 Okay, I'd like to welcome our YouTube audience out there back to actually the first in our series of lectures in our unsilencing the archives. YouTube zoom series. But before we get to today's lecture, I would like to hand the floor over to our curator, Melissa Craddick, who will read a land statement. Thank you, Erin. We would like to begin by acknowledging that Berkeley, California is on the territory of the Poutine, the ancestral and unseated land of the Chicheno Oloni. We respect the land and the people who have stewarded it throughout many generations, and we honor their elders both past and present. It warrants deep reflection on our past, where even our most venerated figures deserve reasonable scrutiny. During this, during his time directing the archaeological excavations of Tela Nasve WF body participated in harmful stereotyping of Palestinian Arabs. It was common among white Americans and Europeans conducting fieldwork in British mandate Palestine. Some of these attitudes appear in print in his popular 1934 book, a manual of excavation in the Near East. Museums are also scrutinizing their collections, including evaluating the legal status and the ethics with which they were acquired. As stewards of the legacy of the body museum and its holdings, it's 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 of the archival materials in order to examine critically the matter and impact of archaeological work on indigenous communities and 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 excavations were conducted under the authority of the British mandate government of Palestine. In an effort to bring light to these issues to serve a broad public audience online and to connect to the local community that it serves. 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 exhibitions and public programming like this lecture series which highlight decolonizing things. I 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. And Callicity now the floor is yours. Thank you Melissa. Before I introduce our speaker. I'd like to just make a similar statement on behalf of the Palestine exploration fund, who I represent, and who are one of the sponsors of the exhibition that Melissa and Sam put together. The PDF fully endorses the Bardet Museum statement on decolonization and supports their efforts in this regard as a funding organization we were very pleased to support the Bardet Museums project to create an online exhibition to highlight the lives and work of the Arab workforce at the Tel Anas Bay excavations, and these online lectures exploring the contribution of the local population to the archaeology of Palestine. As another Western colonial era organization, our own history shares many of the same characteristics which have just been described, and we are keen to play our part in this process, both as co hosts of these lectures and with our own initiatives. And so now I would like it gives me great pleasure to introduce today's speaker, Sarah Irving, who is a lecturer in modern Middle Eastern history, and a Lever Hume early career fellow at Staffordshire University in Britain, and editor of contemporary Levant, a journal for the Council of British Levant. She is a social and cultural historian primarily of late Ottoman and mandate Palestine, and often uses the records of archaeological excavations to explore the lives of ordinary Palestinians, including working class women and men in this period. So without further to do over to you Sarah. Thank you very much. Felicity, and thank you to everybody involved in this series for inviting me to speak. It's a great honor really. It's also really lovely to see the acknowledgement of land at the beginning of something like this is something that I'm very familiar with from the Australian context I'm married to an Australian. I've not come across it in the North American context before so that was something that was really lovely to see, starting this off. Can somebody who's not silence just confirmed that my presentation is showing up okay there. Not yet. Not yet. Okay, why aren't you showing now. Yes, if you advance the slide I think it's it's in that weird. There we go brilliant. Okay. So yes, thank you very much to everybody watching. I'm assuming there's someone watching out there. And good afternoon from where I am in Britain. So I'm going to be speaking on. So the, the title of my talk is guarding archaeology every day labor, and I managed to sneak in a British spelling there in the British mandate department of antiquities. And I'm going to start off by talking a little bit about archives themselves, because it's kind of a key question in what I'm doing here. Obviously is something that's very much evoked by the, the sort of origins of this talk with Melissa and Sam's online exhibition, which if you haven't already seen it is amazing. And very much worth going and spending a bit of time on and also see watching the launch event that they did. So the principle archive that I used to prepare this talk and some of the other work that I do, which looks at the ordinary working class hasn't. And I very much believe in reclaiming the word present in terms of rural labor. And despite the fact that it kind of has taken on at least some negative connotations. But kind of trying to find out as much as is possible about ordinary Palestinian life. And the fact that there is this sort of slightly unusual situation whereby the records of archaeological activities be they excavations, or sort of wider antiquities preservation. Are a really, really valuable source for this broader question of what life was like for ordinary Palestinian people principally under the rule of the British mandate so between World War one and 1948. In terms of British colonial archives from during that period. When the British realize that they had really felt things up in Palestine over the previous 30 years and withdrew in 1947 48. They took quite a lot of the archives back with them. Some of the most controversial were very possibly destroyed majority perhaps are now in the National Archives in South London. But quite a lot of various reasons were left behind. And the archaeological archives for quite a significant part of that and that is because the Department of antiquities of the British mandate administration was based in the Palestine archaeological museum. In 1968, when Palestine was partitioned person archaeological museum fell under Jordanian rule. And, and all of the department of antiquities archives that they're ongoing administrative paperwork was still in the museum. The Jordanian ownership until 1967 with the Six Day War, and the Israeli occupation of East Jerusalem and the West Bank and Gaza and the Jalan as well. And that means that when the Israelis take over the Palestine archaeological museum is renamed as the Rockefeller Museum as it still is. And all of these archives end up in the possession of the Israeli antiquities authority where there has been a kind of ongoing digitization digitization process. For anybody watching who is interested, whether in the archaeological side of things or in Palestinian social history. This I think is a little bit of an untapped archive, possibly because