 Hello, my name is Melissa Craddock and I would like to welcome the audience to the second lecture in the Women and Gender Performance series. Before I introduce today's speaker, I'd like to invite my colleague Brooke Norton to read a statement. We would like to begin by acknowledging that Berkeley, California is on the territory of the Huchun, the ancestral and unceded land of the Chochenye Lone. We respect the land and the people who have stewarded it throughout many generations, and we honor their elders both past and present. We are living in a moment that warrants deep reflection on our past and present. Across many global contexts, equal access to healthcare, education, fair wages and human rights is contested on the basis of sex and gender identity. In an effort to bring light to these timely 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 public programming. Through this lecture series, we hope to highlight new and established scholars who are engaging with risky and marginalized topics concerning women, gender performance and sexuality in the past. We invite you to participate in these programs so that together we can listen, learn and work towards creating a more inclusive museum community. Thank you for joining us today. Thank you, Brooke. It is now my pleasure to introduce today's speaker. Dr. Cynthia Shaper Elliott is an associate professor of Hebrew Bible at Baylor University. Her expertise and research focus on the historical, cultural and social context of ancient Israel and Judah, as reflected within both the archaeological record and within the Hebrew Bible, with a particular interest in the former prophets. More specifically, Dr. Shaper Elliott's research emphasizes household archaeology and issues of food, gender, religion and social memory. She's an experienced field archaeologist and is part of the archaeological excavations of Tel-Halif and Tel-Abel-Bayt-Mikah in Israel. In 2018, she was the annual professor at the WF Albright Institute of Archaeological Research in Jerusalem. Furthermore, Dr. Shaper Elliott is involved with the American Society of Overseas Research, the Society of Biblical Literature and the Albright Institute of Archaeological Research. Dr. Shaper Elliott, the floor is yours. Well, thank you so much. I really appreciate the invitation to be here. I'm going to go ahead and share my screen and hopefully you all can see that okay. Yeah, just fine. Great. Wonderful. Thank you. Like I said, thank you so much for the invitation. I really appreciate the opportunity to come and share here with you. I'm just adjusting a little bit of my screen real quick, so I apologize. We'll just go ahead and go with that. And thank you for that warm welcome. My talk today is entitled Women and Domestic Spaces at Iron II Tel-Halif. And the way I kind of envision our talk today is as follows. I will briefly describe the tools that we use to identify potential gendered space within the archaeological record, at least in ancient Israel and Judah. And those two main tools are household archeology and gender archeology. And then I'll take a look at Tel-Halif. And Halif will be kind of our example of how we can go about trying to identify gender space. And then we'll talk a little bit about food and food production and how those particular artifacts and activities relate to gendered space. So first, let's talk a little bit about household archeology, what it is, how we do it and why we do it. As a branch of settlement archeology, household archeology specializes in the study of the activities and facilities associated with ancient households or houses. So more or less it's a type of archeology that just kind of focuses on houses and the activities, the artifacts, the features, and the people and the activities that were engaged in those houses. And so the question then is how do we do that? Well, areas of household activities. So we're looking at a house and we're looking at the activities that occurred there. And the question is how do we recognize household activities? We do this by recognizing and carefully mapping of an area and the identification of not only artifact types. Now that's really common in archeology and you look at publication reports is we see archeology types listed. We're interested in the types, but we're also interested in much more than that. We're interested in not only the types of artifacts, but their arrangement, the quantity of those artifacts, and their location. And in particular we're really interested in what we call their spatial relationship, the relationship between the artifact and let's say other artifacts or other features or architecture within the dwelling. Because it's by looking at that spatial relationship that we can help determine what activities took place in that space. So why do we want to study household archeology? Why do physical remains done through a spatial analysis help us? Well, physical remains excavated from the dwelling and its surroundings reflect the shape and activities of a household. And thus those shape and activities of the household thus gives us information about potential behaviors of the household members. So when we look at the artifacts and we look at the space and we look at the house and we can determine, okay, this area, certain activities occurred there. That can then give us a lot of information about their daily habits and what habits portray about what people value or even devalue. In their landmark paper on household archeology, Wilk and Rathgie determined that there are three aspects