I'd been scraping for at least two hours. The dust was really settling into my nostrils; stronger than the cement that lined a drain I would find. I couldn't really care at that point. 6 am's are not mything.

Scrape. Clink upon burdened clink, upon brown scratch. It gets rather nauseating, trying to excavate efficiently, but constantly impeded by--- clonk. At that moment, when the cicadas' mourning seemed to turn into a song of hope, when suddenly it seemed as if a god had smiled at me in my slumber of ignorance and 6 am, some flick from the deepest parts of my soul stirred.

Slowly I raised and revolved "it" around in my hands. I was whisked away by the fact that I was the first person in more than two millennia to touch the artefact, the first to weep over it, after it mayhave been buried naturally or by lovmg hands, unknown to us.

Yet there is a lot this unknown artefact can tell us. This discovery was merely a fraction of the life-changing lessons I learnt at the Gabii project on the methodology of classics and humanities, the interdisciplinary nature of classics, and most importantly the joy of archaeology.

That first find I scraped with my trowel meant more to me than probably anything hasever before in my life. It's notjust the wonder of finding the object and its beauty, but there's a sort of aura of glamour and glitz, of rustic simplicity and the perfect life you are invited to participate in, to live in.

And so wonderfulJy idiosyncratic to the Gabii project, I was able to get much more personal with my find. On the next day, I got to go to Finds lab and clean it very carefulJy. I then had the rare opportunity to analyze it in zooarchaeology.

The best part of the Gabii project is that their intense learning is both fun and practical. My first excavation session, where I was tossed into a trench without a clue of what I was doing, allowed me to practise skills, precisely as I learnt them, in situ, which gave me a deeper and more personal understanding of arc hae ology. In fact, I probably retained more in that first two-hour session than in anytwo-hour period ever! This ability to learn didactically gave me the rare opportunity to reflect on epistemological issues within archaeology and generally education: can our archaeological methods yield the truth? How valid are they? I formed my own opinion about the old "balance" between explaining evidence through previous examples and open-mindedly thinking of something new. The constant discovery of contradictory evidence, and new twists and turns, waslike an adventure that taught me that thelatter dominates: embodying the School's core values of risk-taking and open-mindedness, in archaeology it is vital that we keep an open mind when interpreting the evidence, carefully study the facts in the greatest detail, and be wary for new contradictions: thus simply livmg the archaeologist's eternal qualities.

And most importantly, it is this passion to learn which inspires everyone at the Gabii project to go beyond all expectations and share and debate their ideas and keep on improvmg. On my first day, myfellow beginner excavators who had been there for a week explained the basics. But once this was set, I relished the rare opportunity to discuss ideas about Gabii and archaeological methods with academics at the forefront of their field. It was a beautiful atmosphere of direct intellectual stimulation.

We also had sessions in zooarchaeology and archaeobotany (the study of bones and plant life respectively to understand human culture). They perfectly exemplified how archaeology and classics are becoming more and more important as interdisciplinary subjects, which is becoming all the rage todey. In zooarchaeology, we used biology to discuss the anatomy of animals and humans; we used mathematics and statistics to compare the bones in their locations and across different sites; we used our history and environmental skills by using this data on bones to reconstruct how the ancients ate, lived and died. In archaeobotany, we used our skills in chemistry when discussing the nature and composition of the charcoalized seeds, thinking under what conditions the seeds were charcoalized, and identifying the date using carbon-14 isotopic analysis. We improved our skills in biology when identifying the seeds under the microscope, but went further by distinguishing the effects inhabitants made on the seeds, and what this can tell us about how they cultivated over time and the advent ofrnass agriculture. This perfectly embodies the interdisciplinary nature of the classics, and how they can help us to answer some of the biggest questions todey-. These bring useful skills, especially critical and comparative, which are essential throughout life.

What I found (what I like to call personally from an Aeneid 11 passage that I adore, but for which I have no conclusive evidence) was the skull and jaw of an Iapygian horse. James Hua '17