By Siena Giljum (COM’22)

Katie Berlin (GRS’20) came to BU after graduating from UC Berkeley because she knew the archaeology program in the Archaeology Program had top-notch faculty members committed to improving the field as a whole. She quickly became exposed to innovative research techniques, like those of Dr. Andrea Berlin (no relation, Katie says), who created a worldwide database for Levantine ceramics. The platform is moderated by a group of experts but is open for anyone to add entries. “I really liked that innovation of making archaeology and social sciences accessible,” Katie says. “I think it helps broaden your research and connects people in ways that we haven’t really done before.”

As she delved more deeply into the area that fascinated her the most—Mediterranean archaeology and zooarchaeology—Katie would soon get the chance to forge her own innovations that are helping bring disparate areas of archaeology together, and helping archaeologists look at old finds in new ways. Katie made use of travel funds provided by GRS, as well as a grant for Old World archaeological research from the University of Sheffield (the Andrew Sherratt Fund), to spend a summer researching in Greece. 

A one-of-a kind site

Katie traveled to Greece specifically to study marine motifs on ancient Grecian pottery. She worked as a trench supervisor under Dr. Kim Shelton of UC Berkeley, at whose field school she had previously worked.

Mycenae, a famed archaeological site to the south of Corinth, Greece, was one of two areas in which Katie conducted her research. There, she worked with previously excavated material at a site called Petsas House. The ancient site had been used for both residential and commercial purposes, functioning as a home and a potter’s workshop. The site also had several levels of occupation from various time periods, making for a one-of-a-kind archaeological find. After a natural disaster (presumed to be an earthquake), the residents of the site had deposited mass amounts of broken material into a well so deep that reaching the bottom for excavations is too dangerous. “We just have a lot of really good material because they just threw everything in one spot,” Katie says. “There’s a lot going on in one tiny space.”

Doing things a new way

Preservation of all pottery might seem like it would be an industry standard, but in the past the archaeological community placed higher value on undamaged, unbroken pieces of pottery. Since museums almost universally prefer to showcase traditionally “beautiful” items, older field practices included simply discarding undecorated pottery, “so we lost a lot of that information,” Katie says.

To her, an enormous deposit of broken material like the one at Mycenae is no longer a haystack to find a couple of needles in but a pit brimming with them. With her work in Greece, Katie said that she “was hoping that this would be a way we could show people that fragmented material can still be valuable material if you’re willing to look for ways in which it’s beautiful. If you have it, you can do something with it,” she added.

In addition to material analysis at Mycenae, Katie did excavation work at a Mycenaean cemetery site called Aidonia as part of what the archaeological community calls a “rescue excavation.” “That area is heavily looted, so every summer we go in and try to find tombs before looters do,” Katie syas. She and her fellow researchers systematically retrieved material from the chamber tombs so raiders can’t remove and sell it.

Graduate research like Katie’s, and the innovations that graduate students like her can contribute, is only possible when it is adequately funded, so the BU funding and grant from the University of Sheffield were essential to her work.

The shellfish connection

With three semesters of graduate-level classwork and plenty of hands-on research in the field under her belt, Katie used her summer experience as a step toward more focused study of Mediterranean sites, honing in on the connections between pottery and shellfish. By reconstructing a sample of the availability of different shellfish at a Mycenaean citadel, Katie and the rest of the team were able to begin comparing what the Mycenaeans were actually using and eating with what kinds of marine motifs they often included on their pottery.

“We haven’t really gone back and thought about these motifs in any meaningful way,” she says. Not only did Katie make the case for reconsidering long-accepted theories about the popular shellfish motifs and urge her team to value every piece of material, broken or not, but she also helped start the rare conversation between two corners of the archaeological field.

“A lot of times zooarchaeologists and ceramicists don’t talk to each other and we don’t think about aligning our research,” says Katie. “We can see this is a valuable study, and it’s a new way to look at things, so that was really exciting,” Katie says.

Photo credits: Katie Berlin and Oana Craciun on Unsplash

—

Siena Giljum studies journalism in the College of Communication (‘22) with a Spanish minor in the College of Arts and Sciences. She is from Southern California and hopes to one day write for The Atlantic. She loves podcasts and avocados, in no particular order.