The Archaeologist’s View: Deep Time and the Wandering Mind
Reframing Adventure as an Accessible Practice with Justin Bailey
I’ve been reading Justin Bailey’s Substack, Those Who Wander, for many months now and decided to get in touch because we’re both interested in place, and the history of place. Justin is an archaeologist—it’s a profession I admire because I thought long and hard about it in my teens as I grappled with career choices and, although I didn’t have the right qualifications to make it happen, the subject is forever interesting to me.
Fun Fact: Justin still has a binder full of everything he’s ever written since early high school, including journals he began writing to process the books he was reading.
Justin and I actively engage with each other’s work on Substack and we exchanged ideas about the craft of Place Writing. He kindly agreed to give me his views on some of the central questions we struggle with as writers. Like, what sits at the heart of place writing? And, how do we train ourselves to see what’s actually there, beneath the surface of the immediate and obvious?
The Gift of Archaeological Time
‘Archaeologists tend to have a different perspective on time,’ Justin told me, ‘and therefore think a lot about long stretches of human history in specific settings.’ This isn’t an abstract intellectual exercise. It’s a practiced skill, honed through hours of surveying landscapes, sitting at sites, letting the wind and weather work on your body while you work on the ground. When you’ve spent enough time ‘being smacked in the face by high winds and sand’ at archaeological sites, you develop a particular kind of intimacy with place—one that holds multiple timescales simultaneously.
Justin described visiting Mesa Verde and meditating on not only ‘how these specific places change over time, but also how these archaeological places still have the power to inspire.’ As Place Writers, our perspective can encompass the past and deep past, the persistent present, and the future, as far as we can imagine it.
We don’t need to wait for the ideal residency, the grant-funded research trip, the perfect writing space; we can begin with looking at what’s immediately around us then, inspired by Justin’s work, we can introduce archaeological depth to familiar ground.
Most of us have no archaeological training yet Justin’s skills, acquired over years, offer a provocation: what if we practiced seeing our landscapes as palimpsests, locations where human presence is layered over the ground and beneath it, where animals have left their mark and the remains of skeletons survive?
Palimpsest (noun) = 1. Something bearing the traces of an earlier erased form. 2. A manuscript or document that has been erased or scraped clean for re-use. 3. Geological features thought to be related to features below the surface. 4. (Computing) Memory that has been erased and re-written.
Writing Practice
I’m drawn to Justin’s description of his writing habit: he’s a bit of a ‘neat freak’ he said, often compelled to tidy and order his entire house before sitting down to write. It’s ‘almost as if I need my environment organized before I can organize my thoughts properly.’ There’s something in this I think, because I’m of a similar attitude. If my writing space is a mess, I cannot write. I have to tidy. Something about the relationship between physical order and mental clarity, about clearing space for observation, thought, creativity.
Having recently completed a major piece of writing, Justin told me his first book is now available to pre-order on Amazon. ‘An Anthropology of Wandering: How Adventure Can Alleviate a Fearful Culture’. It is ‘part narrative about backpacking the Appalachian Trail and part social science research that addresses the questions of why humans seek travel and adventure, how things like modern media and our evolved psychology can inhibit our innate wanderlust, and how to structure more adventure into our lives.’
Wandering as Research Method
For the Place Writer, wandering becomes method. Not aimless drifting, but purposeful receptivity. When we wander—whether through a wilderness, a cityscape, or familiar paths close to home—we’re doing similar work. We go out not knowing exactly what we’ll find, but trusting that sustained attention will yield an understanding. Justin writes about ‘the qualities of distance, time, and place, which serve as catalysts, enabling us to capture what we’re all ultimately seeking: community, identity, structure, and purpose.’ This is what happens when we commit to knowing a place deeply—it offers us new perspectives and understanding.
Write in the Moment
Choose a familiar place you pass regularly—a building in your neighborhood, a section of path you walk, a landscape feature you’ve noticed but never really investigated. Put your archaeological hat on and ask yourself:
What human activity shaped this place?
What evidence of the past can I observe?
How does this place, or building, sit in its surroundings?
What timeframes are visible here simultaneously?
How has this place changed and what remains constant?
Who else has stood exactly here, across decades or centuries?
What major changes happened at this site which affected how people lived here?
Visit your local library and your national archives. Search historical maps and photographs. Talk to residents. Get local opinion, anecdotal evidence. Layer your own direct observation with oral history and archival discovery.
Observe. Wonder. Imagine. Research.
Then write. Take it from the moment of standing there to what you learned afterwards. Let the reader feel both the immediacy of presence and the depth of accumulated time.
An Adventurous Mindset
I asked Justin what he hoped to pass on to his readers. He said, ‘Ideally, what I want to give readers is a level of anthropological insight into why it’s so important for us to structure travel and adventure into our lives and see the world through an adventurous lens. I think as a species, we have a long way to go to devise a global society that not only respects human autonomy but also encourages us to both physically and metaphorically “see the world” as global citizens and come to value the diversity of human culture and natural landscapes.’
And Justin’s hope for readers is that they’ll ‘adopt an adventurous mindset and come to better understand that many instances of wandering and adventure are already accessible to nearly all of us.’
Credits, Notes and Links
Photos above courtesy of Justin Bailey.
Links to Justin’s Substack Those Who Wander, and read Justin’s post about Mesa Verde.
Justin’s website is here and buy Justin’s book here.
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wonderful💖
I like this concept of wandering as method.