 Well, great, I'd like to welcome our internet audience back to our penultimate presentation in our Unsilencing the Archives lecture series. And before I get on to introducing today's speaker, I would like to hand the floor over to our curator, Melissa Craddick, who will read our introductory statement. Melissa. Thank you, Erin. We would like to begin by acknowledging that Berkeley, California is on the territory of the Puchin, the ancestral and unceded land of Puchinio Oloni. We respect the land and the people who have stewarded it throughout many generations, and we honor their elders, both past and present. We're living in a moment that warrants deep reflection on our past, where even our most venerated figure deserves reasonable scrutiny. During his time directing the archeological excavations at Telenose, W. F. R. Bade participated in harmful stereotyping of local populations as common among white Americans and Europeans conducting fieldwork in tradition in the Palestine. Some of these attitudes appear in print in his popular 1930s book, A Manual of Explanation in the Inner Beast. Museums are also scrutinizing their collections, including evaluating the legal status and ethics to which they were acquired. As stewards of the legacy of the Body Museum and its holdings, it is our responsibility to faithfully evaluate the process by which the collections were acquired within the context of our contemporary moment. One approach is to ask new questions about archival materials in order to examine critically the matter and impact of archeological work on indigenous communities to investigate the colonial conditions in which it played a part. The Body Museum recognizes that its location and collection are part of ongoing and painful colonial legacies that contributed to historical inequalities. These legacies have directly and indirectly impacted populations locally and abroad in Palestine where the excavations were conducted under the authority of the government of Palestine. In an effort to bring light to these issues to serve a broader public audience online and to connect to the local community that it serves, the Museum is taking action to become a more inclusive, welcoming and equitable institution that practices the philosophy of radical inclusion, adopted by its parent institution, Pacific School of Religion. One of these steps is the creation of open access web exhibits and public programming like the lecture series which highlight decolonizing groups. We invite you to participate in these programs so that together we can listen, learn and work toward creating a more inclusive museum community. Thank you for joining us today. Great, thank you so much, Dr. Craddick. So it's my distinct pleasure to introduce today's speaker, Dr. Helen Dixon. Dr. Dixon currently serves as assistant professor of history at East Carolina University in the UNC system where she teaches ancient Near Eastern and classical history alongside courses on public history and museum studies. So her research is a perfect fit for this series. Her research focuses on Phoenician history and religion exploring the ways mortuary practice can be used to reconstruct social history in the first millennium BCE. The project she will be speaking about today draws on archival work conducted at the University of Michigan where she received her PhD in Near Eastern studies in 2013 and I might just add she is a recent Getty fellow just returning from a research time in Malibu. So Dr. Dixon, welcome, welcome, welcome and the floor is yours. Thank you so much and I want to extend a personal thank you to Erin for even remembering that I ever did this research and started it about ten years ago. Truly impressive memory and it was a real joy to come back to a project like this after so long and see the sort of richness of this collection with some new research questions in mind. So I'm going to be talking today about sort of a strange collection of archival work from centered on this character circled in red Horton O'Neill who was a teenage volunteer on excavations in the French protectorate of Tunisia in 1924 and 1925. And I wanted to look in particular this was collections motivated research I wanted to look at his souvenirs right when we think of souvenirs today if you've ever been a volunteer on an excavation. You might think of something like a reproduction of a Roman lamp, you know some small little thing to take home as a memento. It meant something very different to Horton O'Neill and I'm going to explore that here with some research in progress. So I'll start by talking about this character himself. He goes by Horton. I'm going to use his papers to talk about the logistics of excavations at Carthage the really interesting textured information we can get from his letters, correspondence notes and scrapbooks as you'll see on on how that excavation those excavations were run and organized. We're going to get into a little bit on the attitudes towards local workers events in his writings. And we're going to sort of lead into finally his attitudes towards portable antiquities and souvenirs from his time in Tunisia and across the Mediterranean world. So starting with the first question, who was Horton O'Neill and why should we care? Horton was born in 1907. And that means that when he excavated at Carthage he was 16 and 17 years old. This was by all records I can find his only archaeological experience. He was a volunteer. He came from boarding school in Paris to join these excavations. So I don't totally understand how he got roped into all of this. But this was before he ever entered university at Princeton. He eventually became an architect, married a famous dancer, Madeleine Hyde Phillips, had two children, really had an interesting and varied life, relatively well off. And eventually passed away at the age of 89, at which time his New York Times obituary described him as archaeologist, architect, sculptor. So this identity as an archaeologist follows him throughout his life and is something he really celebrates and returns to in his own depictions of himself, representations of himself, and of course his interests and friendships. Another reason we should care about Horton O'Neill is that his collections can be found across Harvard, Princeton and the University of Michigan's archaeological collections and university museums. So again, he excavated in the mid-20s. 40 years later, he made his first donation to Harvard, a collection of stamped amphora handles and objects. That was published in the Harvard studies in classical philology in 1968. And the sort of narrative that accompanies the scientific presentation of these pieces describes O'Neill as a volunteer and co-American staff for the excavation of Carthage during the spring seasons of 24 and 25. And says that his own accounting of the material Harvard acquired describes, or he describes his acquisition as he used to walk to the excavations from the village of Sidi Bou Said and picked up pieces in the fields. He occasionally traded pieces with the French scholar, Francois Ikard, discoverer of the precinct of Taneet. We're going to return to this story later because it changes quite a bit if you look into his personal papers. But that's the sort of official story that Harvard presents of the collection it acquired in the 1960s. A second donation followed pretty soon after. That second donation contained eight further boxes, and there's a sort of good record keeping of what was acquired at that time. You can view the O'Neill collection and Harvard Art Museum's online site. And it includes, you know, a lot of ceramic material, some ivory, and at least one cremated, the cremated remains of an infant from this Taneet excavation at Carthage. In 1981, a second institution was a recipient of Horton O'Neill's collections, antiquities collections. This donation was facilitated by Francis Jones, who was the curator of the time. And it seems clear from the documentation that Michigan has about that donation that Francis visited the O'Neill's in their home, picked a representative group in consultation with the O'Neill's, and then quite a bit was left behind for them to enjoy. And after Horton O'Neill passed away in 1997, his wife, Madeline, made a third donation to the University of Michigan. 