Archaeology, And What Is Worth Doing

In this essay, we’re going to punch a child in the mouth.

Specifically, we’re going to metaphorically punch my younger, teenage self in the mouth, over and over, until he lets go of some dangerous ideas.

On Archaeology

Half a life ago, when I was 16, my parents took me and my sister to Atapuerca. It’s an archaeological site that holds some of the oldest human fossils in Western Europe, for which it has become a UNESCO World Heritage Site.

It’s deep into Spanish land, near a small village that would otherwise not boast anything over the hundreds that dot the countryside. It’s got guided tours, a nice visitor center attached to it, with a cafe, gift shop, and all the amenities you’d expect for a Public Culture Thing.

The place fricking rules, and that trip was actually chill and good… and no one in my family remembers anything about it, except the drive home.

You see, I must have been tired, or hungry, or feeling particularly pubescent, because I just couldn’t help myself. As the countryside rolled by, I looked pensively out the car window, and blurted out: “I mean, it was nice, but like, what’s it for?”

This stumped my parents. “What do you mean?” they asked, as if I’d suggested we all jump out of the car just to see where it goes on its own.

“Well,” I said, already savoring the opportunity to drop some thoughts onto my unsuspecting family, “it’s just that, if you really think about it, isn’t it a waste of money?”

They looked at each other. Well, my mother glanced at my father, because my father was driving.

I continued. “Like, nothing that we learn digging will be actually useful, right? Shouldn’t we be investing this money into, I don’t know, like medicine research or something?”

More glances. I smirked. Victory. Intellectual Supremacy was mine.

And then my parents started laughing at the sheer ridiculousness of the suggestion. To this day, 15 years (!) later, they still bring up that question and laugh about it. I now laugh with them, because it’s funny and I’m a full adult that can process feelings. But I don’t think it’s that ridiculous.

It’s a legitimate question. So much so, that whenever the topic comes up, usually over an aperitivo on their terrace as it blends into lunch, I take it as an opportunity to pull that question out of the drawer where I keep my childhood CDs and 2000s band t-shirts, polish it a bit, and ponder it as I pass it from hand to hand, feeling its weight.

It’s a good litmus test to see how my thoughts and opinions have grown over the years.

So, today, we’re bringing justice to that 16-year-old. Today, we’re imagining ourselves in the back of that car, with him, as he asks that question. Today, by God, we’re going to give him the debate he thought he wanted. And because I know exactly what he’s going to say to everything, we’re going to dismantle him until he goes home crying.

I thought about framing this constructively, but this is more fun.

Let’s tear down that little shit.

Youth & Perspective

So alright, you angst-ball kid, whaddya got?

“Well… I mean, we agree that there are immediate problems in the world, right? Like cancer and poverty.” (From now on, 16-year-old Borja is going to speak in italics. I’m going to speak like a normal person.)

“Sure, yes.”

“And Atapuerca costs some amount of money.”

“Yep”

“And we agree that it doesn’t help the immediate problems, right?”

“Uh… yeah, that’s debatable, but for the sake of argument let’s say it doesn’t.”

“Then, shouldn’t we devote all our resources to fixing those problems?”

“Hmmm… maybe. But why don’t you devote your resources to that cause? You have some pocket money. It’s not much, but I’m sure you could donate it.”

At this point, he’d widen his eyes for half a second, before recovering his composure, and tsk-ing before saying:

“Well, that amount of money wouldn’t materially help anyone. It wouldn’t make a difference, it’s like 20 euros a month?”

“First of all, is that a question or a statement? Make up your mind. Second of all, what makes you think that shutting down Atapuerca would? Have you looked at the numbers?”

He hadn’t, of course he hadn’t, because he had no idea what a balance sheet was (yet). So, at this point, he’d lower his gaze, and start to feel a little color rise to his cheeks. Of course, we have to press him.

“Well, if you had, you’d see that the whole excavation part of Atapuerca only costs a few hundred thousand euros a year.”

A spark lights in his eyes. “Ah! But that’s not the visitor center, right? Like, I saw at least 20 staff working, and that has to be more than that, like a million.”

“Well, yeah. The center actually loses a couple of million every year…”

“Ha!” He’s beyond excited, the poor creature. “That is significant money, that we should spend on something else, right?”

Now it’s my turn to smirk, which makes him wince preemptively.

“No, I don’t think so.”

“What.”

“Well, if we are thinking of country-wide impact, I think Atapuerca is absolutely the wrong place to start. Even if I agreed that the results are useless, we should probably start with other things that are equally useless or downright harmful, like a 1.1bn airport that never landed a plane, or oil subsidies, or almost any public software project.”

His mouth opens and closes a couple of times before he answers. “But… But that doesn’t mean I’m wrong! It would still be right to move the money somewhere else.”

“Maybe,” I concede. “But it means you’d rather be right than be helpful. And that is a true waste of resources, like everyone’s time.”