it's fairly horrible to use. The digitization is in JPEGs. It's not text searchable. The setup of the website is very, very odd. And things are pretty much impossible to find by searching. So you literally just have to wade through and find things. Of course there's all sorts of bigger questions of colonialism and coloniality. When we're using an archive like this there's a kind of double coloniality here of course this is British colonial material and then it's been put up and digitized by the the Israeli state and of course there's a whole sort of question of what that means in terms of Palestine. But I hope that what I am using these for in some ways is a is a kind of attempt to not just kind of read against the grain but to sort of find ways in which to use this archive to ask questions that are maybe quite different from the sort of things that might have been intended by the people creating them. And one of the types of file that are particularly interesting I think in and give us some particularly unique insights are that quite unusually I suspect most of the sort of ordinary bog standard HR personnel files of the British mandate will have been destroyed as not being of interest not being relevant, but because this stuff was it seems preserved fairly willy nearly. There are what we would now call HR files still amongst them and this is a picture from the archive website of the file the folders that they hold for the site of athletes which I'll talk about a little bit more in a minute. So you can see as well as the all of the sort of fairly standard archaeological subjects that are going along here so the cemetery the castle conservation various related things like that we have these names that appear and these are local sites who were employed on the site at athlete or in the area. And these give in some cases what I would say are possibly unique insights into the lives of ordinary Palestinians who are working for the mandate authorities. So there is an increasing awareness I think in in the literature of of middle class educated Palestinians who worked for the for the mandate and the kind of ideas and agency and political involvement and social and cultural kind of aspects of their lives. I guess famously difficult to ask similar questions about working class people, people who are often non literate, or partly literate, who are very very very rarely have written their live stories their ideas, and I rarely interviewed about their biographies. And obviously, there are elements that are problematic about these records. Pretty much everything is mediated through translators in a lot of cases it by the look of the archives. I read a lot of documents that where there will have been an Arabic original which has been just been, but the translation that was done for non Arabic reading members of this of the mandate staff has been retained. So there's mediation through translation. If we assume, as seems to be the case with the person I'm going to be talking about that most of these manual workers were mainly non literate then there's probably a scribe or somebody else who is writing the letters that they send to head office. Again, mediating what they say. But I think there are still valid methodological kind of question, kind of ways that we can still ask some pertinent questions of this of this archival material. So who were these working class laborers in the Palestinian Department of Antiquities under the mandate. They cover a whole range of job roles there's manual laborers there are guards on archaeological sites. There's museum attendance, there's delivery staff so there's an entire folder on bicycles for delivery staff. There are night watchmen at the museum and on site. There are caretakers janitors people who are doing various kind of sort of curious managerial managerial to manual jobs, mending things building things. Some of these sound very routine. They probably were. They may well have been quite boring for some people they in a lot of cases were potentially quite risky. If you read even the published accounts of a lot of excavation early excavations in Palestine and elsewhere. There are quite often accidents. The picture that I've got up here is one that I took at the Palestine exploration fund a couple of weeks ago of the dig in Jerusalem in 1927 where because of an earthquake, which is kind of the main focus of my research at the moment. A worker was actually trapped and I you picked this picture because it kind of go you can see how far down they're digging and that there's no sort of wooden struts or anything being put in place. So it's quite risky stuff going on for the excavators. There was also the possibility for those who are guarding sites to feel threatened. So we see a number of cases in the archive where there are people requesting to be allocated firearms, for instance, there was a site guard at. So, better known as who shams palace in Jericho, saying from the night watchman who was saying that he wanted a firearm because there were hyenas around and he could hear them and he could hear them prowling, and he was afraid. And even for museum attendance, they had right of arrest. If people tried to steal or otherwise interfere with the things in the museum so obviously they are at least expected to put themselves into positions of confrontation. And so, you know, these are not necessarily easy jobs. Some of them are permanent, as you'll see others, especially obviously working on excavations themselves were seasonal. So there's the question of what work it is that people are doing outside of those seasons. And so, you know, these are hard, occasionally dangerous, and sometimes insecure, and not terribly well paid roles in society, but they were also as we'll come to see quite sought after. So I'm going to particularly be talking about a site on the coast of what is now Israel, called athletes. It's sometimes spelled athletes sometimes athlete depends partly of whether you're transcribing from Arabic or Hebrew. It's mainly and best known for being a crusader site with some Islamic finds as well. But in the area there are also some really important prehistoric sites. For instance, and, and lots of other kind of I mean this is this is this is Palestine and Israel we're talking about you can't stick a fork in the ground without hitting something archaeological. And it was excavated partially excavated by the mandate Department of Antiquities field archaeologist CN johns said Rick johns in the early and mid 1930s. It fell at the time in a region covered by the antiquities and inspector for the sort of northern part of mandate Palestine. This is a man called name Shahadi mohoole, who was a Christian Palestinian from Korea safe, which is a bit further north. And at this point in time he is based in Akka. So a bit north of athlete. And he is what we would nowadays call the line manager to the man that I'm mainly going to be speaking about a baller al-masri. And johns mohoole and anybody else in this area who's working for the mandate authorities, ultimately reports to the Jerusalem office this is where the mandate authorities have their offices and headquarters of the Department of Antiquities is placed