79 physical artifacts and the papers of Horton O'Neill. And that collection is where I did most of my research in around 2012. The Kelsey Museum of Archaeology has given me permission to talk about this material today, and thank you for that. Has this incredible series of boxes containing eight separate scrapbooks that Horton O'Neill put together documenting his life from 1903 to 1925. So the last four of those volumes of scrapbooks contain information related to his travels in North Africa and his excavation experience. They include drafts of typed letters, right? He would draft letters to his family and then copy them out again with all the corrections made and send them off. We have some letters from family members. We have photos. Of course, we have the ceramic collections, some of which include, again, cremated infant remains. I was able to study those collections, and I was working on them as a sort of element of Phoenician collecting, you know, Punic artifacts collected by American institutions when I came across all of this rich archival material. So it's from those papers, the papers of Horton O'Neill, but I'd like to explore some of what he sort of indirectly points to in terms of logistics of these excavations going on in 1924 and 25 in Carthage. So of course, Carthage is a coastal site, the northern coast of Tunisia there, but Carthage itself is an enormous preserved ancient city, and we have just in the two years that he's there, several excavations mentioned by Horton O'Neill. So there is sort of one area at the temple of Tanit. Most of the time, Horton describes this just as Tanit, but this is the so-called Tophit site, the sort of infant cremation cemetery with hundreds of inscribed staley marking either sacrificed in infants or perhaps, you know, miscarriages and early neonatal deaths that have been sort of given to the gods for a replacement child, depending on your position on that. There's the Hill of Juno, the Roman Forum, Punic ports, those are all separate elements of Carthage that were sort of in various stages of excavation while Horton O'Neill was there. At the site of Utica just north of Carthage that Horton works at in 1925. He references several trips taken to Duga, which has also been excavated for about 10 years at the point that Horton is there. And then there's a reference I'd be really interested if anyone has leads on this, a reference to the Hogarth, the Hogarth with the definite article. This is described as an excavation that has been postponed until fall 1925 after Horton has left, and I haven't been able to figure out what that site is. Had some leads that are all dead ends as far as I know. So how did the excavations Horton was privy to work? Some of the details he gives us are, again, just sort of really amusing, charming, you know, letters home. So he writes to his brother in 1924 that there are 10 in the party and by this he means Western staff members who have assembled to oversee excavations at Carthage in his little group. Seven boys and three girls, the average age I discovered today to be 23, and I don't seem to be at all out of place at the time. He's 16 years old. As the count trusts me to manage the whole excavation when he's busy, attend to personal notes in French or drive his car to Tunis any day of the week, should I take the notion? Sort of a shocking thing to imagine a 16-year-old doing, and we don't know how much of this depiction is bravado, right, writing to a brother trying to show off a little bit. But certainly there is some support for this claim borne out in the rest of his, in his papers. These scrapbooks are a joy, a joy to Peruz. He's carefully sort of sketching out lines to keep them straight, pasting in all sorts of material and illustrating in some cases that material further. So here is illustrations of several sort of day trips that the crew took to visit sites. Again, a lot of folks wearing pith helmets for no obvious excavation-related reasons, but a mixed gendered group of Western individuals who are touring the sites. And of course, you can see already here his little drawing, his sketch identifying who's who in the picture at the top of the page. Some of these names will be familiar to those of you who work in either historiography or Punic and Phoenician studies for sure, sort of a little charming little cartoon legends. And sometimes he offers teenage boys style labels to photos. In this case, he identifies here the Abbe Chabot of the French Academy and describes his nickname, the Shabby Abbot for the boys at the site. He also cuts out clippings from newspapers published in 1924 and 1925 to sort of provide further content. And probably also, you know, prestige, right? These publications, media coverage of the excavations add to the feeling that he has that he's responsible for something really important and exciting. In this case, this is that same Abbot. The published news clipping says an expert reads the records of a vanished civilization, the Abbe Chabot, one of the foremost authorities on the Punic language, the ciphers and inscription, et cetera, et cetera, and Horton adds the comment, no comment from the well-mannered company, right? This is all very, very fancy and highfalutin sounding. I know this guy to be a little bit of a silly old man, right? Some of the transcribed letters go a little bit further. And here I'm going to use the language of a teenage boy in 1925. So I apologize for the terminology he chose. But in this lovely mother, letter to his mother, Horton says, I could never be an archeologist with these human freaks representing the fellows I would have in the trade, hashtag relatable. He goes on to really character the bear of our zoo, Professor Swain, et cetera, et cetera. And then at the very bottom of your screen, all the Michigan representatives are alike with the exception of Professor Kelsey, who I'm sure isn't far removed, right? I don't know that guy very well. He's got a certain gravitas, but I'm sure if I got to do that, I'm going to be a weirdo too. So this is the lens through which we have to experience these papers, right? A lot of sort of making fun of the characters in the story, making himself look great, a lot of cleverness and backhanded sarcasm, all that kind of