Man with Hat and Pipe

A Material Girl It’s a cliché, I know, but I became an archaeologist because of romance. I fell for hidden things, material traces of a veiled, seductive past. I didn’t just want to read about the past; I wanted to touch it and feel it get its hooks into my body. I can’t resist handling artefacts-surreptitiously pushing the gold wire of an excavated earring through my pierced lobe, touching my tongue to the edge of a ceramic fragment to see whether it’s earthenware or porcelain. When I grew up in Australia in the 1960s and ’70s there was nothing old in our house; even my grandparents had replaced anything that reminded them of the war or the Depression with 1960s veneers, vinyl, and laminex. The past I fell for had nothing to do with my people or my world; it took me to another place, an exotic, foreign country.