In September last year, the professor that recently passed away was reviewing my setup for the week’s experiments on earthen materials. I was then his teaching assistant and was responsible for delivering the week’s lab assignments. I was unsure if the two soils required for the experiment were the right ones. One was from Pecos and the other one from Fort Union. I had never been to these sites before, and did not understand how they were used. The professor, whose mind was probably engaging with the minds of ancient men —removed from the pedestrian realm of a lab setup— buried his hands deep into a bucket of soil, as if trying to understand the DNA of the soil viscerally by feeling the clay and silt particles. Or was he doing something more? Perhaps he was feeling the soil so as to viscerally translate his deep and intimate understanding of the field he devoted to study: archaeology, materials, and conservation. Every clay particle an academic article. Every lump of soil a conference. Every grain of sand a book. He had mastered the field. Or perhaps he was feeling the geological forces that gave birth to that particular soil: the alluvian forces eroding a parent rock of granite formed during the Devonian period that eventually disintegrated into the soil he was feeling. Or perhaps he was engaging in a conversation with reality, a reflection on his own mortality: feeling with his palms the dictum “from earth to earth, ashes to ashes, dust to dust.”
He was always like that, miles ahead of everybody, and yet filled with spirit, soul and humbleness with everyone he encountered. He was down to earth.