stuff. Horton is also documenting the locations where the team worked. I actually have no idea how he got this top picture, I don't think he took that one himself, though he does have, he talks about his new camera that he received before the excavation in 1924. The Palais Hamacar is where the dig team stayed, and we've got images of the living room there. And then portraits in various states of sort of casualness. I don't think he took that one himself, though he does have, he talks about his new camera that he received before the excavation in 1924. He talks about the casualness of all of the team members headed out with their equipment to the site, et cetera. He also keeps addresses for future correspondence with some of these staff. So that's a helpful way to sort of track where these characters went after they disassembled the team. And we can check Horton O'Neill's recollections and notes against the published preliminary report of the 1925 excavations put together by Francis Kelsey. This is the Kelsey of the Kelsey Museum of Archaeology. Kelsey was a classics professor at the University of Michigan who really started to sort of raise money to do on these multi-year expeditions to accumulate antiquities, but also to sort of finance excavations. And he was at least in name a director of the excavations at Carthage. He organized some funding. But he had this important role to play at that site. And of course, in 1953, the University of Michigan named the Archaeological Museum for him in his honor. But in that publication, Kelsey describes Horton O'Neill of New York, not associated with any institution, right? He's a teenager, not at a university. In a list of volunteers who at different times took an active part in the work, rendering service as inspectors in charge of the Arab workmen and in other ways, as the need might arise. And already, of course, we have that distinction between volunteers who are going to be named, experts who are going to be given in conjunction with their titles and their credentials, and then Arab workmen who will not be named in this publication. In fact, the Carthage leadership in 1925, according to the Kelsey publication, is extensive. Those first three with blue titles all represent the leadership at the highest level, the chairman, the director, and the associate general director there. And in fact, we know that Kelsey was largely absent. The pro-rock ended up in a kind of scandal wherein, like a lot of institutions withdrew funding because he was considered to be sort of unscientific excavator and also maybe a social climber in some really classist language of the time. Those green titles that come next sort of represent the subject matter experts that would have had training already in Punic antiquities in particular, the time and culture of the site that was being excavated, and then the others, an architect, a photographer, an engineer would have been associated more with sort of setting up the excavation and recording properly. The four with stars by their names are those that are mentioned most often in Horton O'Neill's notes. He works very closely with Abey Shabo. He spends a lot of time with Delatre and the pro-rock, and then Henry Washington gives him advice at several points that he writes home about. There's also some interesting New York Times clippings that give further information about logistics on the excavation, and in particular, one article that he clips describes women undertaking the delicate task of sorting incinerated fragments. That is specifically women who were working on the excavation, again, western women, who are named in that article as sort of a special interest piece. Isn't this fascinating that there might be women on this site? Although the fourth woman listed in the article is listed as Mrs. Francis Kelsian and doesn't have her full name recorded, but these were research fellows from the University of Michigan and the American Academy in Rome who were there sort of doing the careful study work with the human remains, a sort of exciting bioarchaeological project. In Horton's notes and descriptions of his day-to-day work, he gives us quite a lot to chew on involving sort of being able to picture the day-to-day negotiations of who's working on what, where. So this is just one example. He writes, I spent a longer day than usual at Tanit with Abbey Chabot. All the others had gone to Duga for the day, and we were left to our own devices. As I cleared away the earth around each of the 14 urns, we discovered Monsieur Lebes recorded and tagged the find and climbed up to the storage shed with it in a basket. So, I mean, this is a kind of familiar description of who's worked on excavation, right? Like you have your baskets, you're moving them to and fro. You have a storage shed on site. You are sometimes working with very few people in a square. While this isn't a scientific excavation of the 2020s, there are some familiar elements that really bring alive how these excavations worked day-to-day. And it also makes me think of Rachel Sparks's excellent slide sort of detailing the dig hierarchy pyramid in her April contribution to this series. It makes me think about this, this, you know, we have our sponsors, we have the director, the Western staff piece of this. It's really easy to sort of flatten that section of the pyramid out and say, well, Western staff would have been university professors who are there for their expert knowledge. But here in the 1920s at Carthage, we're including a 16-year-old writing home to his brother about how to play tether ball in Western staff, alongside women research associates, alongside, you know, 60-year-old folks who have lived their whole life in Carthage as part of the French Academy there. So a real sort of depth to that piece, but also at this particular excavation and from this particular archive, a flattening of all the sections of the dig hierarchy below, as you'll see. When we look at attitudes towards local workers as sort of implied and advanced in Horton O'Neill's papers, a lot of it is what you expect, right? This is a pretty typical picture that depicts workmen, but also, you know, it's pretty clear that there was no, hey, guys, I'm going to take a picture, look up here. The point isn't to photograph the identity of the workmen in this photo, this is an action scene sort of showing the joy of discovery, I'm asking you to identify with the supervisor, the person looking and watching the workmen and supervising the work. So in this case, we have, again, a caption here saying under Abe Shabo's direction, Duff, Hardin, Ray, and I went to work with the help of four Arabs not named. So that's pretty typical to name off every Western individual that is working with you and then to summarize or quantify other workmen with no stated identity. This is a second example, some of that texture. In this case, while the four of us, that is Western staff, were thus engaged with the meticulous part of the work, the four Arabs each with a long-handed shovel tossed the earth and relays to successively higher levels until it reached a two-wheeled cart with a mule standing patiently in the shafts. So that distinction again between they're doing collective work, it's unskilled work, it's of no scientific