of a household in which to study and that these three aspects seem to be shared across time and space. And we're going to look at all three of these aspects briefly and that first is the material aspect followed by the social and ending with the behavioral. The material aspect is really basically anything physical. It's the physical aspect of the dwelling, the land, any other buildings on the land, any kind of fields or orchards, vineyards and gardens that belongs on that land and with that house. It includes any of the possessions whether that be tools or weapons or things related to food preparation, but it also includes the areas of activity. Where did people do things and what kind of things were going on in the household. From this picture, you can see a kind of a replica of what a Iron Age house might have looked like in the Iron Age, Israel and Judah and this is located at Harvard University and what used to be called the Harvard Semitic Museum. It's called the Museum of the Ancient Near East now. I could be wrong about that, but you could easily identify that and it's a really cool thing to see if you want to be inside a house, a potential what a house potentially could have looked like. Speaking of what that house looked like, this is a great opportunity in our talk to talk about what a house in ancient Israel and Judah could have looked like. And it seems like in the Iron Age that there was a pretty typical blueprint of a house. When archaeologists and Hebrew Bible scholars and historians first started looking at these, they noticed that there was a similar footprint and that footprint included three long rooms that were parallel to each other with a big broad room running the width of the house in the back. And so it came to be known as the four room house or sometimes people called it the Israelite house. But as we've carried on studying these houses, we've realized that well one, first of all, some of them had three rooms. Some of them might have had five rooms turning one of those long rooms into a smaller room. So we can't really call it the four room house. And we also can't really call it the Israelite house because there's no, there's nothing to determine. This is absolutely Israelite or Judah high or maybe some other people group. We just don't have that kind of information. So a better description of it. Some people call it the pillared house because one common feature is that they all have pillars. And these pillars hold up the second floor of the house and help segregate space on the first floor. Sometimes those pillars are made of stone and sometimes as pillars are made of wood with stone bases. But the basic idea of the house as you can see in this picture here is that it's a small, usually smallish rectangular house with two stories. And we're kind of guessing but it's an educated guess about the second story, because the houses that we find are just the remains of these houses and sometimes scant remains at that. And the feeling right now is thinking right now is that they're rectangular houses with a flat roof with some sort of open workspace, usually in the maybe in the front of the house, maybe even inside of the house. That's a current discussion within household archeology of ancient Israel and Judas. Was there a courtyard, or was there a four court. The houses also had common features besides the pillars, including things related to storage, like storage pits, and of course ovens. And really this indicates the artifacts that we find the features that we find all indicate that these houses were multifunctional, and that the people who lived there were agrarian and pastoral meaning they had herds, probably mostly sheep and goats. And they farmed the land, and that they were more or less self sufficient but were also more or less living on a subsistence level of course that subsistence level would change depending on the circumstances but that seems to be the case. Our social aspect includes the members of the household and their relationship to each other. And this brings us to a distinction that needs to be made. We don't call this type of archeology we don't call it family archeology we call it household archeology. Excuse me. And we do so because, sorry, my apologies, is that the broader term of household seems to encompass what the Israelite social aspect of the household looked like. Sociologists define a family as people who are related to each other by blood by marriage and there's issues of dissent involved. A household is much broader than that. A household could include family members, but it could also include extended family members, and it could also include non related members and those non related members would be think of people who are working together at the household or who are living at the household but aren't related. A household is really defined by co residents and co working in ancient Israel a household could include the immediate family some extended family, maybe non related people would include slaves it would include guests, and it could include a seasonal workers who came to help, maybe during harvest But when we talk about the social aspect of ancient Israel in Judah. The basic social structure is kinship related it's all about people who are related to each other. So the household would be that smallest if you think of a series of concentric circles that the household is that smallest nuclear unit, and then the circle outside of that would be the clan, followed by then the tribe. And of course I couldn't. I couldn't