now I just want to point out before I leave this slide. Fabulous picture of this crusader building at athlete I've got lots of crusader pictures and lovely pictures from athlete which hopefully will make Aaron happy, but down in the left bottom left hand corner. You might be able to see in the archway where there's daylight coming through. There's a figure of a man. And we don't know what a baller al-masri the guy that I'm going to be talking about mainly looked like there's absolutely no known photos of him, but this might be the sort of thing that you possibly want to imagine. This photo was taken at about the time that he was working there. It may well be that he was the guy who was showing this photographer who came from the American colony in Jerusalem the maths and collection. He may well have been him that was showing the photographer round so it may well be that this is Abdullah that we're looking at in this corner, but we don't actually know but it does give you a sense of the sort of person that you might want to have in your head. While I'm talking about his career. In terms of the sort of working conditions of somebody working as a guard at the site of athlete. So it's got a big archaeological site there's the castle there's various other remains there's a graveyard there. Some of it's been dug some of it hasn't. There are increasing numbers of visitors there during the 1930s which is the period that I'll be talking about it somewhere where tourists to Palestine. Come and see because it's this this big castle that's very very prominent as you as you travel up the coast. So just south of Haifa or down the coast if you sailed into Haifa. And also educated Palestinians Jewish residents of Palestine and colonial officials and things like that might well come to somewhere like this at the weekend. It's it's quite a popular sort of tourist destination for the weekend. It's got a castle. It's got nice hills it's got a beach. Why not it's a nice place to go and Abdullah the guy I'm talking about he he sometimes is showing people around. There are also however squatters living partly in the castle at times it takes the mandate government quite a long time to negotiate them actually leaving and they are paid compensation. That's a whole other question but it's worth bearing in mind that there's a there is an issue here over who actually kind of has daily ownership and daily sort of run of the place. And it's in an area that is changing rapidly it's on the coastal plain as I said just south of Haifa Haifa at this point in time is a rapidly expanding major city port industrial zone. And at athlete itself. There are quarries. There is the Palestine salt company works which is growing kind of industrial concern. There's a British military camp which starts to be used as a prisoner camp further into the 1930s. There's a lot going on around this place. I think quite often, we may be sort of envisage things like a castle on the sea in Palestine as being something that is a bit sort of cut off from the sort of wider economic political and social currents that surround it but actually at the castle is very much stuck right in the middle of them. And Abdullah al-Masri himself. So Abdullah originally worked for CN johns on the excavations that I was talking about at athlete. He was presumably undertaking some kind of manual labor there, but he also learned to do a very good job of reassembling ceramics we know this much from the archives. And then seems when the excavations aren't going on to have been hired as a guard during johns absence. It seems that although, as you can see from this photo. There was a campsite in the earlier days of the excavation it seems that there was a house of some kind, which the British either built or acquire rented or bought or something. So Abdullah al-Masri's job was partly to guard that, and also to keep an eye on the tools that were stored in it from the excavations, and to, and also they were they were finds held there still. They were taken away from the site may well be that the mandate authorities were perhaps planning a small museum there they did actually try to open up quite a lot of small archaeological museums. The ones that we know about that sort of still exist and have been written about particularly in Jerusalem, but they were kind of failed attempts as well that we know about one in Nablus one in one in Africa. As a guard Abdullah was expected to be on site night and day. And so this is, you know, this is a big responsibility he's supposed to be there 24 hours a day, even though his family live in Tantura which is a Palestinian village about five or six miles south of athlete so doesn't sound far. Actually that's two hour walk. So he's guarding the British dig house and the ruins he's expected to keep the ruins safe to make sure people don't start digging to for fines to sell to make sure it's not damaged and presumably although it's never made explicit that he might have had to have some kind of relationship with the squatters as well. And he performs daily upkeep he weeds he men's building bits of the building that are potentially, you know, going to be damaged or falling down or something like this. He keeps graves clear on the cemetery. He's maintaining the place on a daily basis. He is allowed to leave the site on Friday afternoons in order to go down to Tantura and see his family but that that's the only sort of official weekly time that he gets off. He's also expected to be there to receive and guide visitors so this suggests that he has at least a bit of English or French as in order to be able to communicate with them. And he starts this job as the site guard, according to his HR records in December 1930. The first five or so years of his records are reasonably quiet. He asks for pay rises occasionally sometimes they're granted. He seems to have a growing family of which CN johns is obviously aware. And so they'll, you know, we obviously know something a little bit about his life. So he's got a growing number of children with his wife live who live in with his wife in Tantura. He's he's he's sick at one point he gets a fever and is in hospital for a couple of weeks. But but basically sort of thing. If his HR records or anything to go by things kind of trot along reasonably okay for the first five years or so. But as I mentioned, there is a lot of change going on in the area. There is a rapidly increasing Jewish population. So there are tensions that are rising between Jewish citizens of Palestine and Arabs. And 1963 is kind of one of the first of the sort of pivot moments that goes on here. There's no sign before that that Abdullah is dissatisfied with his working conditions or anything like this. But something kind of is obviously kind of cracks a little bit. And up to that this point he seems to have had a particularly good relationship with CN johns obviously he knows him personally they've worked together on the excavation. And johns seems to be more sympathetic than many of the other mandate sort of senior staff. He's reasonably empathetic to questions of things like having a growing family and the cost attached to that to the fact that there is rising in there is quite