merit, it requires supervision, and the rest of us are doing the meticulous part of the work. In this particular set of papers, we have only two personal names recorded for workmen across those two years of excavation with multiple months each. The first is Hassan, a simple personal name. I have no gentilic, I have no patronymic, I don't really have any leads or ways to trace this back to a larger group or individual's identity at the time. But this particular excerpt says the four laborers whose services we hardly needed were no concern to us as Hassan had been put in charge of them with Juno shut down for lack of a supervisor. It's kind of interesting and difficult sentence to parse, but my read of this sentence is that those workmen are being overseen by one Hassan. But there's no supervisor, right? There's no staff person put in charge of them. They're a separate sort of group that, you know, work cannot continue because there is no western staff person to supervise. So this is the second personal name that we find in Horton O'Neill's papers. This is described as a working at Juno, Mohammed Foreman with white beard is the only individual identified from this group of maybe a dozen men. So you can see Mohammed with the white beard here sort of third from the right. But that's the only name we have from this picture. We've got the mule here too. And then the policemen in the scrapbook on the right-hand side, this is what you see when you open that page of the scrapbook. This story from a Paris newspaper is actually folded over maybe a quarter or a third of that photo. It's it's tucked behind. It's not as important in terms of preserving the memories that Horton wanted to preserve in these scrapbooks. We get in his letter's home a little more detail about the variety in his experiences with workmen. And in particular, in 1925, in February and March, Horton was working at Utica, a site just north of Carthage. And he's conscious of the differing ethnic and linguistic backgrounds of the workmen there. So whereas at Carthage, no matter where he's working, he always describes workmen as Arabs. At Utica, he says, I had gangs of workmen excavating in all parts of the Romans, Arabs, Sicilians, Maltese, Italians, and French that I had to keep separated so as not to have too many wars. And he goes, he's gone to really detail the incredible amount of responsibility he's given over these adult men's livelihoods. So Horton says, again, in a letter to his father, so maybe a little bit of exaggeration, but we're going to keep that in mind. I kept the accounts and delts out the funds as I liked. When there were misunderstandings and the men were discontent, there were strikes and feuds and wars. I fired whole gangs at a time and sent for more in Binsart to come and take their places and live with the rest in the Roman cisterns. So they're actually camping inside Roman cisterns at the site. That's how these men are being brought in from a larger urban center to come do this seasonal work. He goes on the wages range from five to 18 francs per day, according to the nationality and the customary pay of the districts in which we found them. So there is no set wage rate. There are individual negotiations going on with groups of men in different languages. At one point he even talks about bringing in a linguist to try to negotiate further because he speaks French pretty well, but the rest is really challenging. And how much is five to 18 francs per day? Well, that's a pretty enormous range, no matter how you cut it for a daily wage for a full day's work. But I can give you a relative reference point in his letters. Horton describes his own expenses. His own expenses for lodging and food. He is paying out 30 francs a day to support himself, a young teenage boy with no dependence. Eventually his costs are taken on by the expedition at Carthage, but that record comes in within a month of his indication that he is paying this wage of, again, five to 18 francs per day. So he's aware he's making or he's paying out two to six times what he's paying these adult men with dependence to work for the excavation. This information on attitudes towards local workers carries over into the final sort of question I was asking of these of these materials. I wanted to know about his attitudes towards portable antiquities and souvenirs, how this translates into the collections at Harvard, Princeton and Michigan. In his writings, in this case to his mother, he writes about his responsibility and characterizes it as, besides keeping the Arabs at work, I have to watch every move they take in case of one finding something of value and pocketing it, or putting it into his mouth as is very common. So this is described as sort of one of his major supervisory roles. He's watching that everyone does what they're supposed to be doing. He's watching to see who's working how much, how much they should be paid per day based on productivity. And then his job is to keep them from taking anything off the site. And in contrast, he writes, in this case to his father, of earns and Greek lamps that he finds that is that he excavates in the course of the excavations he's overseeing. He describes nine or 10 of them in perfect condition, that a single scratch or crack, one of these earns, these excavated earns I find I shall take to Paris when I come so you can see it. The count is really too generous. He'd have me take everything away should I let him. So describing himself as a kind of golden child of the, of overseeing the ex, the excavation, giving him permission to take excavated antiquities away to sort of show his family to keep to collect. And in fact, that this is not the first time it's been offered. He's, he's getting generous offers of things he could take back. So again, this contrast quite a bit with that 1960s depiction in prints, the publication of describing him as simply, you know, collecting surface finds on his walk to the excavation site, picking them up in the fields, trading them with others who live nearby, who are also, you know, good, respectable academics. Instead in the letter's home, we really see that contrast between the workmen who must be stopped at all costs from taking anything, whereas he's been given sort of carte blanche to take items straight out of excavation back to Paris with him. In a 1974 narrative that I suspect is actually just sort of based on notes that Horton O'Neill had written at the time. The detail is really specific. He describes visiting Ecard in his cramped little office the day before he leaves in 1925. And he says he performs his duties as chief of police in the midst of burgeoning accumulation of antiquities. And I don't know how much of this is a joke. If he's actually serving as chief of police, if that's an official title or if this is again kind of a tongue-in-cheek characterization of Ecard, but in any case he's got collections and collections sort of in his office. And Horton says we had planned this meeting sometime earlier. He had meanwhile put together a collection of objects I don't know if you've heard of. Some of these are tomb objects from Carthage, which implies that they would have been taken from the very site that he was excavating at and the card was overseen. And then after his