There is something humbling about laboring at an archeological excavation. You toil away in the heat and dust with your trowel and brush at the bottom of a pit, inching your way through the deposits of millennia. The border separating the present moment from the distant past dissolves and you find yourself tumbling into a vanished world that, though dead and buried, comes curiously to life. Your perceptions shift: you are made to realize the vulnerability of all that seems robust and majestic—palaces, aqueducts, temples—but, equally, the resilience of what appears small and insignificant—an
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