly in the classroom what we will be doing, but the majority of the learning must take place outside the classroom, beneath the hot sun, digging in the dirt. Most of the students at the meeting are girls. We find out that the boys have all arranged work to make some money, and the girls, who would otherwise be restricted to a day of chores, are more motivated to learn something new.

The next day we wait in anticipation beneath the large breadfruit tree at the school where we have asked everyone to meet early in the morning. At eight, the time we scheduled to meet, no one has shown. But slowly girls arrive two and three at a time until a large group has formed nervously ready to begin. David returns to see everyone ready and takes to his role as teacher.

He begins by asking everyone to look around them at the bits of rubbish that have been left under the breadfruit tree where many people gather throughout the day; little things that few of us notice regularly: gum wrappers, string, an old rusted metal knife, a few things David may have put there for his demonstration. Then to look at the load of sand the aumaga, the young men have dumped there to soften the ground for people’s feet. Imagine the bits of rubbish that must have been covered by that sand. Imagine this process occurring repeatedly over many hundred of years and then one will understand what we are looking for.

We then move to an area recently excavated for the foundation of a new school building, a large rectangle dug into the ground a meter and a half deep. Together, with shovels in hand, we all clean the profile of one wall of the rectangle. The girls see the layers, and bits of rubbish sticking from the top. We move to the wall opposite this one and see a similar but different profile. How do we understand how these two walls relate? We must look at the wall between. The girls clear the third wall and now understand stratigraphy.

We conclude the day by practicing a small one by one excavation, screening the soil for artifacts. Few things are found but the concepts are well understood. Now we must wait until Monday when the real excavations will begin, to see who will return to learn how these concepts are utilized to discover the remnants of the past. In the meantime, we each begin our individual projects in the afternoon, and attend dance practice in the evening in preparation for the coming festivities.