serious inflation in Palestine at this point in time. So so Abdullah's pay packet is going to be worth less and less. And this sometimes really does kind of contrast with the department directors so people like Ernest Richmond and and Hamilton after him who sometimes seem quite suspicious in a very sort of Orientalist kind of way, assuming the Arabs are maybe by definition, a bit lazy or a bit deceitful in their working practices. And there are also tensions between Abdullah and Naim Mahouly, the regional inspector. This might have partly been that because of their personal acquaintance, Abdullah has a tendency to try and communicate with the head office through CN johns and the right to Jerusalem directly, which is not supposed to do Naim Mahouly is his line manager he's supposed to try and communicate through him, but it's not always easy for him to get hold of name, especially once Mahouly moves to Nazareth which is a lot further away. And so this is one of the sort of things that turns in a little bit tense just within the internal working relationships here. But in terms of the sort of general conditions, the pay isn't fantastic, although it's comparable to other sort of manual roles like sort of service jobs and things like this, where we, in cases where we can see what people are being paid in Palestine at this point. So he does get some sick pay. He gets paid, he does get paid holidays he gets the equivalent of about two or three weeks of paid holidays per year. Some of those are allocated on religious holidays. So mandate staff would choose whether they took Christian or Muslim or Jewish religious holidays as paid. It's a personal holiday allowance. And when he has a personal holiday he can also get things like free rail tickets for himself and his family in order to travel so you know this is not a terrible job, especially given that we are talking about a period of quite significant unemployment during quite a lot of 1930s in Palestine. As I mentioned, there are rising tensions in the area of athletes itself. And this is partly the general situation in Palestine during the 1930s. So there are two kind of various aspects of British mandate policy, the fact that you have rising political tension between Palestinian Muslims and Christians and Jewish immigrants. But there are also things that are quite specific to athlete as a site. And especially after the beginning of the Palestinian uprising in 1936. I think Abdullah would have been finding himself in an increasingly just unpleasant place to be working for the mandate authorities on his own. A lot of the time, and in a place where people attend. So the British have a military camp at athlete, which at some point in the 1930s starts being used as a prison camp. I've not been able to work out exactly when that is most of the literature says 1938 or nine because that's when it starts being used to imprison Jewish people who are coming to Palestine, especially to flee Nazi Germany. And this of course is the point at time and time when places like Britain and the United States start stopping Jews from coming in. So if you're trying to flee Nazi Germany. It becomes harder and harder. So the British open this big prison camp. But before it's used for Jewish immigrants, it is used for rebels in the 1936 39 uprising. And so it's a dangerous place to be around in 1937 they've been a big raid by around 200 rebels trying to free some of their comrades from the camp. On another occasion, Abdullah is actually kidnapped for 24 hours by some rebels who steal the official issue gun that he has for his job from him. He took him from his home blindfold him taking away and then release him on another occasion he's asked to stand guarantee for a cousin of his who'd been a rebel and given himself up. And Abdullah asks his bosses in the Department of Antiquities to say that he can't do this because because of what his job is, and that he shouldn't be asked to do this. He can't very much disentangle himself from a kind of official trouble. Trouble hits him again in 1938 on, there's a circumstance where a Palestinian policeman a man called Mustafa Hury is shot dead by a Jewish member of the Palestine police for force, who is the guy in this photograph. And he was a Czech Jew who had come to Palestine joined the Palestine police and then was allegedly so angry about some previous incidents during the rebellion that he had shot the colleague who he was sharing a tent with overnight. And Abdullah is actually one of the witnesses who is who is called for this trial and again he asks his bosses to try and get him out of this and reading between the lines of some of the letters that he wrote about this. He's very much aware of a kind of sort of positionality that he has in terms of, he knows that he is legally being asked to come and testify in court. He asks his bosses to say that he can't so there's a kind of interesting thing going on where he is sort of actively trying to take on this sort of even more subservient position in order to get out of an entanglement like this. So what seems to be happening in his HR reports in the letters that he is sending in the discussions about him in in Naim Mahouli's letters back to Jerusalem is that Abdullah is quite obviously getting more and more dissatisfied with his working conditions. He doesn't want to be there. He starts asking to be transferred to Jerusalem. And he starts having time off for back trouble. There's various terminology that's used in the doctors reports for it. But I suspect that if this was a modern day personnel situation, people would be starting to ask questions about you know whether this is stress and stuff like this going on. And he also starts being increasingly commonly found absent from work. So if he's going to go to Naim Mahouli or someone else will go to the site and he won't be there. He will be down in Tantura, usually with his family. And he starts getting in more and more trouble from for this. He has holiday docked he has pay docked. So as well as the sort of wide attentions that are happening in the politics of the area. This is this is very much kind of overlapping and I think probably has a causative relationship with Abdullah's everyday relations at work. And really sort of the situation deteriorates completely in the winter and spring of 1940-41. There are some particularly serious allegations of absence. They're probably not true it seems in the papers, but certainly people get quite angry and inquiries are made. Abdullah asks more often for transfer to Jerusalem or he asks to have an extra night when he can be at home. He suggests that one of his colleagues can cover for him his colleague says well no because that means that I have to work the extra night and my family are left alone more often. And there are increasingly angry letters happening in all sorts of different directions. He's finally given his notice in March of 1941. But it's really not a clean break. It's difficult to say when he actually stops guarding the site might be as late as August that year it's a little bit hard to tell, but there are various applicants for the job as I mentioned it's actually seen as quite a desirable position. There are