My upstairs writing desk, which has been untouched for several months, had accumulated debris: dust, stacks of paid bills and important paperwork yet-to-be organized in the filing cabinet, a pile of sweaters and flannel shirts I haven’t worn in years, and a tiny stuffed lamb that was one of my first stuffed animals — one my mother hadn’t gotten rid of, so I ended up taking it home with me instead.
Among the clutter, I found my small brown bag from the Smithsonian from our family trip to D.C in July, the treasures I bought there still wrapped carefully in tissue paper, the edges taped closed. Instinctually I began to move the bag toward my “keepsake box,” a catch-all for things I can’t bear to part with: movie tickets, plane tickets, travel itineraries, tourist maps, letters and cards from family and friends. But then I paused. I remembered one of the items was an ammonite fossil, something I initially glanced at and walked past, only to return to it moments later.
An ammonite is an extinct marine mollusk that first showed up during the Devonian period, then disappeared during the Cretaceous-Paleogene extinction event. The Devonian period was known as the “Age of the Fishes,” as life was evolving rapidly and fish in particular reached substantial diversity during this time.
Ammonites are considered “index fossils” — they can indicate a particular span of geologic time or environment, which is useful for dating them, for telling the story of time.
The ammonite fossil is a perfect spiral — a “golden spiral,” mathematically speaking, as its shape is infinitely repeated if magnified. It’s often described as “sacred geometry in nature.” It is brown, bronze, gold, and pearl, with hints of copper and blue and green iridescence as it catches the light. It is something that I appreciate more and more each time I look at it. It feels solid as a stone in my hand and when I lift it up to smell it, I swear I inhale salt and metal. I sit and imagine for a few seconds what it means to hold tens or hundreds of millions of years in the palm of my hand, tried to imagine it alive and somewhere underwater, back when most things were; tried to imagine what it was like during the extinction when everything went dark, and how it managed to stay silent and quiet and buried until it was found.
Who would have thought that it would be sitting on a writer’s desk somewhere in 2023, a talisman she holds to summon up wonder, to crack open her own memories, to resurrect the dead.
I like archaeology for many reasons: I am fascinated by the world in all of its eras, and by the incredible diversity of animal and plant life it has hosted. It’s humbling and awe-inspiring to me that there is so much we never saw, and there’s so much we just don’t know. I also love the process of archaeology: of using a limited set of data and limited tools to piece together a puzzle of what has happened here, and when. The fern and shell fossils I found in the shale-heavy cliffs in Pennsylvania were indicative of land that had been underwater for a long time, covered by shallow seas.
I realized the striations of rock tell their own stories, whether the width of the bands or the depth of color, and of course the once-organic fossilized materials found there. And of course, archaeology is also a metaphor, because we all know I love a good metaphor — it is the process of excavating, of using morphed and transformed materials to get at the truth. It feels to me a lot like writing essays.
Archaeology awakens something living in me. It may be the study of the dead, or of the past, but it inspires the exact opposite: to live. Our lives are short, but the earth’s is long. It’s good to be reminded of that — that we only have a brief amount of time to live, to experience things, to maybe make the world a better place, before we return to it ourselves.
I loved this, Ashley! Fossils are so fascinating, though when I was in Geology 105 while at BGSU, I failed to find them quite as fascinating as I do today. Keep writing your beautiful, soul searching words as you make us all think and, in the end, appreciate ❤️
Beautiful, Ashley.