As students of the past, the BEARS team knows that disruptive and catastrophic events like COVID-19 occurred at many points in history. But the experience of living through such an event can fundamentally alter how one interprets historical and archaeological evidence. To dig a little deeper on the potential intellectual ripples of the pandemic, we asked BEARS team members to reflect and respond to the following question: “How has COVID-19 changed the way you think about archaeology and history?”
Sarah:
During the early phases of the pandemic I was thinking a lot about demography, and how late 20th and early 21st century humanity is a crazily unprecedented experiment in what happens when you have an extremely elderly and largely unhealthy, sedentary population constantly being poisoned by greedy corporations. People kept comparing COVID-19 to the 1918 Spanish Flu epidemic, but in a way it is inappropriate to suggest much of a parallel because the demographics of the societies on which the diseases operated are wildly different. Back in 1918 the normal life expectancy was about 40 – young and healthy active people died from terrible, incurable diseases all the time: typhoid, measles, scarlet fever, diphtheria, tuberculosis, etc. It’s sort of weird to say, but if COVID-19 landed in the 19th century or even in 1918, maybe nobody would have noticed what was going on, because the kinds of people who get really sick and die from it just didn’t exist in significant quantities. I guess it’s sort of a reminder that all of the humans who lived in the past had much, much, much worse problems to deal with all the time. We’re pretty lucky not to be generally surrounded by death and sickness all the time.
The other thing I have been struck by is that a lot of archaeological and historical interpretation assumes that human beings behave in ways that are somewhat rational, that communities and individuals at least have a general idea of what is in their best interest, and act accordingly. But living through a pandemic has definitely made jarringly clear just how terrible we are at behaving in any kind of sensible fashion whatsoever, especially when faced with new or unfamiliar circumstances. I guess that maybe should put paid to a lot of functionalist or rationalist frameworks for assessing past behavior at both the individual and the group level.
Melanie:
From a disciplinary standpoint, the covid-19 pandemic has demonstrated how important collaboration is in archaeology. Without working together in the same space during the summers the real benefits of collaboration, discussion, and team workflow dissipated and the work was just less fun. We archaeologists are pack animals who don’t thrive in isolation.
While no one can say that any earlier period can rival the waste production of the 21st century, the drastic and immediate change in the types and quantity of waste produced as a result of the pandemic – the multitudes of paper masks, medical waste, and test kits – has reminded me that although the archaeological record is often the result of cyclical mundane processes, the effects of major events might have, in fact, be materially visible. I’ve always been resistant to this idea, and it certainly happened more slowly and on a smaller scale in antiquity, but the pandemic has shown me how much material change can result from particular events in the community.
Grace:
Aside from inspiring some speculation about the paper mask, cotton swab, and test chemical stratum of 2020-21 (to be excavated by future archaeologists someday, no doubt), living through a pandemic has made me reflect to a greater extent than I ever have before on the social effects of contagious disease on communities. Wearing masks, sheltering in place, and maintaining social distance really affects the way that humans interact with each other and our sense of appropriate personal space. I’ve also thought a lot about how the social existence of a pandemic is contingent to some degree on how much a society understands about germ theory and disease transmission, as well as the degree to which local and global inequalities intersect with the virus to produce certain outcomes. I’m not sure how much of this is directly relevant to the study of the past, but I do think I had given contagious disease somewhat short shrift in my previous thinking about historical change… and I don’t think I will in the future!
Shannon:
The pandemic has certainly changed the way I think about Time, in a few ways. In archaeology we are used to dating things to within a few decades (longer in prehistory) and looking at gradual changes over time. Barring some major events, there are fewer big years or sudden shifts that we see clear evidence of. But the pandemic has made it clear how LONG a year can feel, how quickly people’s lifestyles and behaviors can change, how quickly new technologies can become normal, and why you would refer to a year as “the year of the drought” or “the year of the plague.”
Rob:
The whole pandemic has made me think of how ephemeral something like a pandemic could be in the archaeological record. Seven billion people have been focused on this for the past year and a half, and my guess is that in another year or so there will be little evidence that we were all stuck inside for 15 months. And when you’re dealing with things 2,000 or 3,000 years old, the chance you find material traces of that single year seem pretty slim. So I guess it’s made me think there’s probably a lot more year-to-year variation for the groups we study than probably shows up in the archaeological record.
Other than that – and I know this sounds incredibly privileged (and it is) – it’s highlighted how much getting to travel and do fieldwork improves my overall well-being the rest of the year. I think not getting to travel made me feel more cooped up than missing restaurants or gyms or anything on a day-to-day level. It’s great to be back.
Joey:
As an archaeologist, I am used to travelling and seeing lots of different types of places, meeting different types of people, and using different types of objects. But, for the period of the pandemic, especially during its first few months, I was restricted to only interacting with the people, things, and place of my household. During that time, the introduction of any kind of novelty, whether a new book or a new specialty food ingredient, elicited strong cognitive and emotional responses. This really illustrated to me the power of interaction with “the new” and the possible motivations, aside from strict utilitarian needs, for wanting to interact with others outside one’s community. It also makes more evident the possibility of manipulating such novelty in the service of different ideology (especially inequality).
Also, an obligatory collapse related thought: nowadays, it’s pretty common to hear scholars say that the collapse of states or communities is always the result of multiple factors. Although COVID hasn’t quite led to widespread social and political collapse, the wreckage of the pandemic has very clearly been interwoven with dysfunctional political institutions, a changing climate, and the corruption of individual political actors.