'Discoveries incite excitement, not fear'

Armed with pickaxes and brushes of various sizes, archeologists take a trip to the past as they explore sites splattered across India. On Monday, security agencies were left shell shocked, after ASI officials, looking after the upkeep of Red Fort, found a cache of ammunitions and explosive materials.

But for the archeologists, such discoveries incite interest rather than fear as they gain perspective from such discoveries leading to ground breaking reinterpretations of history.

However, working far from the limelight, they have to work under dangerous conditions, fending off the wrath of nature, human oversight and dangerous animals falling into trenches. All of this effort is for one single-minded purpose: Documenting and reporting their findings, helping

us understand our links with the past.

The Director of Excavation and Exploration, Jitender Nath, while speaking to Millennium Post, brought these issues to the fore: "There are three types of dangers that we face. There are times when we work on a site and it starts to rain, which adversely affects our site and hampers our work. Then there are times when there is a lot of crowding at the site and may jeopardise our work and then there are also times when animals inadvertently fall into the trenches."

Archeologists take proper precautions as they analyse the sites and carefully choose the equipment required for exploration.

They go through a rigorous training and have to gain knowledge from diverse sciences ranging from soil analysis and zoology to the study of geology and botany, making them the 'jack of all trades'.

"We never send in fresh recruits to the sites. They have to work for years under their seniors before we let them handle sensitive artefacts. In fact, we also have to train the labourers working at the sites and teach them how to dig up the site and the use of proper tools," said an ASI official.

An archeologist drinks deep from the fountain of history and it consumes a better part of their lives but in the end, the ground breaking work that they produce, changes history, inviting the ire of political parties, making them modern day rebels.

"The use of AMS (Accelerator Mass Spectrometry) radiocarbon dating has changed the face of history. Despite these discoveries, it takes a long time to inculcate them in our books, as governments change and so does the interpretation of history. The historians of the medieval or even the ancient era were court historians and their work was never critical of their patrons but for us, evidence is everything," the official added.

On Monday, when a team from ASI were involved in a cleanup drive in the Red Fort, they found a box of explosives.

The team was cleaning a well inside the historical monument, when they found five mortars and 44 live rounds. The team was fortunately safe, as they reported the incident to the police, after which the NSG along with the bomb disposal robots were deputed to the spot.