By Evan Taylor

Community Archaeology, Outreach, and the Old City

Community Archaeology, Outreach, and the Old City

By Elena Sesma (Anthropology, UMass Amherst) and Evan Taylor (Anthropology, UMass Amherst)

Community archaeology is a spectrum of engagement and collaboration with local people who live at, in, and around a research site. Here at the Tel Akko project, the community archaeology and outreach program brings together local teens and field school students to work towards understanding contemporary life, heritage, and material culture in this unique place. Over two weeks, we learned the importance of conservation in a coastal city built in vulnerable sandstone through workshops with local conservator and stone mason Saleem Amer; we talked about the cultural and heritage values placed in this uniquely diverse and beautiful city through tours led by local residents, professional archaeologists, and conservationists; and we studied the ancient and recent past of Akko/’Akka through archaeology and conversations with people who study and live in this place. These varied activities exemplify what it means to do community archaeology today: learning with and from local or descendant communities, and contributing to a common goal, in this case sharing the stories of life in Akko/’Akka in the past and present.

Over the past few years, the community outreach program has integrated Photovoice into its basic structure. Photovoice is a method used by many anthropologists to highlight local understandings of place through photography and storytelling. Some use it as a research method, but in our case Photovoice is a tool for cultivating relationships between local communities and the archaeological project. The basic idea is to enable participants to share their own perspective on a place or on a special topic by giving them cameras to document how they see the world around them, sometimes with prompts and sometimes with little instruction. In this case, participants in our Photovoice tour had the following prompts: “This place is important to me”; “I want to know more about this place”; “I would take a visitor to this place”; “I would change something about this place”. Many of the photos from this tour correspond with these prompts, while others were produced for different reasons. Ultimately all photos were taken because the participant wanted to share their experience, knowledge, or curiosity about something.

 

This year, we expanded the Photovoice exercise into a digital map that can be saved and shared more widely than within our group alone. Using Google Tour Builder, we have compiled the photos and stories from our tour and placed them on a map of Akko/’Akka. Anyone with the link can take a tour of the city through the eyes of those who live here (our teen participants) and those who have come to know it in recent weeks (our American field school students). These photos, stories, and occasional audio recordings help to populate the city’s map for people who might not be familiar with the landscape. The tour is also valuable for residents and frequent visitors to the city who want to see their local values and histories represented through familiar eyes and with familiar narratives. Tour Builder is a flexible platform that will allow us to add more content to the map as the program develops in future seasons.

 

An especially neat feature of this exercise was the overlapping stories that began to emerge as we toured the Old City. Often a participant would lead us to one site for a particular reason, and when we arrived we found out that this same location represented another unique story or memory to another person. The digital tour does its best to represent the many layers of memory and value that our participants attached to each site. The sites included in this tour range from family homes, to favorite bakeries, to religious sites, to the excavation site on the Tel. We invite you to take a tour of Akko/’Akka and see what makes this city so meaningful to those who call it home for a lifetime or for the summer.

Explore these sights and sounds at the Google Tour Builder site here.

Note: All photos are shared with permission from their creators.

 

By Jennifer Munro

One Thousand Days and Nights – Akko through the Ages

There is so much more to Tel Akko than this one season that I and others have been writing about on this blog. The tel has been excavated since the seventies, and many wonderful discoveries have been made over the years. If you’d like to read more, go to this page and have a look through the document called “One Thousand Days and Nights – Akko through the Ages”. It is the catalogue for an exhibition held at the Hecht Museum edited by Ann E Killebrew and Bered Raz-Remeo, and includes information about the Crusader town of Acre as well as the lengthy and varied history of Akko and its mysterious tel.

By Dr Melissa Rosenzweig

Crops of Tel Akko

In this post I am going to run through some of the most common domesticated plant species that we find in the archaeological record at Tel Akko.  These taxa give us a good sense of the economic plants used at Tel Akko, particularly for food.

The two most prolific crops at Tel Akko, from all the historical periods excavated thus far, are olive (Olea europaea) and grape (Vitis vinifera).  Fun fact: The grape pips we recover occasionally show up mineralized, rather than charred.  This means people ate these seeds, which then calcified as they passed through the human gut (Green 1979).

