Diary Of An Archaeologist - Wattys 2019 Non-fiction Winner

That Time I Was Told To Become A Housewife

Welcome back, my lovely readers. Don't get fooled by the title of this week's chapter. I have so much respect for stay-at-home moms and dads. They run an entire household, and manage to keep track of everybody's shit when I can barely remember my own dentist's appointment. Like a week ago, I had to call my mom to ask her what my blood type was.

Well, anyway, as I've stated before I'm not good at keeping a group of kids in check. I just don't know how to keep an eye on ten different human beings. But because I specialized in Public Archaeology, I will always get the guiding tasks.

This time was no exception. I was asked to help during the museum week (a week-long event in the Netherlands where museums have extra events to showcase their collection) and the museum I was asked for had a vast archaeological collection for which they wanted me to make an interactive tour for kids around the ages of 10-13.

I was given unlimited access to the collection, and the director was very enthusiastic, which made the job a blast. So, we came up with a small tour around the highlights of the collection before the kids would get a chance to participate in a mini excavation themselves.

Yes, you read that right. We had placed a sandbox in one of the empty rooms and put some very common objects in the sand along with tools and instructions on how to excavate the artefacts. This was, of course, the highlight of the tour, and the kids couldn't get enough of it. After two days we even added a second box and another archaeologist to help me because it was so popular.

So, during the third or fourth day, I forget which one, my colleague informed me that we would be getting a school class from a quite conservative village. I won't go into too much detail, but let's just say that this village is notorious for their strict religious beliefs. Well, I didn't see any problem with that because I didn't talk about religion in the tour. Besides, I had worked with a boy from that village in the past, and yes, he was a devout Catholic. Still, he never pressed anyone to become Catholic or discriminated against people who had a different belief than him. I remembered him as a great, honest and hard-working guy, so I didn't see what all the fuss was about with these kids.

Until I started my tour.

These kids were very well-behaved, a little too well-behaved. Typically, with pre-teens, they become a bit more daring and deviant, which is great when you're giving an interactive tour because you can start a discussion with the kids and let them speak their mind. These kids didn't respond to any of my questions and simply nodded agreeing. It didn't help that their teacher was following me like a shadow.

But, oh well, I still had the sandboxes, so maybe that would liven things up a bit. And it did!

 I can't tell you how happy I was when I saw these kids excitedly excavate, and play around once we were in the last part of the tour. A few girls yelped when they found a bone in the sand, and I explained to them that it was just a cow's bone and finally got them to open up about pet's and burials in what I thought was a really nice conservation. Sadly, I was interrupted by a tap on my shoulder, and the teacher asked if he could speak with me.

I took him to the side, and his words are still engraved in my memory. "I don't want you to give these girls any ideas. It's cute that you're studying Archaeology, but you won't ever have to use it once you become a housewife. They shouldn't be given the wrong idea of what a woman's purpose is."

I think my brain just shut down at that moment, and I stared at him with my mouth agape. How do you respond to that? Without kicking his ass back to the backwards time where he belongs. Because as much as his words hurt me to my core, he said it in a way that wasn't malicious or demeaning. His tone was more concerning like he genuinely believed that women were meant to become housewives and nothing more.

It took all my patience not to snap back at him as I explained that I had graduated a year ago, and this was my full-time job. If the girls wanted to become housewives, that is their choice, and I would never tell them that they couldn't. Just as I would never tell them that they couldn't become an archaeologist if they wanted to.

This answer seemed to confuse the teacher, and he asked me about my religion. "I'm agnostic", I explained, and the questioning look on his face told me all I had to know. He didn't understand what Agnostic was, so I added that I had read the word of God, which pleased him, and he didn't bother me for the rest of the tour.

Little did he know that by that, I meant not only the Bible but also the Quran and the Buddhavacana scriptures. We had read it all for Theology of World Religions, and that was also when I started to identify as Agnostic. Which literally means, a person who believes that nothing is known or can be known of the existence or nature of God.

For those who are wondering what the difference is between Atheism and Agnosticism. Atheism is about belief or, specifically, what you don't believe. Agnosticism is about knowledge or, specifically, about what you don't know. An atheist doesn't believe in any gods. An agnostic doesn't know if any gods exist or not.