various applicants for the job who emerge and I'll speak about them in a minute. Abdullah also apparently hopes to be reinstated his initial responses to being fired a very much kind of declarations of innocence, a slightly sort of a kind of martyred sort of grieve a grieved kind of you don't want me so I'll just go now, kind of sense to things. But then later on when when I think I think he's hoping that the British will will just kind of back down and say oh it's okay we'll just talk a bit of pay or something again. But he does seem to be hoping that he's going to be reinstated. When he isn't he comes out very directly and says please give me my job back I'll take a pay cut I'll do whatever you want. And I say I'm sorry we've got somebody else. We could maybe give you some excavation work and he points out that he can't do manual work because of his spad back that we already know about and by this point, he's born probably in about 1900. He is 40. And, you know he's lived quite a hard life, and he doesn't perceive himself as being able to do manual work. He also has a strong sense of grievance he seems himself as having a right to a job. He's given as he perceives it and I think justifiably so he's given 10 years of his life to this job he's worked hard he's gone well beyond the sort of requirements of the job of just sort of sitting there and guarding the place he's mended stuff he's talked to visitors and things. This has been taken into account in his pay rises and he was being paid quite a lot more than similar guards for instance at Kherbital Masha. But he's also being paid less than than similar guards in urban sites so he's kind of in between in a bit of an in between position in terms of his take home pay but he does perceive himself as having quite a clear kind of moral right to keep this job and is very annoyed when he is when he is told no I'm sorry sorry somebody else has been given it you can't come back. And then there is this sort of question of of of how to replace him and ultimately he is replaced by after milham who had been guarding one of the prehistoric sites in the hills just sort of slightly inland from at least. And this is quite a significant sort of raising status for after but the department also takes the opportunity to cut their costs and they actually pay him a pound a month less so 20% less than they are paying Abdullah. But there is also quite a lot of processes that go on in terms of actually finding a new member of staff to take on Abdullah's role. The local villagers show and and there is a series of sort of letters and petitions and this is one and you can see quite a lot of them that some of them have signed their own names and others have signed with a thumbprint or a stamp. But there's a very clear sense that the local villagers feel that they should have a voice in who this job is given to. This is somebody who's going to be living amongst them, who's going to be around their families. They actively reject some candidates they say no we know about this guy he's bad he's got a prison record we don't want him here we don't care if he's married to a local woman. We're not having him. What about this guy. And there are also a series of letters that come from people like the manager of the salt factory, which was a Jewish agency as Zionist organization enterprise that had been there since the early 1920s. And it sort of shows the entanglement of the villagers and these big enterprises that in conventional narratives about mandate Palestine are often depicted as being very separate from ordinary working class Arab Palestinian life. And, but they're used for references and backing up claims and things like this so there's, there's a real sense that this is a desirable job, and it's also a job that's seen as embedded in the community the archaeological site is not separate. It is part of how the villagers see their local area, and they want to determine who actually gets the role and this is possibly one of the reasons that after millhouse is given the job. They know him he's from not far away. So just to sum up what I hope has maybe come across in this talk. The fact that archaeological paperwork, even some of the most sort of mundane and routine archival material can I think be seen as really quite valuable as a social history source. There's a whole range of workers, their experiences their relationships with their seniors, the nature of the labor itself, the labor relations that the colonial authority that's that's going on here. I think it highlights the entanglement of archaeology with its local, local, social economic political environments, what's going on around an archaeological site like this. I think also it's kind of important to consider even somebody is sort of usually perceived as lowly and and and sort of unskilled unskilled as Abdullah al-Masri as as having his place in the archaeological site here. In terms of how they that visitors see it what they're told about it what they look at what they maybe don't bother looking at. Those villages of course are British and Arab and Jewish. So there's there's impacts there, as well as the fact that I have no idea how good his skills as a renovator of crusader sites were but presumably there's still water on the street castle that Abdullah al-Masri, you know sort of built into it. So I think, you know, we get quite an important insight here, not only into archaeological history and archaeological labor but more widely into questions of colonization, colonial power relations colonial labor relations, but of the individual similarities in relations that kind of go on within most. So I hope that's been of interest. And I think now I hand back over to Felicity or Melissa. Thank you so much for that. Excellent incredibly rich talk. Felicity did you want to chime in before I go to the Q&A. You're muted. Yeah, just to say thank you very much Sarah really really interesting and I think it's particularly interesting to learn about this this perceived connection between the local community and the archaeology and that this would there was an awareness of that in the era, because sometimes I think that it's seen one of the one of the complaints about local communities is that they're divorced from the archaeologists in some way. So it's an interesting, an interesting fact, I suppose to come out of that. Yeah, I mean we do tend to see it in. And I think a lot of the, I very much remember from a lot of the Palestine exploration fund materials the only time, quite often that the local people are talked about in a lot of the letters and the reports is either as laborers or as looters. And I think that's it and there's always this allegation that oh well you know they're just not interested and I think, even if it's just on the level of it being a useful local workplace, and then place of employment for one of the, you know, Abner and Belad you know the sons of the village, you know it's it's seen as something in which the local village has a stake, and that is important to them. So let's move on to our question and answer portion of the program and invite the YouTube audience to submit questions via the YouTube chat function. So our first couple of