This season at Mandeure is drawing to a close, and I am reminded of the ephemerality of my stay here and of being itself at every turn. I have made some great friends in my time in France, and I trust I will see them again, but it is a bit surreal to think that I may never work at this particular site again; three weeks are nothing, a passing sigh next to the totality of life, but I feel as if a part of me will remain here. A few days ago, we visited a warehouse where features from the theatre at Mandeure as well as the nearby temple and necropolis are kept–parts of columns, statues, and a frieze– and the aura of these artifacts in this context is worth examining. The grandeur that was Rome lies in fragments on pallets in a warehouse in an unmarked building in rural France. Is our culture destined for the same fate? It seems inevitable. Last weekend, several Carthage students on this trip visited Paris. Paris is a living city, and the status of a living city is contingent upon change. It has its constants–elements of its classical roots will always remain–but such tradition meets modernism and post-modernism constantly, at times gracefully, at times jarringly. It can be said that Rome didn’t truly “fall,” but instead gradually transitioned into something else, and effectively laid the foundation for the next culture; a stage in evolution, rather than a dead end. Regardless, the “Rome” in the mind of the average person is a relic, a dusty ruin from ages past. Is this idea of Rome less valid than the mystic, immaterial “spirit” of Rome that has been carried on since its “fall”? The Romans are long dead, is their say on the matter of any importance?
Our culture, our “world,” seems threatened on all fronts by a collapse. The Amazon is burning, non-western powers are finding burgeoning fiscal strength, and unrest and disquiet grow constantly. Is our way of life sustainable? Even if the ultimate death knell is from a different cause, are we consigned to the same fate as the Roman Empire, the Achaemenid Empire, and all empires from ages past? Will our churches someday have a status akin to the Mandeure theatres of the world? The short answer is yes. Inevitably, yes. No structure is built to last forever, nor is any system of government, nor is any nation. This may seem grim, but it should not be a reason to consign ourselves to nihilism. As said earlier, Paris is alive because it is changing. Change is the essence of life. The theatre of Mandeure is alive, and the excavations here, by gleaning knowledge from it, keep it alive and save it from being lost forever in the titanic, cyclopean pages that constitute the records of the earth. This Sunday, a mass will be held here, worshipping a different god than Mars Ultor, which the Romans here worshipped, just as they displaced the unnamed Gallic deity that was praised here long before. The rites this Sunday, if observed by Romans, would undoubtedly seem alien, as would the worshippers’ modes of dress and transportation; yet, this sanctuary has a religious purpose again. The god changed through the millennia, yet that very thing helps keep the elusive spirit of this holy place alive. Amid sessions of hacking with a pickaxe through layers of sediment, it is sometimes joked that archaeology is mostly destruction. So is sculpting from marble; so is what fuels the stars; so is change itself. This is the essence of what it means to be alive.
Today was my second-last day of digging at Mandeure. I have become intimately acquainted with this place, and the thought of returning to America seems distant and unreal. I am sure, however, that decades from now, this will be another of many distant memories, albeit a fond and cherished one. Life must go on, and ends bring beginnings. This is the end of my undergraduate career, and I eagerly anticipate what is to come next. I could not hope for a better finale to the last four years than my experiences here. Today, I dug on the southern façade, and I was thrilled to see that some of the bricks were composed of fossiliferous rocks. I believe these fossils are remains of Baculites, a genus of cephalopods with conical shells that lived in seas all over the world in the late Cretaceous, ending 65 million years ago. This number may seem trivial, but I ask the reader to contemplate what a vast expanse of time that really is; these remains were in this stone for well over ten thousand times as long as it has been since the pyramids were built. They were there when humans first developed writing, first painted on a cave wall; when the first human ancestors stood upright, when the first mammals with thumbs used these appendages to climb trees. This unfathomable expanse of time, when fully appreciated, evokes the same sense of grandeur as the vastness of a night sky with millions of stars. Eons later, they find themselves in a brick in a theatre of a culture that is ancestral to our own. Two thousand years is less than a hiccup as far as geological time is concerned, but it is still well beyond what our minds, programmed to run for seventy or eighty years, can really fathom. The juxtaposition of these gulfs of ages motivated me to write this; hopefully, with the limitations of my skills and the limitations of language itself, I conveyed a little bit of the wonder I felt. Everything we see might, in the scheme of things, be passing in the wind, but what a show it is! However brief and ephemeral, I am honored to have spent a moment with all of this–with Mandeure.
Thank you,
Andrew Goebel