talk about families without putting a picture of one of my favorite holiday films of national lampoon's Christmas vacation. Our last aspect is the behavioral aspect and these are the activities the members performed. Things within a household of course are going to be domestic activities, every day activities or even special occasion activities activities every day that could have taken place would have to do with production, which is basic things like growing your fields and and harvesting your fields and having your your vineyards and your orchards and taking care of your herds, but also producing things like textiles and tools and weapons preparation is another category and that includes the preparation of food. And the distribution is how the stuff that's produced, how is distributed and stored whether you trade it, whether you store it whether you eat it right then and there. And one major aspect that we're going to talk a lot about later is the reproduction aspect, followed by religious rituals. And social occasions would include things like weddings, agricultural and religious festivals and hospitality. Our second major tool that we use to determine gendered space is gender archaeology. Archaeology can be defined as research that considers the relationships of women and men to the social, economic, political and ideological structures of particular societies. And this is about looking at daily repetitious activities and these daily repetitious activities what we call habitus can tell us a lot about what is society values and devalues. And we use other tools to help us infer what certain activities could have been done by certain members of the household. And tying it with household archaeology, the place where repetitious activities occurred serves as the stage of daily life, which in this case, and in many ancient societies is the household. So our example today comes from Tel Halif. And you can see on this map here you can barely see this little red dot right here. And you can see where it is locating Tel Halif for you and Tel Halif is in the southern foothills known as the Shveila right in a liminal zone between the Shveila and the Negev. And Tel Halif is about a 10 to 12 acre mound. So it's not super large, but excavation of this tel was initiated in 1976 by the Lahav Research Project. And excavations there since 1976 have determined the occupational layers, ranging from the calcolithic early bronze age one and all the way through the Roman Byzantine periods. The most current phase of the excavations phase four was excavated from 2007 to 2009. And again from 2014 to 16 and was directed by Oded Borowski of Emory University. So on this slide I've got two images for you to look at one you can see the topographical map here on the right. And you can see all five of the fields on top of the tel and down the slope of the tel that have been opened over the year starting with field one on the side here. Field two on a type of acropolis and then field three, four and five, all on the northwestern or western edge of the mound. And it's when field three began but really into field four and field five, when the concentration of looking at the houses really began. Now God bless the inventor of the drone because the drones have been so helpful in our in our analysis of in our excavation and our field excavation, because you can see this fantastic aerial view shot of our site of tel halif. Now really, you can see here to the right. This is field five, and then from this house over is field four. And as you can see on the top of graphical map there was a space in between the two fields and there were houses and field four and houses and field five. But we wanted to connect the two fields so we opened the area in between this little area here which we could see the pillar sticking out from the earth and knew that it would be another house and so basically, we, the house that we're looking at today connects field four and field five and is really a nicely preserved row of houses from the eighth century so the iron to be. So Halif was one of the many towns and villages destroyed by the Assyrian campaign into Judah in 701 BCE. So how do we conduct household archaeology using spatial analysis at Tel Halif. Well what the law of research project calls the magic square is really one of the ways that they figure and try to use and determine spatial analysis. And so what they do and what we do is we figure out, you know, once we get to the floor materials, we rope up 50 centimeter square increments, and we that and then we excavate in that smaller space and we just expose everything, which then allows us to kind of get a very complete picture of the floor of the house and exactly where everything is. So everything is excavated and labeled and documented according to those 50 many meter square or centimeter square increments. And as one of the archaeologists on the Tel Halif team in the past James Harden has written that this mini grid or the magic square as they call it provides information necessary for identifying patterns introduced by human behaviors. Not only regarding domestic activities, but also more complex organizations in society as a whole. And this is a picture of the house that we're looking at. I'm just going to go back one more slide just to show you so this house right here is going to be the house that we focus on. This is the house I supervised the excavation of so I personally refer to it as bait Cynthia House of Cynthia, but I know I can't officially call it that it's official