questions are about the archives themselves. And the first question is how do the archives that are currently under control that of the state of Israel, compare with the archives that were taken back to Britain in terms of the scope and the contents of those archives and was there any kind underlying logic or strategy to the division of the archives as there was sometimes applied to let's say division of artifacts. As far as I can tell from having experience of both what seems to have been taken back by the British is the stuff that they perceived as administratively important. So anything that sort of policy that's about actually running the country, all of that sort of stuff that's taken back the stuff that seems to be left behind and it's split between various places. So I've talked about the stuff that's held by the Israeli antiquities authority. There's quite a lot at the Israeli National Archives. That's partially digitized. And then also the municipalities. I mean one of the main places where there is continuity in the archives is that at the city level of you know just running a town. There are places where the archives still exist so Nablus has quite significant archives Jerusalem does although apparently they are now no longer accessible to researchers I've been told that they've been put in some storage place somewhere and nobody is allowed to look at them anymore. But, but yeah basically the stuff that's been left behind. The archaeological stuff is a bit of an anomaly because that seems to be almost everything. There are Department of Antiquities files in the British National Archives, but it's mainly files that existed in London. So it's letters that came from Jerusalem to London. And may and antiquities files that ended up in other departments, because they were being passed around. For instance, the treasure at the Jerusalem Treasury or the Jerusalem Department of Works. Most of the archaeology stuff gets left behind at all levels so there is this stuff that's kind of, you know, talking about one guy at this one site like the stuff I've been talking about right up to sort of, you know, policy stuff about antiquities and what's, you know, the sort of actual decision making levels. In terms of other archives that are left behind, it tends to be this kind of the stuff that basically the British didn't see as important enough to bother carrying back and wasn't sort of controversial or confidential enough to them for them to be bought to bother burning it. So it's, it's things like personal records like this, or it's sometimes like, you know, really sort of low level kind of documentation from the Public Works Department about, you know, tarmacking a road and stuff like that. Thank you. Another related question to that the archives that did either make their way to London or the letters that were sent sent there. Are they cataloged and or digitized. Are there differences in accessibility of these archives between what's in the UK and what's in the state of Israel. Okay, so the archaeological stuff, as far as I know has been sort of is, it's, it's from from kind of second hand stuff that I've been told informally, it's almost the project of one individual within the authority. I'm not even sure if it's ongoing. It's quite haphazard. And it's literally just the name of the file. There is no search ability at a finer level than that you literally just have to wade through it. The stuff that is in the Israeli National Archives is PDF. And there is some level of text, text search ability to it, but it's quite erratic. I guess probably because of the character recognition, sort of software and issues with handwriting and things like that. It can be a bit random what keyword searches will throw up in it. There have also been various issues which I'm not going to go into in great depth because we could be here all night to do with what the state of Israel reveals of archives and what it doesn't. There are various Israeli NGOs, sort of campaigning for greater access. And then obviously there are issues, kind of in terms of who can and can't go to to Israel itself and access archives and obviously there are a lot of people who are excluded from that. It's gotten as far as I know all of the stuff that that that there is in the British National Archives, so it's a queue. It is cataloged at the level of the folder names. And there is a little bit of keyword stuff attached to those but not very much. And all of that's been digitized. And again, if you can go to London, if you can get the British Home Office to give you a visa. And all of those sorts of things. I apologize to my government for my government, if there are any people who have ever had to deal with the fundamental racism of the British visa system. But again, a bit like Israel there it's a question of who can and can't actually go to those archives. I would also like to say that if there are people who can't get to the British archives, and they want images of these. There's an awful lot and I am willing to share digital copies so do please get in touch with me. I've done a lot of sharing of the 10 now probably tens of thousands of document images that I've got from British archives and I'm willing to share them more. No, they're not digitized. There doesn't seem to be much in the way of plans to digitize them and certainly if you're looking for individuals, they're not you're not going to be able to you have to go and physically look at them. They're not, they're not kind of keyword tagged at that kind of level. It's very much just on the level of kind of antiquities archeology, maybe the names of a major fine like the Dead Sea Scrolls but nothing more granular than that. Thank you. That's all incredibly useful information for the researchers and specialists who are tuning in today. So, thank you. And there are some really good articles if you kind of search on kind of Palestinian archives Israel and that things like that. There are, there have been several very useful kind of articles written about this stuff. And as I said, there are NGOs in power in Israel working on this. So, it's, and it's a moving process, particularly in terms of access to the Israeli archives. Okay. Yeah, I'll very helpful information. So a question that I have for you is related to the web exhibit from the body museum and one aspect of that exhibit was a focus on pay and specifically differential rates of pay based on different hierarchies basically internal project hierarchies as well as job duties and social hierarchies, for example, lower rates of pay for women and children compared to men and lower rates of pay for Palestinian manual laborers as opposed to the Egyptian foreman. So, in your talk today you mentioned that the archives record things like holiday time and occasional requests for pay raises on an individual basis for workers like Abdullah al-Masri. So, broadly speaking, do the extent archives address rates of rates of pay in a more systemic way. And if so, can you comment on the kinds of pay scales that you've seen. Okay, this isn't something that I have looked at in a systemic in a systematic kind of way across the archives, but I am very aware that the stuff is there. It's