Dea Goes to Deya

By Dea Adria Mallin

The sweet synchronicity of “Dea Goes to Deya” (the name of an archeological research site on Mallorca) was but a small marker of my joy in being back in the field after a 13-year absence and endless, vicarious Earthwatching.

We dug in a stony field in Valdemossa, with permission of the finca owner to cut some of his ancient olive trees. We unearthed artifacts and slowly, oh so slowly, silted and moved mounds of rather ordinary-looking dirt around the Son Mas Sanctuary site, identified by principal investigator Bill Waldren in 1987. Son Mas is the oldest sanctuary in this area of the western Mediterranean with evidence of Beaker culture. The Beaker people, who are believed to be of Iberian origin, spread across Europe beginning in the third millennium B.C. They were skilled in metalworking and made distinctive earthenware beakers with stamped designs.

We were an avid team, full of curiosity and energy. Each of us was assigned a quadrant to dig, and we worked under a sweltering Spanish sun in the company of rather reluctant burros and sheep. This business of starting from a plain square of ground, labeling it something like 3Z17, and coming to know it right down to its bugs and bedrock, is more of an experience than the complete novice could ever predict. The digger, the pick, the trowels, the cesta and the bucket become, like the cowboy and his horse, inseparable.

John found a small piece of incised beakerware, and he got a well-deserved bottle of champagne to celebrate prehistory. {“Think Beakerware!” was the battle cry.} A 17-year-old volunteer found a beautiful bronze needle from the Roman period, and I found a prehistoric awl, about 12 centimeters long and carved out of bone. I also found three pieces of Roman glass, opalescent and lovely.

We were digging about 200 meters away from the actual sanctuary stones of Son Mas, which are thought, from radiocarbon dating and artifacts, to have been in use from 2100 B.C. to 200 B.C. The sanctuary was a ritual and religious center for the whole alluvial plain. While the stones were certainly not the impressive monoliths of Stonehenge, the ones Bill unearthed and stacked could, if a person were inclined towards spiritual musings, move a person. And so I was moved, musing on the eternal quest of the human spirit for meaning.

I thought then about the church and cemetery of Deya, perched on the very crest of the earth, high above the water. Each graveyard stone was lodged on a clump of earth, but overlooked the vast Mediterranean Sea. Each dawning brought a mighty sun, and dusk oversaw the dying day and the birth of the starry night. The elements were so powerful in this village that standard 20^th-century accoutrements, from the towering skyscraper to the microwave to e-mail, seemed almost offensive. And yet, what proof did I have that these gigantic 20^th-century constructs of ego are of a different order from the sanctuary stones of Son Mas? That the early people who made beakerware and observed the rites at Son Mas were more in touch with nature, spirit and slow time?

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Hot afternoons were spent in the Waldren terrace lab doing the other half of archaeology. The laboratory overlooked the terraced village of Deya, its morning glory and bougainvillea bursting in color around us, and the sweet jasmine Jackie Waldren planted wafting upwards.

Bill’s Deya fever never abates. Nor does it have academic discipline boundaries. He slides easily from archaeology to paleontology, to history, to architecture, to fine art. One day, Bill found a perfect oval stone in the quadrant he was working and retreated into his workshop deep into the night. The next day, he emerged with the stone, now magnificently carved into a two-faced Janus. Bill was once a darling of the New York City galleries and was caught up in the 1950s art explosion in America. But here in Deya, he is his own art explosion. The dark wood doors all bear his carvings, the olive wood trees have become magnificent convoluted sculptures, and tables, chairs, terraces and lamps all bear his vision of participation in an archaeological dig. I’ve lived in Bill’s lightning for two weeks.

A mere week back in Philadelphia, and I’m still perusing the ground, my eyes restless for the unusual. Walking in Center City, I spot a piece of Coca Cola glass embedded in the pavement, and I grin, fast-forwarding to the archaeologist circa A.D. 2600 who would speculate about the separation of this piece from the rest of the bottle or the violence of the late 20^th century. And that’s pretty much what he or she will be able to do: speculate. Artifacts speak to us across centuries, but not necessarily clearly or with any more agreement about human behavior and motivation than psychiatry speaks today. The excavation that revealed Myotragus ballearicus (an extinct species of gazelle native to the Balearic Islands) gave Bill and the world a sturdy image of this critter, but the rest is informed speculation. Stonehenge speaks, but it retains most of its earthly and heavenly mystery.

Deya itself is locked into tranquility and stillness, its stone structures and streets ancient and worn smooth by centuries. So I walked in timeless streets in a timeless village, and I worked, sifting granules of dirt for signs of a time before history. I lived for two weeks in that odd atmosphere of slow motion – with inanimate things speaking, with the past actually coming forward, proclaiming itself and imprinting on the present. And I loved it. Every slow-ticking minute.

Dea Adria Mallin is a professor of English at the Community College of Philadelphia and a frequent contributor to The Cultured Traveler.