name is the eight house. And as you can see the eight house connects this larger house labeled the L eight house with this other house to the south called the be eight house. So houses have the similar blueprint the size is it ranges as you can see the eight house is is smaller than the L eight house. But as you can also see, they share walls with one another. So this main wall here connects the L eight house with the eight house and then this main wall here connects the eight house with the be eight house. So they're almost like row houses, using the space as best as they can. So here's another zoom shot of the house again this is the eight eight house and this gives you a more zoomed in picture of it than that neighborhood picture. You can see those two main walls I just mentioned the walls that they share with the houses on either side of them. You can also see quite clearly the two pillars of the house. This pillar right here is the one that was sticking up out of the earth before we even started to excavate. And at least the way I see it so far is that this house the eight house has two parallel long rooms and one broad room in the back. One other thing to know and I am going to go backwards one more time so don't mean to make you feel dizzy but all of these houses were built, we suppose using the city wall as part of the house, the back room of the house. But as you can see, since it was so close to the edge of the tell the very western edges of the tell including that houses have eroded down the side of the tell so our eight eight house we have a little clarification that needs to be done on this very western face of that house or western side. And you can see that a little bit more clearly here. So the way I defined the house is at least so far, you know things could change that there are two parallel long rooms room one and labeled room two. You can also see this little wall right here. It looks like room two was made at some point into a smaller room. So we've got this third room and then the back room, but broad room labeled as room for room five is the open workspace the four court of the house. We're going to look primarily at rooms one and rooms two room one here to the northern part of the house has several significant features and this was really fun to excavate one is the two pillars which we already mentioned, especially this main pillar here. And you can just see at the edge of the photo down below you can see a semi circular installation. And after excavating the inside of it. It was kind of difficult to determine what its use was. But it's spatial relationship to the rest of the house the rest of the room would make a very good storage pit, or maybe even a midden. You can also see this beautiful cobblestone floor had very few remains on it. But it's nice compared to how the rest of the house has just a beaten earth floor which is pretty common. And you can see right here, right underneath where it says area a, we have this beautiful grinding installation and I'll show you a close up picture here in just a moment. And surrounding this grinding installation was new a large quantity I mean large quantity of restorable pottery, most of which were storage jars, with numerous pockets of carbonized micro remains and pounders, and then over here in this dark spot where it says area C. There was a cooking pot in a pit. So based on the artifacts and the amount of artifacts and what kind of artifacts activities those artifacts would have been used for I labeled this air this room as having three main activities. There's not only activities that occurred there because remember, this is a utilitarian type space. There's no such thing as having a room designated for really just one activity, like a craft room or a library or something like that. You can see here I've labeled area A, B and C, and area A would have been used for food preparation and that's determined mostly by the grinding installation and the pounders. Area B could have been used for storage because that's where we found all those storage jars and the semi circular installation. In area C, the cooking pot and the pit indicate that food preparation occurred there. I do want to draw your attention to this middle photo this little one right here. This was found in this same area around on top of this area B material so it is a beautiful cosmetic pallet and cosmetic pallets were used by women to grind cold to use as eyeliners around their eyes very kind of Egyptian style, if you will, and that's going to be interesting to us in just a moment. Now you may recognize this photo here on the right. This is the Bade Museum photo for this series, which they graciously let me use. And here you can see to the left a close up of that grinding stone and installation. And you could see it's lined with field stones and then this big solid piece of rocks. I didn't find the handstone, but basically if you're unfamiliar with these this is how people would grind grain into flour. The grain would be put on top of this large stone and then a smaller handstone would be used to rub the grain back and forth between the handstone and the slab, just like this picture of the young Bedouin woman is doing here on the right she is illustrating how this grinding stone could have been used. What's interesting is that our a house has this grinding stone in its own little, you know, nook its own little installation. Some of the other houses also had grinding stones, but they weren't in installations. So there's something special about this at