Silent Labor: Dig Workers in the Middle East

018

Like many archaeologists, I take pride in my excavation skills. I can keep my vertical sections straight, reveal a delicate skeleton, and sort out complex stratigraphy. Of course, on my first excavation, I struggled with these tasks. So that I might learn, my excavation supervisor told me to watch Moses, an excavation worker hired from the local community. As I observed and copied the way Moses held and moved the trowel, I learned how to excavate.

I am not alone in this experience. Seton Lloyd, who later became the president of the British School of Archaeology in Iraq, wrote in the 1960s about his experience at Khorsabad, learning to excavate from the local Sherqati laborers hired to work on the site. Khorsabad is famous for its extremely difficult and sensitive mudbrick architecture. The laborers were not only experts in recognizing and digging around the mudbricks but had even developed their own specialized tools for revealing the mudbricks clearly and carefully.

In the history of Middle Eastern archaeology, there are many examples of local communities such as the Sherqatis, and individuals like Moses, who developed expertise in archaeology by working on project after project. Yet these people are rarely, if ever, credited in archaeological publications for their contributions, and they are generally excluded from the documentation, analysis, and publication of archaeological research. We know about them mostly through affectionate notes in diaries and memoirs, which make it clear that archaeological excavation would not be the same without these locally hired workers.

Of course, excavation management varies across the Middle East. Since the 1940s, archaeological labor in Israel has been done mainly by volunteers, soldiers, and government workers. In other places, students have been the ones to move the most soil. And while the number and scale of foreign-run excavations has decreased, especially in Turkey and Egypt, many excavations across the Middle East still follow the 200-year-old tradition of hiring members of the local community to conduct the manual labor of the archaeological project.

So what skills and knowledge do locally hired laborers contribute to an excavation? In 2014, I set out to answer this question by interviewing former site workers at two major sites: Petra in Jordan and Çatalhöyük in Turkey. In total, I spent five years interviewing more than 150 workers across the two sites. They described their memories of working on excavations—of the heat, the pay, and the relationships they formed with students and researchers. As they shared their recollections, it became clear that they possessed expertise in many aspects of the archaeological process.

Some held detailed and vivid memories of the archaeological finds recovered during excavation. They were able to describe particular architectural fragments, burials, figurines, and coin hoards. In some cases, their memories conveyed more information than the original documentation on the project. One man, for instance, described the 020 appearance and specific location of a bronze statue from the Temple of the Winged Lions in Petra—and offered a hypothesis regarding its original use. The documentation for this object in the project archive, by contrast, is only one line long.

Other site workers possessed significant expertise about excavation methodologies. They were proficient in recognizing stratigraphic changes, even subtle ones. Interviewees described how they knew which tools to use, depending on the soil’s color and texture, and density of artifacts. Site workers from Petra described how they knew what pottery came from which era, and one site worker from Çatalhöyük said he could anticipate what would be recovered from the flotation machine simply by looking at a soil sample.

But the moment I commented to site workers that they clearly had expertise, they denied it. “Oh no,” said person after person. “I don’t know anything about archaeology.”

Why would so many site workers claim to know nothing about excavation, even after years of experience working on digs? The memories that they related made it clear that they possessed extensive knowledge and skills relevant to field archaeology. As an archaeologist, I expected that they would want me to know how skilled and informed they were. I was wrong.

As I continued with the interviews, the reason behind the contradiction became clear. In addition to feigning ignorance about archaeology, site workers told me stories about times when they had worked on excavations and offered their expertise to project directors. The site workers had suggested, for instance, other places to dig, different dates for artifacts, or alternative conservation strategies. In response, they were reprimanded or demoted or even fired—in other words, punished, often financially. One man had sworn off ever working on an excavation again, saying that project directors treated him as someone “only there to work, not there to ask.”

In my recent book,¹ I call this phenomenon “lucrative non-knowledge.” It describes a situation in which it is rewarding monetarily to pretend to be ignorant and where revealing one’s scientific expertise can prove costly. Workers across the Middle East have been disincentivized from sharing what they know about sites, artifacts, and excavation procedure. They possess knowledge from living near archaeological remains, from working on excavations for a long time, and from handing information down through generations—but it is risky for them to try to share it with archaeologists. And our knowledge about the past is poorer for it.

Fortunately, there are things that archaeologists can do to change the situation. One way is to involve locally hired laborers in the documentation and analysis stages of the archaeological project. Historically, the manual and the intellectual work of archaeology have been treated as two separate phases, with one person moving the soil and another one documenting its texture and color. Combining the two would acknowledge the expert work entailed in removing, recognizing, sifting, and dumping soil. If site workers participated in documentation, they could include their perspectives and knowledge in the archaeological record and, by extension, the scholarly interpretations.

If archaeologists want to benefit from local community members’ insights, we should make it more rewarding for them to share their expertise than to hide it. To do this, we have to change the way we hire and pay site workers on archaeological sites. Specifically, manual labor needs to be treated like other professional work, where team recruitment and pay scales are based on experience. In this way, workers would be rewarded for their expert contributions to the archaeological process, rather than for performing an easygoing, quiet attitude. As a result, archaeology would grow and benefit from the free and open sharing of knowledge that is essential to good science.

Like many archaeologists, I take pride in my excavation skills. I can keep my vertical sections straight, reveal a delicate skeleton, and sort out complex stratigraphy. Of course, on my first excavation, I struggled with these tasks. So that I might learn, my excavation supervisor told me to watch Moses, an excavation worker hired from the local community. As I observed and copied the way Moses held and moved the trowel, I learned how to excavate. I am not alone in this experience. Seton Lloyd, who later became the president of the British School of Archaeology in Iraq, wrote […]