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Cereals were also staples at Tel Akko.  We find grains of barley (Hordeum sp.) and different varieties of wheat (Triticum spp.).  Wheat would have been the preferred grain for people to eat, while barley would have been consumed by humans and fed to animals as fodder.

A handful of pulses, which comprise beans and peas, are found in the Tel Akko excavations.  They include lentil (Lens culinaris), common pea (Pisum sativum), and bitter vetch (Vicia ervilia).  Fun fact: Bitter vetch is considered a famine crop because it has to be boiled in order to be safe and palatable for human consumption (Zohary and Hopf 2000: 116).  However, this legume was also a popular fodder crop for livestock, who ate it as-is without any harmful side effects.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Other plants that round out our picture of cultivated crops at Tel Akko include fig (Ficus carica), safflower (Carthamus sp.), and flax (Linum usitatissimum).  Fun facts: We only have a few finds of safflower thus far.  But these seeds provide tantalizing links to maritime contacts with the Egyptians, who grew and prized safflower for both its oil (used in cooking) and red dye (used in cloth production) (Marinova and Riehl 2009: 345-6).  We have recovered just two (two!) flax seeds so far, but these plants were also important sources of oil (linseed) and linen for textiles.  They are hard to find archaeologically because their rich oil content makes them susceptible to ashing, rather than charring, when exposed to fire.  By the first millennium BCE, safflower and flax were largely (but not entirely) replaced by the red/purple dye of Murex shellfish and sheep wool for textiles.  And as it turns out, we have a fair amount of Murex shells and sheep bones (Ovis sp.) at Tel Akko.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Works Cited

Green, Francis J. (1979) Phosphatic mineralization of seeds from archaeological sites. Journal of Archaeological Science 6: 279-284.

Margaritis, Evi and Martin Jones (2008) Olive oil production in Hellenistic Greece: The interpretation of charred olive remains from the site of Tria Platania, Macedonia, Greece. Vegetation History and Archaeobotany 17: 393-401.

Marinova, Elena and Simone Riehl (2009) Carthamus species in the ancient Near East and south-eastern Europe: Archaeobotanical evidence for their distribution and use as a source of oil. Vegetation History and Archaeobotany 18: 341-9.

Zohary, Daniel and Maria Hopf (2000) Domestication of Plants in the Old World.  Oxford: Oxford University Press.

By Dr Melissa Rosenzweig

What is Archaeobotany?

Archaeobotany is a sub-specialization within environmental archaeology that studies human interactions with plants in the past. There are several approaches to recovering plant remains in archaeological contexts, from the collection of microscopic fossil pollen, starches, and phytoliths (the silicate skeletons of plant cell structures), to the recovery of macroscopic charred seeds and wood charcoal. I conduct the latter, and study carbonized seed remains under a microscope to identify plant species. It turns out that if seeds are fired just right (crispy, but not ashy) they can preserve in the archaeological record for thousands, even tens of thousands, of years. Once I identify these seeds I’m able to assemble information on changes in agricultural production and plant consumption over time (e.g. Did the residents of Tel Akko cultivate different crops at different times?) and over space (e.g. Did the people of Tel Akko use different kinds of plants in different contexts on the site?). Plant remains can also help us reconstruct ancient landscapes; track the use of forage, graze and fodder for livestock; and ask questions about the kinds of social interactions that plants facilitate: e.g. Did food choices distinguish different ethnic or status groups? Did men and women conduct different kinds of agricultural labor? Did people in the past promote sustainable environmental practices, or engage in lifestyles that led to erosion, deforestation or pollution?

 

 

 

When you think about it, most of the artifacts that archaeologists recover reflect only a very small proportion of the material culture that people utilized in the past. We find what endures: stone and mudbrick architecture, pottery, lithics (stone tools), bones, and metal items. But people in the past relied on and made so many other kinds of objects, a great deal of them from plant materials: e.g. timber architecture, wooden furniture and utensils, woven textiles, reed baskets, written documents, and, of course, plant foods. This continues to be the case today, even in the age of plastics. Look around you (and on you), and you will find materials made from plants that make your daily life possible.  Archaeobotany is an attempt to recuperate these hard-to-find but oh-so-important physical elements of human life.