departure, he writes further, and this is down at the bottom of your screen, with the card, my only friend on the pier to say goodbye. He was there to make sure there was no hitch and taking my antiquities through customs. He had a sense of the sort of French colonial bureaucratic structure hoping to smooth things along. And as you'll see, that story of no hitch and taking my antiquities through customs had a sort of prologue. In the letter that comes closest in time from his actual departure date, this is a May 8th, 1925 letter to his mother. Horton actually confesses to illegally exporting everything he took from Carthage. So he writes from Palermo, I spent my last night in Tunis and early next morning before the customs opened, found a dormier, I don't really know what this officer is, and persuaded him with a five franc note to stamp my baggage and send it on board the little steamer without inspection. It was a very necessary act as my trunk was bulging with antiques that I hadn't been able to get into before with the point so or point say troubles. And this is another thing I've spent way too long trying to figure out what this is. Point say or point so he spells it both ways in different letters. He's definitely an academic, he's written some stuff, but I can't figure out what the troubles were. Until now there hasn't really been any use in telling you of the wonderful junk I'm collecting for just as easily as not, it might all have been confiscated leaving Tunisia. What is he talking about here? I don't know what he's talking about. I don't know what he's talking about. I don't know what he's talking about. I don't know what are these antiquities or antiques. He goes on in this lever to really itemize what he means by souvenirs, what he means by antiques, how much he has been collecting. And it's jaw dropping. So he describes one set of seven big cases. Seven big cases like steamer trunks sent to Paris. Except for one box of urns I sent you in the States two weeks ago is safely in Palermo. So he's got some other quantity of trunks in Palermo. Among the ponderous junk of the seven cases, that first set that went to Paris, were 70 Greek and Punic pottery inscriptions. And he describes, you know, a collection of collections here with a lot of individual histories, some of which have already been published, a complete collection of 60 prehistoric implements purchased from an officer from the Sahara, endless miscellaneous Punic and Roman pottery, bowls, glazed plates and cups, bronze and terracotta statuettes, fragments of statuary, lamps from all the periods, 20 off pottery tier bottles, these are Anguintaria, but the finest pieces I have are in Palermo. And he goes on to further characterize these collections and itemize the gems of the collection. These are from the Palermo materials, two rare sixth century Punic vases from the necropolis of Dume, different sites entirely, a Roman bronze sacrificial frying pan like vessel and a Punic fourth century glass bottle beautifully painted. The other day, Washington suggested that if I am ever in need of money, I can sell them to any American museum for a great deal. Talks about the academic publications he's acquired. And besides these, I have the only collection of tonnage as stumpy outside of the sets I made for the Academy in Michigan. And he details in the letters a lot of time and energy. He was put in charge of making squeezes of the entire tonnage precinct, all the inscriptions that they had to that point. He had to make multiple copies for Michigan, for McGill, for the French Academy, et cetera. But apparently he also took some home for his, his private collection. So this is not ambiguous. We have in his letter to his mother May 8th, a confession that he had to bribe an officer to stamp his baggage so that it would not be inspected because he did not have any permits. And in a sort of rare situation for historiography, we have very clear Tunisian antiquities laws in place in the 1920s. So remember at this time, Tunisia is a French protectorate in 1886. They had already passed a decree on the protection of antiquities and art objects in 1920. Again, four to five years before any of this, there was even more specific language outlining, outlining the distinction that should be made to those antiquities prior to the Arab conquest versus post Arab conquest. And it's very clear that anything from this period, the Punic ancient material, requires the director of the service of antiquities and arts to investigate it, to examine it, to make sure that this isn't a value to the Tunisian people, to issue an export permit, and then that's how you remove material from Tunisia. The penalties are also very clear. In the 1886 law, a fine of between 500 and 5,000 francs and seizure or confiscation of the objects is the penalty, but those were strengthened in the 1920s decree, a fine of between 100 and 1000 dinars or imprisonment for between three and 12 months or both fine and imprisonment, in addition to seizure of all of the archaeological property. So these are the sort of clear penalties and stakes in law at the time that Horton Noniel is sneaking stuff out in, you know, whatever, 20 crates. And I don't think that Horton Noniel was aware of these laws in their specifics. Certainly he writes just as easily as not, it might all have been confiscated. That seems to be the only thing he was really afraid of, at least what he admitted to his mother. So all of this is sort of interesting to look at in light of later attempts to sell some of the collection. In 1989, he wrote to the Ariadne Gallery to sort of inquire as to, you know, whether they'd be interested in purchasing some of this material. He outlines the most important items in the collection to me at least and describes specifically the material from Carthage and then adds, as I worked in the Carthage excavations during the 24 and 25 seasons and acquired the Etruscan pieces from a Florentine friend who was the son of the finder with exact knowledge of where they were found in the mid-20s, I can vouch for their having been properly excavated and witnessed. So it's clear that even in later writings, he's more worried about the developing UNESCO laws and sort of attitudes, changing attitudes to antiquities as illegally excavated or not, or I should say provenance or not, versus the illegal exportation at the time that he left Tunisia in 1925. So this is the research in progress as I've been able to construct it to this point I think that the implications and next steps for this research are really exciting. I look forward to exploring the implications for the collections, holding institutions. Obviously, these are likely not the kinds of things that would be good candidates for repatriation because we don't have clear excavation notes. There are, you know, hundreds of duplicates of these urns and steely impressions, but this might change some of the ways that these materials are framed in the galleries and it might still have implications for communication between the current government of Tunisia and these collections holding institutions. I think that it would be really exciting for me to get into exploring other archives associated with Carthage, other of the members of leadership, given O'Neill's