Questão 30515

(Pucrs 2016)

ARCHEOLOGY: Starting Out

When my longtime childhood ambition of becoming a surgeon was derailed by the onset of adolescent ¹squeamishness – specifically, a dread of blood – I turned to archeology. The sere, crumbly atmosphere of a dig, as I envisioned it, seemed a welcome relief from the maelstrom I now perceived to be teeming within the human body. This was in the nineteen-seventies, when archeology was a glamour profession.

I decided to take a year off before starting college and devote myself to salaried excavation in exotic places. I had grown up in San Francisco and had left the United States only for occasional family trips to Mexico. I’m not sure which part of this vision most enthralled me: myself prying human bones and lustrous vessels from the soil of Asia or Africa, or the forgotten lives I pictured humming just ²__________ that soil, awaiting my discovery. After weeks of anxiously checking the mail for job offers and plane tickets, I received a single reply, from a professor at Berkeley. His avuncular tone failed to entirely blunt the gist of his message: Our graduate students pay us to come on digs. And you are not even remotely qualified.

Stung, I turned to some of the small pay-to-participate digs I’d seen advertised in the newsletter. In September of 1980, as most of my high-school friends were starting college, I shelled out two or three hundred dollars plus airfare (my earnings from long hours ³__________ the counter of a Haight Street cafe) to join a three-week dig in Kampsville, Illinois.

The exoticism of Kampsville was not the sort I’d craved. The real shock was the square metre of earth – delineated by strings attached to pegs – that was the extent of my archeological domain. We weren’t allowed to sit on our squares, only to squat. Nor were we to dig on our dig, only to skim away fine layers of earth with a scalpel, lowering the surface of our metre over the course of days, until the objects embedded there – projectile points or pottery shards – rested on top. This soil-shaving took place ⁴__________ a scouring sun, in ninety-degree temperatures. By day two, I was craving stewed prunes long before lunchtime. By day three, I’d renounced my goal of becoming an archeologist.

Still, the archeology fantasy had been irrevocably dispelled, and by October I was back at my cafe job with a fresh goal: save enough money to travel to Europe. But my sojourn in Kampsville has stayed with me – the sensation I had of scraping away the layers ⁵__________ myself and a lost world, in search of its occupants.

Answer the question considering the words that correctly and respectively complete the blanks in references 2, 3, 4, and 5.

According to the text, the words that fit in the blanks are