I mostly listen to bluegrass when I’m working in the desert.
The slow-plucking guitars and raspy voices perfectly accompany tracing the yellow-red horizon against the brilliant blue sky.
My walk to site this January was along a not-yet-too busy road, next to a line of just-opening shops, their garish signs still bright against the dawn. After the shops was a small neighborhood, with short yellow school buses pulling up outside of houses, destinations declared in English and Arabic. School starts early in Al Ain, and it was rough when we lived there with my little nightowl.
Technically Al Ain is not the desert, as my lovely Emirati friends would tell me, and they’re right, really. There’s ragged mountains and wadis, and a surprising amount of green, particularly in the wintertime. It’s mostly shorthand anyway, for where I’ve worked and wanted to work all my life as an archaeologist. The real desert is aways out west, towering dunes and no footprints.
The end of the neighborhood dove into the oasis. Off to the right was the entrance to an old mudbrick house, still standing, slowly melting. Then you were in the oasis in the early dawn, birds throwing themselves amongst the palm fronds. The main path was recently done, well-paved, wide and accessible. I’d preferred the little raised dirt paths along the edges of the beds, but so it goes. The palms still almost closed overhead, and the full moon winked between them, huge in the eye and tiny in the lens.
When I had enough of the birds, I’d slip the earbuds in again, finding a bit of stillness before landing in the noisy, busy construction site.
My daughter hates tower cranes, their untouchable looming feels sinister and oppressive to her. The crane, the JCB, the hive of concrete huddled around the site made the archaeologists feel at home though, most of them having spent their formative years in the flurry of London’s construction boom in the 2000s.
We were focussed on excavating one of the most iconic archaeological structures in the Arabian gulf–an Umm an Nar tomb. A limestone circle 11.8 meters in diameter, it targets the eye, and is full of imported pottery, soft-stone vessels, and human remains.
So far we’d mostly encountered burned fragments, as this was part of the cycle of the tomb’s use and we’d only reached the upper fills. We were carefully digging and sieving the sand that had filled in the tomb after it had collapsed and been robbed of its facing stones, finding the odd carnelian bead and tooth.
The excavation will progress without me, as I’m back in windy, wet England to teach. But my heart remains neatly divided by a horizon of blue and yellow-red, the desert twanging both sweet and melancholy, just out of reach.
Colleen Morgan 