youth and the audience for his papers, right, often family members that he wants to impress and, you know, just to try to get other, other sort of viewpoints and perspectives from people at different life stages and with different interests sort of answering some of these questions about attitudes towards local workmen and logistics of the dig. And of course, I have been thinking quite a lot since resuming this research about attitudes of archeological volunteers and later how much impact our student volunteers can have through their lifetimes after participating in excavation. And this isn't just impact on the scientific community. A lot of them, you know, don't become professors, don't go into publishing, but Horton O'Neill spent two summers, spring and summer of his teenage years excavating and throughout his life because of this incredible collection of souvenirs. Because he kept reaching out and making relationships with folks on the basis of this teenage experience, he really had an outsized impact on the study of the ancient Near East at Harvard, Princeton and Michigan and probably quite a few individuals he encountered along the way. So I imagine if I were running a field school right now, I love the idea of assigning a digital or physical scrapbook as a kind of archival project, right? What is your experience as a volunteer? How do you describe things? What kinds of clippings would you assemble to sort of look at the volunteer experience as another lens through which to see excavation as an institution? So in any case, research as a team sport, I wanted to call out at least a few folks who really facilitated this work and had some great leads for me over the years in the two phases of this research. And I have my email address down on the screen as well in case anybody has follow-up ideas for me about the Hogarth or who Poinsay is or what his troubles were or anything else I spoke about today. Thank you so much for your time and for inviting me. Hello, thank you so much for sharing this incredibly illuminating talk with us. I'd like to invite the live YouTube audience to submit any questions or comments you might have into the YouTube chat box. I'm an all-starterist with a question of my own. So your talk raised many really critical issues about ethics and provenience and archeological labor. And as an audience member, listening to this narrative unfold about Horton and Neal, I was continually surprised and also troubled by what you were sharing with us. So my first question to you is, what did you find most surprising as you were going through these archives? Yeah, I mean, I felt like I was surprised quite often. First of all, you know, there's like, just continually having my jaw drop at how 16-year-olds talked in the 1920s. It's really just a lot to take in. And I had to stop reading his letters with a, hey, see, kind of wise-guy attitude because it's really different. But I think the big surprise for me was watching how adaptive the narrative about how he got these antiquities and how sort of legitimate they are changed depending on audience, right? So he seems to slowly, like, he tells almost no one his intentions before he leaves, although it's clear that he had to negotiate with Yucard about buying some collections on site. He's getting encouragement to take stuff home, but he's not writing home about the collecting process. It's only once he breathes a sigh of relief after sneaking all these antiquities out that he writes home and tells his mother, this was such a close call. Man, you're going to see all the stuff I got. And then I'm absolutely surprised at the quantity. I mean, I cannot believe how much stuff. I mean, this is a kid. Like he wouldn't have even been able to carry half of it. One by one fireman relay. It's just a stunning amount of stuff that very understandably shaped his life. I mean, it was like a house worth of antiques. And three institutions have had collections of hundreds of objects or at least, you know, 79 objects, plus boxes and boxes and boxes of papers resulting from that teenage collecting spree. So I think, I think that, you know, the surprises have been in, in sort of degree and scope of what he got away with in a way. But it's, it's hard not to be charmed by the story too, because it's being told in his little, you know, sort of breaking the breaking the rules, unaware, oblivious, impulsive teenage voice. Yeah. Thank you. And also the short span of time. Yeah. I mean, that's what's so crazy. Like obviously it is. Excavation was a lot longer than it is now. Right. These, these folks camped out for three or four months at one site, sort of getting, getting material in a nonstop every day way. But to look at how much stuff he acquired as, I think most of it was just in that last summer, that last 1925 season. I agree. Good point. And I also want to reiterate one of the comments that you just made. Which is so important is the issue of audience. And it's a great reminder of always keeping a critical view and looking through the archive, especially the letters, right? Depending on who they're addressed to, who they're coming from, and how their narrative changes. So I think it's, it's really important that you have these different tones and different kinds of storytelling from one single actor who I know, you know, to these people who, who's both of those parents who I, I guess you might assume aren't reading each other's letters from their son. Yeah. In some cases they're in totally different cities. Yeah. I think you're right. Yeah. So another question that I have, could you discuss in a little bit more detail some of the original motives and goals that inspired your archival work at the Pelty. And you talked a little bit about where you're going to take it. So yeah, I'm interested in hearing more about how the project is going to be done. Yeah, that's a generous question. Thank you. Yeah, when I was a graduate student, I was also in the certificate program and graduates in museum studies at Michigan. And I was thinking about my dissertation on Phoenician Mortuary Practice and wishing we had more collections that sort of informed that research. And then I remember it was like word of mouth. Someone was like, you know, we actually have, I think we have to fit burials in the collections. They're not on display. And my mind was blown. I was like, wait a minute, what? Like I couldn't, I couldn't really wrap my head around like, okay, well, this must have been because there was a portage arrangement and Michigan got a bunch from the Carthaginian excavation. Must have been Kelsey that somehow got this year. I just had no idea how the human remains had been exported and brought to Michigan. So I was studying that and in fact I was, the reason Aaron knows about this at all is because I was preparing a proposal for an ASR paper on sort of like thinking about how ASR was developing its own ethics policies at the time around, you know, what is okay to present at the meeting? What is okay to publish in our series? What counts as a first publication, right? If we're only willing to be the first publication of material that has been properly scientifically excavated, what does it mean to say, well, we're grandfathering in stuff that has been published