Mediterranean archaeological site
AA-2026-5A4EA2
On the image
Someone decided that serious archaeology could be conducted in swim trunks, and the 1960s were exactly permissive enough to let that theory stand. A young excavator in a floppy sun hat leans over a drafting table set up in the open dirt, pencil in hand, recording a find with the same gravity a stockbroker might apply to a ledger, except the ledger here is balanced on driftwood legs and the desk lamp is the sun.
Behind him two more men in identical hats crouch and sift among the boulders, doing the unglamorous crouching labor that never makes it into the museum placard. Fieldwork in this era ran on the honor system of sunscreen, meaning none, and on the assumption that a proper tan was simply a professional hazard of the trade.
The drawing instruments on the table, calipers included, insist this is science and not a beach holiday, though the shorts and bare shoulders make a persuasive counterargument. Whatever they were uncovering among those rocks, it mattered enough to trade shirts for precision.
The historian's note
The scene shows a mid-twentieth-century archaeological field team at work on an excavation, likely in the Mediterranean given the rocky, sun-exposed terrain and informal summer dress typical of field seasons in Greece, Italy, or nearby regions during this period. Excavation recording in the 1960s commonly involved on-site drafting tables where finds were sketched, measured with calipers, and logged before being moved to storage, a method largely unchanged since the early twentieth century.
Field archaeology of this era relied on manual documentation methods that predate digital photogrammetry and GPS mapping, making hand-drawn plans and stratigraphic sketches the primary record of a dig's progress. The minimal, practical clothing reflects both the physical demands of fieldwork in hot climates and the more casual safety standards of the period, when sun protection and site conditions received far less attention than they would in later decades.
Such excavation seasons, often staffed by university teams and student volunteers, were foundational to establishing chronological and material records for many classical and prehistoric sites still referenced in archaeological literature today.
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Shirtless Archaeologists at an Excavation Trench, 1960s. 1960–1969. Archive & Atlas, Historical Image Library, AA-2026-5A4EA2. https://thearchive.archiveandatlas.com/library/shirtless-archaeologists-at-an-excavation-trench-1960s.
@misc{aaAA20265A4EA2,
title = {Shirtless Archaeologists at an Excavation Trench, 1960s},
year = {1960–1969},
howpublished = {Archive \& Atlas, Historical Image Library},
note = {Accession AA-2026-5A4EA2},
url = {https://thearchive.archiveandatlas.com/library/shirtless-archaeologists-at-an-excavation-trench-1960s}
}TY - ART TI - Shirtless Archaeologists at an Excavation Trench, 1960s PY - 1960–1969 PB - Archive & Atlas, Historical Image Library AN - AA-2026-5A4EA2 UR - https://thearchive.archiveandatlas.com/library/shirtless-archaeologists-at-an-excavation-trench-1960s ER -
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