The search for archaeological finds is part of the human search for everything that exists outside. The seeker of archaeological finds is a sorrowful person looking for a strange and beautiful stone to distance themselves from the meaning of absence. Archaeological finds have a dual history: one horizontal, looking toward the extended horizon and the earth’s surface, placing everything within reach; the other vertical, revealing concealed finds beneath the earth’s surface, away from the noise of the world. In the horizontal type, there is searching in riverbeds, in arid lands, and within dense forests.
On our recent journey to the Black Mountains, I observed the informants Emhamed Boukhzam and Abdul Latif al-Mahdi as they walked through valleys and ravines searching for rock art sites. Both share the same passion: searching for archaeological finds on the earth’s surface. Reading the earth’s surface has been their passion since childhood, and over many years it has transformed into collecting the archaeological finds they come across. Through observation and monitoring the behavior of each, I found that Abdul Latif always looks at the ground. Although he is a skilled tracker, he cares only for archaeological finds. He looks at the earth with patience and care, with pleasure and filled with longing to find a stone that a prehistoric human attempted to polish and fashion into a knife. At the moment you expect him to place his foot on the ground, he descends like a hungry falcon, lifts his head with an arrowhead in his hand, then releases a gentle sigh from his chest. After that, he rubs the arrowhead well and places it in the palm of my hand, saying: “Look.” Abdul Latif embodies ghosts from other times, writing a history of searching for archaeological finds without uttering a single sound.
As for Emhamed, he walks along the stony path, and you feel he carries infinite sorrows. His slender shadow is detached from him, walking alone, while stones polish his features before him. Emhamed is also skilled in tracking, but he turns his attention to every line on the earth’s surface with a friendly manner. The track of a snake moving with its lethal, dry spirit; the track of a small, pale rock hyrax drawing passionate emotion on the Black Mountains; the track of a wild rabbit stealing the cold melody from the dawn. All these paths formed by the tracks of animals and reptiles do not prevent Emhamed from seeing archaeological finds as a halo of an ancient spirit. They both have a particular way of walking, weaving, to scan the largest possible area of the earth’s surface with minimal effort. Each of them has a valuable collection that awakens prehistoric spirits: chipped stone pieces, pottery shards, fragments of ostrich eggshells, and others.
The history of searching for archaeological finds is a painful and patient history. These material remains do not represent, for Abdul Latif or Emhamed, mere material remnants of a material culture; rather, they represent a longing to hear the echo of the past’s voice in their region. Abdul Latif and Emhamed place their collections not wrapped in cardboard, polyethylene, or bubble bags. They are there in a very ordinary cardboard box, from which a faint ringing can be heard. When Abdul Latif or Emhamed takes out his collection, he looks for a black cloth and spreads it on the ground with an intimate and instinctive manner, then brings out piece after piece, his hand echoing an unknown sorrow. Piece beside piece in a field of sweet serenity. When I look at him, I find him trembling, whispering with absolute emotion. This is the history of archaeological finds: the history of the mysterious emotional influence that flows into our hearts.