elsewhere. And the problem I saw with that was that museum catalogs, if they count as a first publication for unprovenance or poorly provenance or illegally exported antiquities, then a museum's ethical sort of imperative to make its collections accessible to the public comes into direct conflict with our field's ethical imperative to present and prioritize scientifically excavated materials, right? Because now you can potentially cite anything that's ever been in a museum catalog as well, it's already been published. So we're just going to keep working with this illegal material or problematic material or looted material, et cetera. And so this seemed like a really growingly fascinating case study of Michigan has this stuff. Oh, it's not from controlled excavations. Oh, it's from a volunteer, wait, a teenage volunteer who actively snuck it out of Tunisia. And yet the Kelsey wants to present this to the public. And a sore seemingly would allow it. So my first paper I gave on the subject was talking about this loophole. And the second paper I wanted to give about it was what should the Kelsey Museum do with these? And we never got to that point because Christina Brody is amazing and she filled her session way past capacity. And so my paper was deferred. And meanwhile I had to get started a new job, but that was the original impetus. Yeah. Sorry, that was long, but thank you for that question. That was very nice. Yeah. Well, thanks for telling us. You know, it's always interesting to see how projects develop over time, especially as you stumble on material that might be accepted. Yeah. It's sort of a bigger picture question here. I think one of the trends that has come out of this project and this lecture series as a whole. Among the different talks and different archives that we've seen, which have mostly been based around American recordage, excitation projects, is that we've seen these quite inexperienced and oftentimes young Westerners being put in charge of a field site. So whether, whether it's even the site director himself who maybe have very little or no field training prior to somehow being granted a permit to excavate a site, or someone my partner, you know, who's at 16 years old, basically appointed interim director in the absence of other supervisors, although there were, it's seeming like plenty of other experienced and older staff members that you noted. So was there any indication of tension or conflict with this promotion of a 16 year old with very little expertise among either the Western staff members or the workers that he was supervising, is that drawing out right now in the archives? And is there any indication either of whether and how what material is leaning on other people's expertise in order to do his job? Yeah. That's a great question. I mean, it really is incredible. And I appreciate so much the accidental tallying that he does at that one point where he's like the average age is 23. So amazingly, I fit right in. And, and that, I mean, to me, that indicates, okay, we know that Abbey Chabot is in his 60s. So everybody else has got to be just super young relative to our, you know, supervisory structures today. And I think some of this is, I mean, it's clear in his letters home that there's a tension between wanting to be seen by his father in particular as extremely capable and responsible, but also, like, his fears seem to be around being accused of being a playboy. So in the passage about getting to drive the Count's car anytime he wants, he makes a sort of passing comment to his brother, like also if dad reads this letter or like if dad asks you about it, the answer is I almost never drive. Don't worry about it. Like I'm not driving in Tunisia. Okay, calm down. So I think that he's afraid of getting in trouble with his father, who he clearly respects and longs to come and admire him. But in terms of interacting with staff, I would say that he is really caught up in a fake it till you make it kind of model. So we get these indirect references to how he's like reading for the first time a very basic primary source and he's like, whoa, like, did you know they sacrifice their children? And you know, it's sort of like, well, that would be the impetus for the whole excavation. Yes, we should know that at this point if you're supervising. So he's sort of playing catch up the whole time he's in charge, but the pressure to just be capable, just just pretend you're authoritative to, I mean, it must have been frightening for him to be like basically improving his French, trying to speak with folks from all kinds of different, you know, linguistic backgrounds, really trying to navigate a brand new social situation. He has almost, he has almost nothing to say about the women on the site, like he just doesn't talk about them at all. They show up in the cuttings from the newspapers, but he's probably a little bit nervous about the co-ed interactions. So we can speculate quite a bit through the bravado that we see. But as far as we can tell, all of his self presentations are that I'm nailing this and crushing it. You know, like you would be so proud of me. I'm doing this and that and it's so conflict heavy and I just, I'm in control at one point he says, I can think of nothing better than to be in control of the richest excavation in Africa. You know, he's an explorer. So to, you know, I think to all of us the tension is present, but he's not self aware. He's not presenting it that way. He's an explorer, but he also derives his fellow explorers. What an interesting dynamic there. Speaking of women, this might be a very straightforward answer. You just mentioned that he fairly discusses them. But we do know as you told us that there were some women from New Jersey, Michigan and from the American Academy in Rome doing some specialized excavation tasks sounded like it was mostly part of the research. And I think that's one of the things that we have been able to find to process and related. Were there women among the field workforce that you've been able to find in these archives? Oh my God, I'm dying to know that. Yeah, that was, that was one of the questions I have been sort of desperate to find other clues about this, this represent, I think the hope would be that Utica would have some better results. I think that's one of the things that we have been able to find. The ratio of Westerners to local workmen who are clearly also immigrant communities or diaspora communities from Malta, from Italy. We've got just a real cosmopolitan mix of folks there. But they are living locally full-time in the urban center in Binsart and then they're being brought in and hired as groups. So they're away from their homes. They had to hire someone to cook for them, I imagine, right? There would be a certain amount of sort of like, we are going to the site to work. We come back to our camp and someone should be watching the camp while we're away. They're probably were women. But I can't find any mention of them. In general, Utica is just much less well documented in Horton's papers. And part of me thinks maybe that's because there's a lot of people who don't know about it. I don't know if they're interested in this paper or that I think Harvard is less likely, but I would be interested to see what they