 

Still want to hear more about archaeobotany? Allow me to explain in person

 

 

Astragalos

By Emily Holt

Cows’ Ankles and Urchin Spines: A Day of Zooarchaeology at Tel Akko

My alarm went off at 4:15 am today. Work starts early at Tel Akko, and I like to run in the morning to wake myself up and collect my thoughts. When I open the lab at 5:30 am, I’m feeling alert and ready to meet the past. And it’s a good thing, too, because my tables are covered with piles of fragmented animal bones. It looks more like a mess than information.

I’m the zooarchaeologist at Tel Akko this year, and it’s my job to identify, record, and interpret the animal remains recovered by the excavations. Animal remains are an extremely common find on archaeological projects, and they provide a wealth of information about diet, economy, environment, social status, mobility, and other aspects of ancient cultures that archaeologists work to understand. But getting from broken bits of bone to a reconstruction of something like ethnic differences in food choice is a complex and painstaking process.

How does zooarchaeological analysis begin? One bone at a time. I examine each bone or bone fragment for

the shapes and features that would allow me to identify it to species – if I’m lucky – or as close to species as possible. All kinds of factors come into play when I make these identifications. For example, an astragalus (ankle bone) of a cow has basically the same shape as the astragalus of a sheep or goat, but of course it’s much bigger. Telling the difference between the astragali of sheep and goats is much more difficult – only a few parts of the bone are different, and it’s best if all of them are preserved for me to make a really secure identification. Often this can’t be done, and I’ll record a bone as “sheep or goat.” That particular bone won’t help me tell if Akko ever developed an intensive wool-producing industry, but it will contribute to answering other questions, such as how food preferences at the site changed over time with the influence of new ethnic groups. Zooarchaeological analysis is many-layered, and the only way to get at all the questions we’d like to answer is by collecting a lot of data.

Every bone fragment provides some kind of data – even those that are unidentifiable. Unidentifiable bones can still show evidence of being chewed by carnivores, often an indication of the presence of dogs on the site. Similarly, many bone fragments preserve evidence of rodent gnawing. Some bones may preserve cut marks and help us understand ancient butchery practices (one of my favorite studies in zooarchaeology uses differences in butchering practices to look at inter-ethnic marriage in the ancient world*). Burned bone fragments can tell us about both cooking and trash disposal.

Even tiny bones are important sources of information, and some of the bones I study at Tel Akko are very tiny indeed. These are the bones recovered through the process of flotation – taking samples of excavated sediment and processing them with water to extract carbonized plant remains and other tiny finds. The resulting animal remains are often only a few millimeters in size, but they can be one of our most important sources of information for the use of marine resources and the presence of reptiles, amphibians, and small mammals like mice on the site. If you’re not sure what mice have to do with understanding the past, check out this excellent study.

Zooarchaeology takes a long time, and today I worked seven hours before lunch and still feel like I’ve barely made a dent. After lunch, I’ll attend a lecture by another of the specialists at the site and then spend two hours washing the new bones that have come in from the last few days of excavation. At this point in the season, it feels impossible. I have to take a deep breath and remind myself that no matter how daunting it looks, it will all get done in the end. And when it does, we’ll be thousands of fragments closer to understanding the past at Tel Akko.

 

 

* Gil J. Stein. 2012. Food Preparation, Social Context, and Ethnicity in a Prehistoric Mesopotamian Colony. In S. R. Graff and E. Rodríguez-Alegría (eds.), The Menial Art of Cooking: Archaeological Studies of Cooking and Food Preparation, pp. 47-63. University Press of Colorado, Boulder.

By Martha Risser

μεζέδες

A lovely rolled-rim plate was found yesterday in the Garea (i.e., eastern part of our excavations, where Professor Gary Gilbert works). Made in Athens, Greece, in the early Hellenistic period and exported to Akko, this plate is covered with a shiny black glaze. The glaze is partly mottled to red on the underside, an effect that would be seen if the plate was leaned against a wall when not in use. At the center of the floor is a stamped “palmette cross” within a circle of chattering or rouletting. Except for a few chips that are missing from the rim, the plate is in excellent condition.

With a diameter of only 12.5 cm – about 7 inches – this plate was probably best suited for μεζέδες (snacks). We might imagine cosmopolitan Phoenicians reclining on cushioned couches, enjoying the soft sea breezes as they nibbled on olives, pickled radishes, or little honey-drenched cakes.