At that point he will shut his mouth, look out the window, and spend the two remaining hours of the car ride back sulking in silence, replaying the argument in his mind, and coming up with all manner of clever comebacks that all miss the point.

But we’re not done. Oh, no. Between you and me (now that he’s busy angsting and out of earshot): We’ve done that poor boy dirty again!

We have refused to accept his premise. Our argument, solid as it was, really boiled down to “don’t worry about it”. We failed to address his actual question, so the little shit might actually be right!

Maybe Archaeology is useless, and maybe it’s not worth doing.

What Does Worth Mean?

Let’s take a very narrow view of worth.

Under capitalism, whether something is worth doing is measured in the value of the output relative to the cost of producing that output. Let’s call that measure “the GDP-value”. The main output of science, including Archaeology, is knowledge. Knowledge, by itself, is worthless unless it interacts with humans in some way (imagine a book that nobody has ever read, locked in a room that nobody can access). Therefore, to assess the GDP-value of Archaeology, we have to look at second-order effects.

Some second-order effects I’ve observed from gaining Archaeological knowledge: We (humanity) know more about where we come from. We can, on the whole, spend less time and blood and lives arguing over whether a particular color of skin is better than another, or whether the first woman was indeed born from the rib of the first man¹².

That must be GDP-worth at least a couple hundred thousand euros a year, and we haven’t even explored the more intangible aspects, like sparking the imagination in all sorts of ways, leading to the creation of interesting (and sometimes even GDP-valuable) pieces of art. It can also spark ideas for research into why we humans behave the way we do, and have the gaping blindspots we keep falling into.

Even without the research, it’s very easy to find thousands of hours of podcasts confidently asserting the wildest conjectures about gender roles as a consequence of Archaeological findings, and those have GDP-value as well, when they sell Intellifuck or whatever the hell they’re peddling.

In fact, they have more value than most of the other reasons to do Archaeology. Oh, shit.

Under capitalism, the main reason to do Archaeology is to sell dick pills.

…

Fuck.

Yeah maybe GDP-value is not the best measure of what is worth doing.

On What Is Worth Doing

We’re reaching the frontier of my reasoning. At this point, I stop going by logic (gasp!) and start going by feeling, and half-formed thoughts.

Let’s talk about music for a while.

We can all agree that music has a valuable, intangible effect on our lives. It makes us feel things, learn things, and is often the backdrop to some of the best times of our lives. Yet, if you take the top 1% of musicians, they will be significantly less wealthy than the top 1% of society as a whole (though, much more famous!). And it doesn’t get better from there. The further down you go, the bigger the gap between the median income of a professional musician and everyone else³.

Even if we discount all the hobbyist musicians that are not trying to do this full time, the median musician is much worse off than the median bus driver.

And I’m not trying to argue that bus drivers should make less money. The opposite, in fact. I’m trying to argue that just like the median bus driver should be able to make a decent living driving a bus, median musicians should be able to make a decent living making music.

As a society, we’ve apparently decided that this is not the case.

Why? Does it mean that we don’t think music is worth doing?

We might argue that it’s a matter of supply and demand. That buses need to run, garbage needs collecting, and mail needs to be delivered. Music… well music is not needed, right? We don’t really need music in our lives.

Of course we do! Otherwise, we wouldn’t keep doing it as a species. Okay, maybe we don’t need it as much as clean water, but it’s not zero. We need music like we need trees and green spaces in our cities – we can technically survive without them, but we are fantastically miserable. And the median public landscaper does make a decent living!

So we do need music, we’re just pretending that because there’s so much of it, we can just pay musicians peanuts and free drinks and we’ll keep getting music.

What the fuck.

And I know, it’s more complicated than that. That there’s limited money to go around, and there’s the question of “who should be paying the artists”?

We’ll come back to that in a second.

Beyond Supply and Demand

Look, I could have been a musician. Or, more likely, a writer. If my brain worked a different way, and maybe I’d gotten exposed to more guitars and fewer computers growing up, I may have ended up trying to make a band.

But I got exposed to computers, and so I ended up in software. And I love it! I try to make my work fall into the spectrum between “obviously good for humanity” and “arguably good for humanity”, but at the end of the day I didn’t get into software for any sense of civic duty. I got into it for the love of the game.

Here’s the thing: I got extremely lucky. I got lucky that the thing I love to do is a viable career path that affords me a comfortable living.

And that doesn’t seem fair.

Why do I get to do what I like and make a living, and other people don’t? Why did my school bus driver have to drive the bus instead of going full time with his metal band, like he always wanted?⁴

Why do they have to choose, while I didn’t have to?

Yes, I know, this is not practical in the real world we live in. Somebody has to drive the bus.

But that’s not how I’d like life to work, which is why I’m perfectly fine with Atapuerca: It’s a place where a few passionate people get to do work they love, and get to live the life I think we all should be able to live.

It’s not a waste of money, it’s a way for folks to live their best lives. We should have more Atapuercas.

That’s where I stand today. Check back in 15 years.