Faculty Member Musacchio Goes to Egypt on Archeological Dig

?It?s awesome being on the dig,? Tracy Musacchio enthused. ?When you are holding something that is thousands of years old, it?s awesome.?

Digging on hands and knees in the blazing sun is not everyone?s idea of a vacation. But for Knox history professor Musacchio and the rest of her team just outside of Abydos, Egypt, participating in an archeological survey is the perfect get away.

 ?It?s a project that I have been working on for a few years,? she says. ?We survey a vast amount of land and figure out how it was used by the people in ancient Egypt.?

According to Musacchio, Abydos, located in the middle of Egypt, is a very active site. For a nine hour train ride south of Cairo, participants can gain valuable field experience and devotees get their annual dose of history.

She worked at the site for more than two weeks and was in Egypt just over a month. The work site and camp is far from the Nile River. ?It is very intense. We have crude showers that we can take for a minute a day but it is hard to sustain the level of hiking and activity for more than about a week. So we would come back and process what we found and then head back to the field again,? Musacchio says.

The workers rise before dawn and, still half asleep, begin another day?s hard work trying to uncover the long buried secrets that can be found with the next strike of the pickaxe. They walk between 30-40 kilometers a day carrying their equipment and record anything found. ?Monks lived in caves, hewed out, and plastered walls, and wrote on the walls. It is fascinating. We never knew what we would find, or where we would find it,? she says.

Her most interesting discovery on her latest trip in December was uncovered during a hike in the desert. ?There was a huge concentration of pottery. For about a kilometer we were almost entirely walking on pottery. It was pretty obvious we were walking on what was once a road used by the ancient roman army. This was some sort of stopping point. Maybe it was a day?s journey stopping point, or maybe this was a road where they dumped pottery" she conveyed with a shrug.

Despite the difficulties of daily shifting vast amounts of earth and sifting through broken pottery, both in the blazing heat, Musacchio has no regrets about spending her breaks working in Egypt. ?Regardless of what piece of pottery you pick up, somebody used it,? she says. ?It?s just amazing that you are handling things that are that old.?

Musacchio is finishing her Ph.D. in Egyptian language, reading hieroglyphics, through the University of Pennsylvania and is incorporating art history in her work. But coming to Knox College, she uncovered an age-old secret of her own. ?I love teaching at Knox. It was immediately evident to me the first day of classes that the students are very intellectually curious compared to experiences at larger schools.?

?The Ancient Egyptian Warfare Class is a classic example of it. The students aren?t fulfilling any degree requirements but they are interested in the class. They are taking it, participating in it fully, and writing excellent papers, and having great class discussions because they want to?because they like it. I loved seeing that.?

Tracy Musacchio spent her winter break with an archeological survey team in Egypt.