From the Field – Reading Bones in an Ancient City: My Time at the Albright by PhD student, Alexander Dorr
From the Field — Reading Bones in an Ancient City: My Time at the Albright
By Alexander Dorr, PhD Student, Boston University
I arrived at the Albright as rain drizzled over the cobbled sidewalks of East Jerusalem. As I meandered from the trolley station with my suitcases, I noted the rows of shops lining Salah al-Din Street. Many sat empty, doors firmly shut. I would learn over my three months in Jerusalem that this would become an increasingly common sight.
After recovering from jetlag, I immediately set to work on what I had come to the Albright to do. I was led down a twisting stone staircase to a locked metal door. Inside, I was met with the smell of dirt and dust, as light from the small windows bled into the damp basement. On the shelves were twelve boxes, each filled to the brim with bag upon bag of animal bones. Over the next three months I would spend my mornings going through those bags, going specimen by specimen to identify them to the greatest taxonomic specificity. Counting and measuring became everyday tasks, the quiet filled in with the noise of the neighboring streets.
These bones come from the Hellenistic occupation of a site called Tel Shimron. This period was a dynamic time in the region. From a historical reading, one would assume it is a time of war, of borders shifting between the competing Ptolemaic and Seleucid empires. While wars were undoubtedly waged (there are in fact seven to thirteen Syrian Wars in the Levant depending on who you ask), this era was also one of the first that we can define as truly cosmopolitan. Art and literacy flourished, along with the rise and founding of new great cities as part of Hellenistic imperial state-making. During this time, Shimron had been a small farmstead located at the base of a former monumental Bronze Age city in the Jezreel Valley. By analyzing these animal remains I aimed to gain clarity on two things: 1) What were people at the site eating?; and 2) How were animals managed at this small rural farmstead?
As a small farmstead, Shimron would have been a provisioning site, meaning that these farmers raised animals both for their own day-to-day needs, but also for those who resided in cities on the coast, such as Akko-Ptolemais. Understanding the herd profile, the species and the ages and sexes, of what animals were being consumed at the site will serve to provide greater clarity as I seek to reconstruct agricultural economy in Galilee during this period.
The Albright served as a place where I could settle into myself as a scholar. This is one of the only times in my life where I was surrounded by scholars who were all working in the same region. While our periods of interests, methods, and questions may all have been different, the Albright allowed me to connect and learn from fellow junior scholars and seek the insights of established senior scholars.
Early on in my stay at the institute, I was already hitting the ground running. Prior to coming to the Albright I had finished work on an animal assemblage I’d inherited from the site of Kedesh. Kedesh was a rural administrative center in the Persian and Hellenistic periods. It serves as an excellent case for trying to establish how an imperial administrative center would have been provisioned, but also serves as a key piece in attempts to understand how and if provisioning and agricultural economy changed with shifting administrations.
I presented my conclusions on the assemblage in a public lecture at the Albright in February. Contrary to initial hypotheses and other existing scholarship, I argued that the fauna from Kedesh illustrated that animal economy and provisioning at Kedesh remained stable for the centuries that the building was occupied.
Despite this nurturing scholarly environment, life on Salah al-Din and East Jerusalem in general was fundamentally different from my previous stays in the city. Within only a week of arriving, Israeli police raided the famous Educational Bookshop and arrested Mahmoud and Murad Muna on accusations that they were stocking “inciteful” materials in their store. The Educational Bookshop is located right down the street from the Albright, no more than a two minute walk. This event set the tone for the remainder of my time in East Jerusalem. There were, of course, still moments of joy and happiness. Ramadan meant that nights on the street known as “the heart of East Jerusalem” were a cacophony of honking, music, and shouting. I remember failing to fall asleep one night, sitting out on the balcony and watching the bright string lights decorate shops, casting various colors down onto passersby as they streamed up and down the street in the crisp night air.
The best way to describe this Jerusalem was as subdued. There was a heavy weight over the city. The Old City sat nearly abandoned, and many of the famous buildings and sites that tourists and pilgrims would flood sat quiet and waiting. Storefronts were shuttered, and whenever I spoke to local owners of restaurants and shops our conversations were always bittersweet. They were excited to have business, but knew that I was a peculiarity, a blip. Many in Jerusalem have built their lives around the money brought in from tourism. With the ongoing war and heightened tensions, those livelihoods are increasingly under threat.
While my time in Jerusalem was ultimately a productive one, it was also incredibly sombering. The Holy City still maintains its magic, filled with so much history, faith, and hope. But the realities of what is occurring in Gaza and the West Bank are unavoidable. I hope to return, sooner rather than later, to the Albright and Jerusalem, though hopefully under the auspices of peace.
Archaeology is firmly in the past but it is also inextricable from the modern-day, from the places where we do our fieldwork. While I sat in the Albright basement, scouring over some 15,000 bone fragments, I weighed my time in Jerusalem, the value of doing this work in this place at this precise moment. It was an Albright staff member who left me feeling more assured. My morning chats over breakfast with Naual Herbawi, served as a reprieve but also an important opportunity to hear about her life in her town of Beit Hanina. Interspersed in these morning chats about our lives and the news were questions and conversations about the past. There was a joy there talking with her and other fellows at the table – getting to enjoy the pursuit of knowledge and the past in a city so steeped in it. My hope is that conversations like those we had over coffee can continue to happen, for archaeology and history to be a bridge of communication in a city and region so steeped in it.
Now that I’ve returned from the Albright, I am settling into the final stages of my dissertation. The final hurdle remains interpreting and writing up all of the data I’ve accumulated over the past five years. As I sit at my desk, pouring over excel sheets and typing away, I know I will be thinking back to the months hunched over in a dim basement, listening to the sounds of life and the beating pulse of Salah al-Din Street.