Bog-standard sandwiches and Choc Mallows: lunch in my archaeological half-life

Archaeologists love lunch. I know this because I used to be one. And in that half-life I led, the highlights were often food-related.

In 1992, eight of us became Bog Bodies, which meant we helped to survey the bogs in various parts of the midlands. Under the supervision of four real archaeologists, we tramped up and down along endless Bord na Móna drains looking for signs of archaeological material.

If you found timbers poking out of the side of the drain, you’d lie on your tummy and wriggle over to the side and have a closer look. If you saw a cut timber, or a sprig of wattle, you’d look in the opposite face of the drain and poke around a bit to see if the feature was there too. You’d mark the spot with a bamboo from the pile you always carried, and continue along your drain, unless the person at the next drain was doing the same thing, in which case you might have stumbled across a trackway, or something very exciting.

Now, I know I’ve used the word “exciting” there, but some bogs were full of archaeological material and our initial surveys led to excavation projects that yielded priceless information about ancient people’s life, environment, settlement and ritual. (And, of course, their food.) But other bogs went on for ever and a month, with hardly any signs of life except for the nonsense we made up and the songs we yelled to keep our spirits up. And, of course, our lunch.

Having walked to the far end of a bog, and sometimes got lost walking in a straight line, once lunchtime came we’d make our way back to the jeeps and hope we weren’t the last of the locusts. Now that I actually have to articulate what was in those lunches, they can be boiled down into one word: sandwiches. But oh, what sandwich spreads we made. There was every sort of cold meat. There were many cheeses. There was a token sprinkling of salady stuff. There were many crisps. And, in some disgusting vile-lunch-combo-competitions instigated by the Bog Body boys, there were Choc Mallows squished under the top slice.

As the summer ground on, we came back to base camp, tucked away in a corner of the UCD campus, and felt the bog dust grow out of our hair, our skin, our nails and our ears (all our clothes turned brown), and made flatter sandwiches to take account of the fact that we were no longer walking them off. Other notches on our post-and-wattle included an excavation at a crannóg in a far extremity of Co Mayo (where our hands got too cold to spread the sandwiches), a month’s environmental studies in Exeter (where there were no Choc Mallows) and a week of hell in the Severn estuary.

In the Irish midlands we had lived in non-mobile homes behind a village butcher’s shop and had our dinner in the pub every day. On the estuary we lived in tents and worked on an archaeological survey of intertidal mudflats: essentially, when the tide was out, so were we (all our clothes turned grey). Lunch was made by an odd couple who could cook only in beige. And so, because we missed our Choc Mallows, we persuaded one of the real archaeologists to smuggle us some junk, with which we would stuff ourselves silly before curling up together like puppies in the Bog Body boys’ tent and sleeping until the tide went out again.

And then we developed into real archaeologists and started to fan out into the underworld; many of us on excavations in Dublin city centre, some of us on western hilltops, some starting postgrads.

But always, no matter how mucky the medieval hole you were stationed in, the lunchbreaks with the wisest wisecrackers and the sharpest observers would make up for the drudge and the sludge.

Life and natural selection brought me along a different kind of trackway to The Irish Times, and now I am working on the Health+Family supplement. Sometimes lunch is breakfast, and sometimes it is last night’s dinner. Sometimes it is soup, and at no time is it sandwiches. Sometimes lunch is a walk with a colleague, and sometimes it’s a sprint to do an errand.

But journalism is always like archaeology. It’s always about people. And often about their lunch.