not recorded in any sort of single place. So the various places within the archives that will tell you bits of stuff about this are so the mandate authorities have to put together something called the estimates every year, which are what they're going to spend on what they hope to get in. So there are discussions of senior pay rates in those. There are also some other kind of senior level. There's letters, pay negotiations, job adverts, things like this, that tell us how much, you know, director, you know, the director, the deputy director, the curator of the museum, the field archaeologist, the inspectors, how much they're all on. So, I mean, the hierarchy is very fairly obviously in a colonial situation like this, the British are getting most. That's also partly because they are getting expatriation allowances on top of what the role would normally involve. So have up to regional inspector level and a couple of other positions within the department. Palestinian Arab and Jewish staff so educated figures like so there is a guy called Leo Mayor who is a very sort of significant scholar of Islamic art, who comes in the early 1920s to Palestine with a PhD from I think Vienna University and having worked at sort of the big Oriental Institute in Berlin and things. He's the librarian there for a while before he goes to the Hebrew University as a lecturer. And so we certainly know what some of them are getting. We, and then there are, and there's also a number of students. There seems to be a policy of every couple of years they take on a student archaeologist who gets trained, I think, possibly at British School of Archaeology in Jerusalem, and then gets a position as a deputy and then a full rank regional inspector, and they're always and there's three or four of those, Auni Dajani, Dimitri Baramchi, Michouli is the first of those, and Suleyman Suleyman Hussaini, and I think there's one more who I might have forgotten, but I'm not sure. Mara Thornton has done more work on that kind of side of things, and the sort of more kind of like proper archaeologists level of employment. When it comes to people like mastery, we only see their rates of pay because of the preservation of these sort of internal letters like the ones around these, the figures that I've mentioned today so there's a couple of guys at Jericho whose records are still there. There's somebody at Aka, whose records are still in there. There are the various people that I've mentioned at Leight, and those rates in the 20s they started about two and a half pounds a month. And by the time Almasri is fired in 1941, he's on five pound a month. And there's gradations within that they seem to try and start people off as low as possible. And if they stay for a long time, and they do a good job then there is scope, if they keep asking to have their pay raised. Almasri does say on a couple of occasions, I should be on increments. I'm a public servant here. Why am I not on increments? And they never really answer that. But he does go up from just under four pounds a month when he starts in 1930 up to five pounds a month in 1941, and they do when these are going on so it's all quite ad hoc what they're being paid. And it does seem to partly be down to how much the individual is willing to ask and willing to push. And they also seem to take factors like size of family into account. So in Jericho they employ several kind of quite young single men, and they're all started off on much lower rates and they never get any higher because most of them leave quite quickly one of them goes and joins the Palestine police instead. So we look but we're very much looking in single figures for these manual laborers, and we're looking at certainly for the sort of as far as I can remember for the sort of the grade at which you might get a younger British person, or a well educated Palestinian or a Jewish employee, you're looking at maybe sort of 20 or 30 pounds. So that's the kind of comparison you'd be talking about. Thank you. I'm a similar question, shifting now to the description of work duties is it similarly sort of ad hoc where you were able to interpret work duties for example of a loss re based on just this array of documents that you had at your disposal or are there specific documents you've encountered in the archive that outline particular job duties for different categories of workers. So with somebody like Abdullah al-Masri, it was very much a process of just finding mentions in these letters of what it is that he's doing. He's a guard, you know, that the main part of it is made pretty clear, but things like the building the mending pots and things that stuff that just is mentioned very scattered throughout the letters. So that kind of very much comes from all over the place and it's sort of it kind of certainly when you compare him with the Jericho men that I was talking about. It sort of to at least some extent seems to be that kind of situation of the jobs almost what they make it. So he could have just sat there with the gun on his knee outside the British house guarded the site and done nothing else. But he obviously was just probably bored out of his skull. If you know if he tried to do that and wanted to make some of it you know he seems to be sort of quite ambitious in the sense of wanting to be paid more wanting to move to Jerusalem wanting to, you know, he likes, you know, he emphasizes that he does more stuff than he does this good work with the ceramics and john says he's an expert isn't he calls him an expert potmender. You know that he acquires these other skills you know he does want to go beyond just sitting there with the gun on his knee guarding the site, whereas the guys in Jericho seem to be young men who are just after a paid job and it's and see it as a sort of entry entry point into civil service employment or something like that or there's one who leaves because he's too busy with his own stuff so it seems to be that the low rates that they're paying and maybe subsidized by the fact that they assume that these guys have got a bit of land or some family work that they can do on top of it. So at this sort of level it very much seems that you know there's a there's a there's a job title which tells you what the basic thing is guard night watchman museum attendant, and then there is scope to build on that. Obviously at the sort of more senior level, there are things like job advertisements and contracts that say, these are your, your jobs it's something that's much more recognizable to us in these in this day and age as you know, an HR relationship a personal relationship of employer and employee and a contractual kind of engagement. Thank you. So YouTube question coming in from Jeffrey Zorn. Are there any dig diaries from see and johns that reference the individuals that you have researched. I was at the Palestine exploration fund a couple of weeks ago and I wanted to look at them then and, and didn't. There was. Yeah, there was a whole load of stuff that I needed to look at and I only got to look at some of it, because disorganization and stuff. So that's a kind of future part of the project is to get back down to London and look at johns material. But I think