With a background in archaeology and ancient history and a PhD in anthropology from the University of Auckland, Josh Emmitt has worked all over the world. Today, he is archaeology curator at Tāmaki Paenga Hira, Auckland War Memorial Museum, where he is helping look after the spectacular international exhibition “Egypt: In the Time of Pharaohs”, which runs until November 12.
Did you have an inkling as a child that you’d grow up to be an archaeologist?
I was always interested in dinosaurs, which is a misconception most archaeologists try to work against, because archaeology doesn’t do dinosaurs. But I had a subscription to a magazine and each week they’d send out a new bit so you could build your own T rex. I also loved digging things up and anything to do with mysteries.
What sorts of mysteries?
Anything mysterious that could be explored. Like Bigfoot, Atlantis or the Loch Ness monster. I also loved Indiana Jones and Tomb Raider, with their romantic notions that are tangentially associated with archaeology. I see now how problematic those things are, especially within the framework of colonialism and pseudo-science. That’s not to say Indiana Jones and Tomb Raider aren’t great entertainment, but it’s the more nefarious colonial storytelling that I look back on and think, “Why did I read that?” I also realise I had to go through those phases to figure out what was wrong with those problematic narratives.
But was it your actual ambition to be an archaeologist?
There was always an “or”. So film-maker or archaeology. Or an archaeologist-film-maker. I took history and classics at high school and when I realised I could study archaeology at university, I couldn’t say no. But I had no idea what I was getting myself into. The course was just called World Archaeology, so really broad-brush strokes from before humans to quite recent times.
What do archaeologists actually do beyond what we see in movies?
There’s the old adage that archaeologists study rubbish. Or what people left behind. But that is an oversimplification as archaeology is really about trying to understand the human story. To do that today, we start by talking to the people whose heritage we’re studying. As opposed to the days when archaeologists would go to a site with little or no consultation with locals, do whatever they wanted, then take all the artefacts away. We don’t do that any more.
Was it a bit like winning Lotto for an aspiring archaeologist to join a dig in Egypt?
I was so lucky. I was an undergraduate, living at home, not paying rent and working in an outdoors shop, so I was able to save. When I heard about a summer school trip to Egypt in 2008, which sounded fantastic, I went with them. At the end of the trip, I said I wanted to work there the next year, which is how I went from being this relatively listless person who went to Egypt to have a look around to a serious career archaeologist who works in museums.
You were in Egypt about the same time as the Arab Spring. How did that affect your work?
We could tell things were boiling up in Cairo in 2010. There were no problems in the desert so I stayed on after the Auckland crew left. At the next site we started to hear things from other excavations. We’d get messages saying this team had pulled out or that team had had issues with tomb robbers or looters or another team had been evacuated. We were about a 13-hour drive from Cairo and eventually we had to leave and get back before curfew. We saw tanks on the road, and the motorways, which were usually gridlocked, were empty, and the airport was full of really serious-looking police.
What do you find most thrilling about archaeology?
Often there’s this idea of dissociation between us and people in the past. I was holding some 6000-year-old pottery, with gloves on of course, and my fingers slid on to a thumbprint. I felt that connection with them. Or you might find what could only be interpreted as a child’s toy. I have young ones now and I can just imagine a dad making a pot and the child saying, “I want one, too”, so the dad makes a little pot to keep the kid happy, because we’re not that different from those people in the past.
Do you ever imagine your own possessions being of interest to archaeologists in the future?
Sometimes – when I’m working in the garden. We once had a chicken we really liked and we buried her in a towel. Imagine if someone dug that up – how might they interpret a chicken in a towel?
Aside from the chicken in your garden, is your house full of treasures, or is that frowned upon?
We don’t have artefacts in the house from a tīkanga perspective, and we definitely don’t collect antiquities. But we have little replicas we’ve picked up in markets around the world. My wife is also an archaeologist so we’re quite discerning.
Did you meet on a dig?
We met through university, and on a dig in the Faiyum [Egypt]. We were camping at the Valley of the Whales – Wādī al-Hītān – one season. It’s just west of the Faiyum and there are all these 28-million-year-old whale bones in the middle of the desert from when it was the ocean and whales were still evolving. When I realised we might not be returning to Egypt for a while for security reasons, I thought I’d better make hay, so I proposed.
When you talk about what you do, do people focus more on fancy objects rather than everyday things?
The thing I find interesting is not necessarily about nice things that you can use to tell a nice story, it’s everything else. Things can tell us how people lived, how they behaved and how they moved across landscapes. We can tell how often they were at a place by what they left behind. If we see a particular material is used more carefully or sparingly, maybe it was harder to get or more sought after. So things that aren’t traditionally considered nice objects maybe can still tell us things we otherwise might not have known.
To what extent do you mourn the past that is lost – the things you can see but can’t quite interpret?
Working with traditional owners in Australia and up in Cape York on their ancestral lands, we worked on huge 4m-tall shell mounds. Sometimes people would say, “I think my grandfather came out here.” But none of them had been there themselves, and it was a 10-minute boat ride from their house. I felt frustrated on behalf of those people who’d been disconnected from their land and their stories. Or I’d ask, “What do you call this or how do you use this?” and they’d say, “We don’t know because it was taken from our grandparents and we never learnt it.” The depth of that dissociation hit home for me – that people have had their history taken from them. But it’s also a privilege to use archaeology to try to help fill some of those gaps in their knowledge.