A blast from the past of the Tel Akko excavations

By Jamie Quartermaine

The Ups and Downs of Area AB

The Ups and Downs of Area AB

Those of you who have worked, or are working on the Area A excavations may possibly have wondered what happens at the western edge of the site, and why there is a big, overgrown hole there. This is Area AB, excavated by Moshe Dothan, and more specifically, supervised by me for three seasons in the early 1980’s.

mysterious ostrich claw found at Tel Akko

By Jennifer Munro

The Mysterious Claw of Akko

Strange claw found at Tel Akko by Justin Lev Tov our Archeozoology expert

This season at Tell Akko, I, with the aid of colleague Liora Horwitz (National Natural History Collections, Hebrew University) resolved a mystery from the 2015 season. Near the end of last season, a gigantic claw (see pic) — the Akko Claw — was excavated from Nick Pumphrey’s area, QQ3. I was mystified, and took it to the Hebrew University, comparing it to birds of prey, crocodiles, sea turtles and other creatures. I also compared with an ostrich. None of these things fitted ‘my’ bone quite right, not even the ostrich. I mulled this over all year long during the off season, sending the picture to various stumped archaeological and paleontological colleagues. I was even starting to ponder the reality of Near Eastern mythological creatures out of desperation — how about a griffon? Maybe a roc (I have images of a B movie version of Sinbad and the Seven Seas ingrained in my head – I saw it as a kid, and I recall that some of his sailors were taken away by such a giant bird).

This season, Liora Horwitz visited the tel, and brought with her (knowing of the problem) a set of modern ostrich claw bones. We looked, but weren’t quite satisfied. Liora borrowed the archaeological claw to study it further in Jerusalem. There, she noticed, under a microscope, that it had been somewhat polished and cut a bit here and there. The ostrich was very close morphologically and so it must be an ostrich – there is no other bird in the greater Eurasian-African region of that size. A subspecies of ostrich used to inhabit Israel and neighboring countries, and many years ago I identified Roman-era ostrich bones from the site of Caesarea (a site to Akko’s south).

The skeleton which Liora and I were able to compare the Akko Claw with was the sub-Saharan variety, but perhaps some of the difficulty we had in identifying the bone as ostrich were due to subspecies differences. Next step will be to drop by either Harvard’s natural history museum or that of the UK, a couple of the only institutions that house skeletons of the ostrich which formerly inhabited this region, Struthio camelus syriaca. Unfortunately I’ve no plans to be in either place anytime soon: anyone heading in those directions and have room in their suitcase for an ostrich claw?

In the past, evidently, intrepid hunters or the wealthy who could employ them could eat ostrich. Today in Israel one can order ostrich steaks in upper echelon restaurants. Ostrich. It’s the other red meat.[/vc_column_text][/vc_column][/vc_row]

By Justin Lev-Tov

Pondering Scapulomancy

Some days ago University of Chicago student Gwen Christy excavated a fine example of a notched scapula, that is, a (in this case) cow’s shoulder blade incised with many notches running along one side of it. What was its purpose? These are known objects in archaeological sites in the Levant and Cyprus (mainly) but no one agrees on what their use(s) was/were. The truism in archaeology is that when we don’t know what something is, it must be cultic – and in this case too scholars have assigned the objects a religious function, perhaps divining future events in vague parallel with the use of differently modified scapulas from ancient China, a ritual known as ‘scapulomancy’. Others have suggested more mundane uses: the bridge of a stringed musical instrument (could it withstand the strings’ tension?), separating strands of yarn during weaving (would the notches have been deep enough to hold in the threads?), or making rasping sounds while a stick or bone was rubbed against it, perhaps during a ritual (but the area of the notches shows no where from such repeated actions). Other ideas have come to my mind — maybe the notches were used in accounting or for marking calendrical time. Yet, the notches are quite uniform, which suggests they were all made at once. So, although we now have one of the best-preserved examples of this object, the enigma continues.

1 2
Community Archaeology, Outreach, and the Old City
Branding in the ancient world
One Thousand Days and Nights – Akko through the Ages
Crops of Tel Akko
What is Archaeobotany?
Astragalos
Cows’ Ankles and Urchin Spines: A Day of Zooarchaeology at Tel Akko
μεζέδες
A blast from the past of the Tel Akko excavations
The Ups and Downs of Area AB
mysterious ostrich claw found at Tel Akko
The Mysterious Claw of Akko
Pondering Scapulomancy