Felicity might well have a bit more to say on that. Yes. Yes, we've got a lot of the john stuff. And there's also a lot in the archives of the Israel antiquities authority so it's kind of like, sometimes there's quite a lot of duplication. And we have a lot of personal correspondence as well, which is very interesting. And yes, quite a lot of the kind of archaeological material from at least but also other sites he worked on Ashloon and the Citadel in Jerusalem. Things like dig diaries. They've because because I've sort of worked on a few other figures like this principally, a couple of guys who worked for the Palestine exploration fund in the 1890s and early 1900s. And things like dig diaries are very, very variable in terms of how much individual names and individual figures turn up some people like Frederick Jones bliss. He's really interested in his work as he talks a lot about them. They're an amazing ethnographic resource. Other people hardly mention anything. It's so it's very, very variable but there's archives. Yeah, at the Israeli antiquities authority at the Palestine exploration fund. If there's anyone out there looking for a project, the, the Sebastian Samaria archive from 1928 910 that's at the Harvard Semitic Museum is gold. There is some amazing material in there, including complete pay lists of all of its staff. And that's men and women who are being employed there, and every name of everybody who is paid which is more comprehensive than anything I've seen anywhere else. There, there's also stuff in things like the diaries and the sort of site write ups and things but those pay lists are incredible. What's particularly interesting is that after the first couple of weeks on the dig, most of them are in Arabic. So whoever is running and it's beautifully written Arabic so whoever is handling the pay, whether it's one of the Egyptians that have been brought up as a foreman. So a kofti or, or whether it's somebody local who is, you know, not just literate but has got beautiful handwriting, who is acting as a sort of Clark. But for social history of the village of Sebastian and the area around that that archive is just sitting there waiting going. There's at least a PhD here. I should also mention that CN johns has beautiful handwriting so it's a joy to go through his stuff. Yeah, it always makes a difference doesn't it when looking through archives. Really appreciate the good handwriting or more type of letters. Yeah, I mean there's stuff that I've gotten recently from the National archive that looks like somebody's gotten a spider dunked in some ink and just traced it across the page. Allegedly it's writing. I don't believe what we have is like that but CN johns stands out as a paragon of handwriting virtue. So I think we will start to wrap it up now that we're 10 after the hour here and I will ask the final question, she also came in from the YouTube audience and did you research conducted either by you or others on the descendants of the individuals that you have researched. In terms of me. I've started doing that a little bit. So I had been trying to do it on one of the people that I was talking about from the Palestine exploration fund archives. He's from the Ottoman period, but he vanishes in the early 20s and I think he probably goes back home to Lebanon. And I haven't managed to trace him beyond about the early 20s, and that is the bane of my life at the moment. In terms of a dollar all mastery. And so he, he vanishes from this archive when he is fired in 1941 or when he finishes working for them in 1941. Okay, so he, his wife, during all of this time and the place where he keeps vanishing off to is a village called Tantura, and for people who are familiar with Mandate Palestinian history. Tantura is the site of a probable massacre by the Haganahs Androni Brigade in 1948. It's difficult to know how many Palestinians were killed in that but it there was a big controversy over the research that was was done about it at Haifa University about God is probably going on 20 years now. But they, and there are, it looks from various sort of lists of an information about the village that our mastery was quite a common name in the village that it's probably, you know, his family are there. I don't know what happened to Abdullah. I do know that other masteries from Tantura were killed in that massacre. Others turn up in oral history projects that were done in the 70s and 80s and 90s in refugee camps in Syria and Lebanon. So I've not been able to trace direct descendants of Abel al-Masri, because I don't know his kids names. But certainly in terms of his extended family from the village of Tantura. A lot of it is is the violent end of what happens to Palestinians in the war of 1948 that a lot of them are either murdered or they become, they become refugees. I do know of other people who are doing that kind of research. There is, I believe, a group of people who have been trying to investigate, and I think I've been interviewing even villagers from some of the places where Dorothy Garrett dug. And I think I've been trying to track direct descendants. I know that that's something that you're trying to do maybe with Telenospe. I don't think I know of any others, but it's definitely sort of something that is kind of on the edge of my mind or something I want to try and do in the future. And I know that it's kind of something that other people are sort of interested in thinking about. There are resources that are useful for that. And I think that the Palestine Museum, the new Palestine Museum in the West Bank, Nehremola is, is I suspect going to be very valuable for that sort of thing because it is doing a lot of crowdsourcing of family materials and family history. There's also this website Palestine remembered where individual Palestinians from all over the world comment on their villages history. Like bits of people talking about their family and stuff like that. But obviously because of the dispersion of some, you know, two thirds of the Palestinian population at the time are dispersed as refugees in 1948 and end up in refugee camps and beyond all over the world so it's a particularly challenging area to be trying to do that for. Thank you. Yeah, it's certainly a very complicated topic, but that was an incredibly useful answer so thank you once again for this excellent talk. Very illuminating question and answer session to, and I'm going to hand it over to Aaron to say a few words to you conclude. I just want to wrap things up by, of course, thanking today's speaker Sarah Irving for a fascinating session, both in terms of the presentation and the questions and answers really made for a fine learning experience. And for our audience out there, just a reminder that the next in talk in our series will be happening on December 2 at 9am California time. So, log in through the YouTube channel. And that's when Jeffrey Zorn of Cornell University will be presenting on the career of Labib Soriel. So we look forward to that and I also want to thank our various co sponsors of course body museum staff for making this possible. The Palestine exploration fund and the archaeological research facility at UC Berkeley. So, thanks to every.