Archaeological Views: A Career at One Site

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For the past six years I have been directing the Tel Dor excavations on the coast of Israel in collaboration with Ilan Sharon of The Hebrew University and partners from institutions in Israel, America and around the globe. Nearly my entire field career is connected to Dor. After my freshman year at college, Ephraim Stern, then my professor and excavator of Dor, asked me to join his team. Though I was hesitant at first, my mother insisted that I take the job. She said “You never know where this can lead.” (Lesson A: Always listen to your mother.) I’ve been stuck there ever since.

Some archaeologists tell me that having spent almost my entire career at one site is an unhealthy state of affairs, as it may limit my perspective. It is true that my involvement with Dor shaped my career and fields of interest, oftentimes quite arbitrarily. However, Dor is a uniquely fascinating and diverse site. It was occupied from the Bronze Age through Roman times. As a major seaport, it has disclosed ample evidence for cross-Mediterranean contacts. So it is possible to spend one’s entire career in this one site and from this vantage point get a wider perspective than others might get by jumping around from site to site. Thus, I am currently dealing with issues such as Sea Peoples and Phoenicians, commercial interconnections, Iron Age Israel and Iron Age chronology. Besides, Dor is situated on one of Israel’s most beautiful beaches, so I can hardly complain.

My first job was not in the field, however, but in the “Glasshouse” (the Dor site museum), where I processed pottery. In archaeology—and in Israel specifically—processing ceramics has been what the (usually female) assistants do, while the boss deals with the hard-core stuff: stratigraphy, architecture and so forth (later on, luckily, I did get promoted to field supervisor).

One long-term project that I’m involved in indeed stems from my early frustrations with the way ceramics are processed in large excavations, which usually produce thousands—sometimes millions—of potsherds. Any serious study of these artifacts must start by building a comprehensive typology, providing quantitative data with comparative studies, in order to place the assemblage in some temporal and spatial association vis-à-vis other sites. Employing traditional manual techniques for this means that producing the chapters on ceramics in major site reports becomes a Herculean task. The lag in (and sometimes lack of) publication of site reports (oftentimes dubbed “archaeology’s dirty secret”^a) is largely due to the problem in handling the mass of pottery. In some excavations, let’s admit it, this was “solved” by publishing only a portion of the ceramics (only complete vessels, for example, or by foregoing quantitative assessments). Thus, the most profuse—and often the most finely tuned—tool in the archaeologist’s tool kit is given short shrift. Where ceramic research is conducted seriously, it not only drains other excavation resources, but also the time (and patience) of the researchers. All the more reason for ambitious students on the “fast track” to avoid this subject, and—when they reach influential positions—assign this thankless task to those lowest on the totem pole or think up excuses to avoid it altogether.

More often than not, mending, drawing, classifying and counting, and the endless list of comparanda become the bottom line, rather than the starting line from which the real cultural questions must be answered. This only reinforces the negative feedback loop by which a fruitful field of study suffers from low self-esteem.

To overcome this sad situation, a group of archaeologists from The Hebrew University, Haifa University and the Weizmann Institute, headed by Professor Uzi Smilansky (a world-renowned expert on mathematical analysis of complex systems in physics), initiated our “archeomath” project. It has two main components. The first is the ability to record pottery in both an accurate and a rapid manner. This is done by a 3-D scanner that records the shape and texture of the objects and stores the data electronically. We have developed special software that can translate these 3-D images into the 2-D line drawings we are all accustomed to seeing in dig reports. The more crucial and complex part, however (undertaken by Avshalom Karasik, a Ph.D. student), is to develop the proper mathematical algorithms that will interactively classify the scanned pottery (and concomitantly provide quantitative data per type) and compare it to pottery from other sites, stored in large databases (which are yet to be constructed). We still have a long way to go, but the first, very promising steps have been taken. Eventually, especially when site reports go electronic, this will be an indispensable tool. And then, 078hopefully, archaeologists will use their time not laboriously generating the data, but interpreting it.

When Hershel Shanks invited me to write this column, he said he had in mind a feminist (I’m not sure, perhaps he said feminine) viewpoint of Israeli archaeology. So is there any of that in this story? I was often warned by well-meaning advisors that if—in addition to the undeniable fact that I am female—I get branded as a “pottery person,” I’d have no chance of ever getting a university position, much less of ever playing more than second fiddle on a major excavation. I am glad to prove them wrong. So perhaps there is some message here (for men too, I must add; I have heard several times from male colleagues that they take great care not to be associated with ceramics, though they would have liked to deal more with the subject). In the end, it really does not matter what you specialize in, so long as you produce something interesting and meaningful.

Many of my female associates feel they must choose between a professional career and having a family. This was not true in my case, but I cannot say it has been easy. Between ages 25 and 35 I was, professionally speaking, extremely unproductive. Luckily, in this country and in our profession, universities are still willing to offer positions to people in their forties. However, in the crucial, usually quite short, phase between getting an academic position and obtaining tenure, mothers of young children cannot be expected to keep the “usual” pace. This is something that academics around the globe will have to force their institutions to take into consideration.

For the past six years I have been directing the Tel Dor excavations on the coast of Israel in collaboration with Ilan Sharon of The Hebrew University and partners from institutions in Israel, America and around the globe. Nearly my entire field career is connected to Dor. After my freshman year at college, Ephraim Stern, then my professor and excavator of Dor, asked me to join his team. Though I was hesitant at first, my mother insisted that I take the job. She said “You never know where this can lead.” (Lesson A: Always listen to your mother.) I’ve […]