What Ancient Pottery Can Teach Us About Everyday Lives in the Time of Jesus and Herod the Great
BU archaeologist Andrea Berlin, who leads an open-access database documenting centuries of artifacts, receives a lifetime achievement award

Andrea Berlin, a College of Arts & Sciences professor of archaeology and religion and the James R. Wiseman Chair in Classical Archaeology, says pottery can provide insights into where ancient people shopped, what and how they cooked, and how they set their tables.
What Ancient Pottery Can Teach Us About Everyday Lives in the Time of Jesus and Herod the Great
BU archaeologist Andrea Berlin, who leads an open-access database documenting centuries of artifacts, receives a lifetime achievement award
The summer before heading off to college, Andrea Berlin’s parents gifted her a mini educational vacation: a sightseeing trip around Israel, followed by a two-week dig alongside professional archaeologists on a site in the desert. Most of the other kids in the group hated it, Berlin recalls; they slept in tents and awoke at 4:30 every morning to get started. “It’s just like you imagine in the movies—you had to shake out your shoes to make sure there’s not a scorpion,” she says.
But despite these hardships, she couldn’t get enough. “I thought of it as history in my hands,” says Berlin, a Boston University College of Arts & Sciences professor of archaeology and religion. “The second I got in a trench, I was standing in the eighth century BCE, and holding a pot that people hadn’t seen in almost 3,000 years. It was as if I could imagine somebody else’s hands that long ago holding it.”
This passion propelled Berlin toward a career in archaeology. Today, she is the James R. Wiseman Chair in Classical Archaeology at CAS and an expert in ancient ceramics. On excavations in the eastern Mediterranean—including Israel, Egypt, Turkey, Greece, and Cyprus—she focuses on the later ancient empires and kingdoms, like those led by Alexander the Great in the fourth century BCE and King Herod the Great in the first century BCE. She is especially interested in understanding the realities of daily life.
In recognition of this work, Berlin has been named the 2025 recipient of the Gold Medal for Distinguished Archaeological Achievement by the Archaeological Institute of America (AIA). This award, presented earlier this month at the group’s annual meeting, is AIA’s highest honor. Berlin’s colleague, John Marston, a CAS professor of archaeology and anthropology, describes it as the field’s “Nobel Prize.”
Berlin says she was sitting in her office when she found out she had won the award and burst into tears.
“In college, I remember reading about famous archaeologists winning this award,” says Berlin. “The person after whom my professorship chair is named—James Wiseman [founder of BU’s archaeology department and a CAS professor emeritus of archaeology and of art history and classical studies]—was himself a winner of the award. I never saw it coming. It was a complete surprise and really amazing.”
Infatuated with the Levant
Berlin’s first dig happened in the region known as the Levant, roughly modern-day Israel, Jordan, Lebanon, and Syria, and home to the world’s three major religions (Judaism, Islam, and Christianity). Since then, she has felt pulled to focus her research there. In an article she wrote for the Biblical Archaeology Review, Berlin shared how scholars have studied the area since the 19th century and that excavations “have revealed the places behind the stories in the Bible and Qur’an: ancient temples, palaces, cities, farmsteads, workshops, and graveyards. These same excavations have produced millions of artifacts, none more abundant than pottery.”

Berlin says pottery makes people visible. It shows us where they shopped, what and how they cooked, and how they set their tables. Pottery, even fragments of pottery, are “a 3D evocation of all sorts of behaviors and activities and lives.”
Berlin describes her expertise as a unique specialty: creating ceramic classifications (typologies) and chronologies for sites not mentioned by ancient authors. This work allows these finds to be dated and inserted back into the historical record and informs perhaps her most significant professional achievement: the Levantine Ceramics Project (LCP). It’s an open-access website that crowdsources photographs and drawings of Levantine pottery, from the Neolithic period (5500 BCE) through today, excavated throughout the eastern Mediterranean. In its announcement of Berlin’s award, the AIA described the project as “[revolutionizing] the study of ancient pottery, bringing hundreds of excavators and ceramic scientists from around the world to the same digital table.”
Berlin dreamt up the Levantine Ceramics Project over 15 years ago out of frustration at how many archaeological finds were archived in books, difficult to access and search. To illustrate this, she points to the wall of excavation reports behind her desk. For years, Berlin remembers thinking that the way that the field published and communicated about its research was outdated: “It’s the same way it was in the 19th century—these dry, black-and-white drawings that you have to be a specialist to be able to decode and you have to go through page by page,” she says.
So, when Berlin arrived at BU in 2010 after 13 years of teaching at the University of Minnesota, she partnered with a software developer to build the site, with help from a seed grant from BU’s Rafik B. Hariri Institute for Computing and Computational Science & Engineering. The site launched in 2011; today, it’s a Wikipedia-like trove of pottery from hundreds of excavations, with over 700 contributors and over 20,000 vessels documented by photos, drawings, and petrofabrics (types of clay).
One area that the database is especially helpful for is the subdiscipline of petrography, studying clay to determine its mineral makeup. Archaeologists cut a thin pot section to examine under a microscope and identify its soil matrix and minerals.

“You can then connect them via geological maps with certain zones,” Berlin explains. “This is a way that you can scientifically fingerprint a piece of pottery and hook it up with where it comes from. If you are digging in Cyprus or Egypt or Jordan, and you see a vessel which is kind of odd and you haven’t seen anything like that before, you can examine it and then look for other things like it on the LCP.”
Making Archaeology More Human
What’s next? Berlin has thought a lot about how to make archaeology writing more human and less dry. “It’s hard for people to feel emotionally attached to,” she says. “And that’s very ironic, because we study people and care about them and want to do justice to the fullness of their lives via the material remains. But when we write about those material remains, we strip the feeling from them.”
In spring 2023, Berlin won a Fulbright Senior Scholar Award and spent six months at Tel Aviv University. The Fulbright afforded her the chance to start on a new book about the material history of daily life in late Hellenistic Israel, a region that was underneath empires like the Egyptians and then the Syrians. “There was a period of time where there was an independent state, the period of Jesus and Herod the Great,” Berlin says. “We have a lot of archaeology, but we don’t have a lot of sense of real people.”
The book is tentatively titled Beyond the Temple, named after the great temple in Jerusalem that the Romans destroyed in the first century BCE. “It was the centerpiece of life for a lot of people living in this area at that time, and a lot of scholarship focuses on the temple and its pull and how things worked there,” Berlin says. “The temple is a sort of magnet, and I’m interested in what’s outside the range of the magnet.”
In Tel Aviv, Berlin worked with a photographer to take artful photographs of ancient pottery, similar to those on the front of a postcard. Her idea was to style the images as if you opened a cabinet and saw a pile of dishes or mementoes on the top of a dresser. Berlin is writing short, first-person essays to accompany each image about why these items are meaningful and important.
In her remarks when accepting her recent AIA award, Berlin thanked her colleagues and mentors and said earning such an award caused her to reflect. “We archaeologists, we spend our time looking back, finding ways to make the past real, to make it matter,” she said. “I have stood before those piles of sherds [pottery fragments], and tried to see the whole from the parts. I have stood on dirt floors, in rooms without walls, and tried to imagine life in empty spaces. I have tried to turn stills into moving pictures, and history’s unknowns into stars, or at least featured players. Step-by-step, site by site, I’ve tried to bring the bigness of time into focus. And, you know, it has been the time of my life.”
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