have. They have great finding aids, but I just haven't made it out there to physically visit the material yet. Caitlin has visited the Harvard collections and she didn't mention coming across any of that, but it's clear that Horton, in his photographs, captures white western women as traveling through the sites and so on, being present with their sweet little sun hats, but no images in the collection at the Kelsey Museum of local women in any form. Thank you. Since you brought up Caitlin Kirk and I just want to put in a plug for her excellent presentation because the body museum presented in a last ASOR in the digital or virtual session will be presenting again on this project in the first session in October. So she co-chairs that with Caitlin. Just a little plug there for her. Yes, please. Yeah. A question from an audience member here, Antonella Mazzolani Andreose. She says thank you very much. I'm very happy to share with you a little bit about the relationships between O'Neill and a probop because I'm working on a probop site. Oh my gosh. I would love to be in touch. Yeah, there, I'd be happy to share everything that I have on him. It is clear that they had a very close relationship that the, he calls him the count quite often. That they are especially in 1924. I think that he had sort of like a, you just saw O'Neill as like a little apprentice, someone to shape and, and also pass off responsibility for some things. And there's a, there's a couple of really charming letters in which Horton is, is trying to sound cavalier, but it's sort of like, I went to say goodbye to the count. And as he waved from the train, I was given to understand that I should oversee everything and that he trusted my judgment. And it's clear that, you know, I don't know how much of that was said and how much of that is Horton just sort of, I've been abandoned at, at Carthage for a week and I hope I can handle this. But they, there are some really interesting little moments of connection throughout his two years of coming and going. And it's clear that. He admires Duproyak and he makes no mention of the scandal surrounding. His sort of fall from social graces in the larger academic community. And I think that apparently Horton O'Neill either wasn't aware of it or else just like, didn't want to give it any credence. But it does seem like the relationship is stronger in 1924 than in 1925, just based on how much he's mentioned, but please do either email me or, I don't know, find someone you know in this group. I would love to be in touch and send you everything I have, because I think, I know a lot about him, but he's such a fascinating character. And I think looking at this from both perspectives in tandem would be really productive. Thanks for being here. We'll wrap it up with one final question. You brought it up again. And I think I asked a previous question. The Roman cisterns accommodations. I'm very curious about how, how this works with just degrees. It sounds like the main field workforce was camping out in cisterns on site. What were the western team members doing? Were they often living in those accommodations? So we know a little bit about how much they paid out for watching. Now could you elaborate on what you know? Yeah, so it's a little tough to correlate. I can't tell you for sure at every excavation where Horton is staying. Like I think when he is at Utica, which is where the workmen are living in the cisterns, he is, I don't, I can't remember off the top of my head, but I don't think I have any record of where he stayed during the, during that particular excavation. It would have, would have been a separate location. But I know for a fact that they are in much better accommodation everywhere they go. And in particular, they are living in a palace. I mean, it's, it's called Pele Hamilcar. But it is, it is an old sort of, not perfectly kept up, but multi roomed sort of stone mansion. That happens to be owned by either the Abbey, the Abbott, like personally, or by the French Academy. So I think Kelsey sort of in his 25, 1925 preliminary report describes like who, you know, he thanks the person who owned that Pele Hamilcar, but certainly they're, they're well sheltered. They have meals prepared for them. I don't know the details of how they did like lunch on site. I wish I did. But it seems like they're absolutely in segregated worlds. The workmen come show up. They have to interact with Horton to get paid. They have to get sort of like deal with his, you know, you know, impression of how productive they are or should be day to day. He clearly is like, you're useless. I, you're fired. You know, he's, he's making big decisions about, about them based on their productivity, but they have no commentary about, like how they're taking care of themselves, their transportation. They're, they're completely segregated after the end of the work day. That's a great question though. I wish I had more to say. I mean, I think we have a really huge disparities there, which stands a bit in contrast to, to some of the situations that we put about in the culture series and Palestine or workers were either just going home to their local villages as they were from the area after the work day. Or as, as Jeffrey pointed out, they were getting good medical care. So I think that's what, that's what I think is really important to specialists when, when needed or even the team of business sales were trading themselves medical. So that seems to be quite a different situation. Yeah. So thanks. Thanks so much. And Aaron has a couple of words. Sure. Also just want to. Voice my thanks. Such a fascinating topic and a great presentation. Thank you. Thanks for your introduction. I love the fact that you presented it warts and all, so to speak. And have gone into, you know, aspects also of. You know, the ethics and how, of course, not only the legal standards have changed, but also ethical standards have changed. I mean, I, you know, I'm just, I think this happened when you first presented a sore, but the fact that he could. You know, it's not even export. I mean, he could basically sort of smuggle out even human remains just blows me away as a, as a modern person in the 21st century. But there you go. Lots is lots, you know, has changed. And we were remarking, you know, before your presentation also just sort of the, the sheer quantity of the materials, you know, that were excavated between the two world wars. And then, you know, how, how they were scattered. Some of them obviously remained in private hands for a long time. Just so, so much has changed. And, and to reiterate, you know, how much can be learned with, you know, turning modern eyes to this, these legacy materials, right? So thank you so much. And I just wanted to let our audience know that we will have our final contribution to this unsilencing series coming on June 2nd. So also a Thursday, it'll be nine a.m. California time when Elizabeth Minor will take us to Nubia. And we'll be speaking about decolonizing aspects of Reisner's work in what is today present day Sudan. So we're moving from Tunisia to Sudan. We've had aspects of ancient Persia covered and of course the Levant and we'll wrap up our series on June 2nd. So thank you all and thanks again to Professor Dixon for