this house. Let's go on to room two so room two is our second long room it's in the southern part of the house. And as I mentioned earlier, it was divided into two rooms. So room two and then room three but we're going to focus on the room two part. We also had significant artifacts related to two main activities, again food preparation and weaving in this area labeled as area E we found the fragments of an oven what we call a tenor. There were patches of ash and there was charcoal. And we also took some samples from there as well. But then over here where it says area D we found a row of 19 loom weights and three loom weight fragments. And what that indicates is that this is and since all those loom weights were in a row that suggests that there was a loom here a loom that's used for weaving. And that the loom of course being made out of wood would have perished but the loom weights being made out of clay survived the fiery destruction. So in room two we also have areas of food preparation and weaving the food preparation element is significant to our study of gendered space. So you can see this photo in the middle this is a close up picture of the fragmented tenor the oven. When we find ovens in our excavations that we just again find the fragments we rarely. I mean very rarely find a complete oven but we do have one and I'll show it to you in a moment. But a modern tenor as you can see in the right hand picture that this and this will give you a good visual aid is a cylinder clay oven. Today usually about a meter high with two openings opening on the top and a small opening that serves as a flu on the bottom. And as you can see from this photo of an Iraqi woman making bread. The dough would the oven would be lit and once it got hot. The ashes would be raked out and the dough would be slapped on the interior walls of the oven to bake. And we find these ovens both in archaeology and in ethnoarchaeological studies and ethnarchaeological studies is really observing modern societies to understand how their ancestors might have done something. So for instance the first speaker of the series Dr. Jenny Ebling her ethnographical work on how ovens were made and how they were used in Jordan is really helpful to our understanding of how ovens were made and how ovens were used in ancient Israel. And a lot of ethnarchaeological studies show that these ovens or ovens like them are located both inside and outside the house. And the ones that are inside the house are almost always located near the center of a of a central room and that there's no provisions usually for the smoke to escape. And that they are indicators of a living room type space. And here is the one oven that we have found, and that is just fabulous and it was found at Tel Rahov, which was directed by Professor Ami Mazar of Hebrew University. And in this oven dates they're dating it to the 10th century BCE and it was really two ovens, an earlier version and a more updated version. And what's great about this is that it's the most complete oven we've been able to find. And you can see that it does have a second opening, most of the ovens that we have found are the second opening either wasn't there or maybe it just didn't survive. And then there's an opening on the top and of these would be used very much like our ethnarchaeological studies indicate that a fire would be placed inside the oven, the ashes would be raked out, and the bread would be slapped on the interior oven to bake. And that's also confirmed by this picture of the latter part of the oven where you can see all these broken pieces of pottery that were on the exterior of the oven that would help retain heat. So let's get into the social aspect and gender. We talked about how one of the main roles of daily life in ancient Israel would have been the reproductive role and the reproductive role is a major concern for ancient households, especially when the survival of your household, both in the future and the now and into the future is determined and dependent upon the fertility of the household, both the fertility of the land and the animals and the people. And because of course biologically, you know that happens to fall under the female domain. A lot of scholars think that this reproductive role was under over over sought by the matriarch of the family, that it was she who looked over that aspect of all the women in the household. And, you know, with reproduction being something that was absolutely necessary, but also scary in compared to today's day and age, when it's very unlikely that the child and or the mother could possibly survive the birth. This birth survival rate was very very low. And so the concern for the female reproductive role you can imagine was a really big concern for these women. And as a result, if they were in a various stages of their reproductive role, these factors dictated that women were regularly obliged to conduct household tasks within or near the dwelling. And so I don't want to say that, you know, the women were in the private sphere and the men were in the public sphere, I think that's making categories out of that these people wouldn't have that kind of luxury. I mean, you have a household that's dependent on everybody participating in the survival of the family. And especially in times of planting and harvest where all hands were on deck. I think the one exception of this could possibly be the woman's reproductive role, and that, you know, if she's eight months pregnant she's, if she can at all help it she's not going to go plowing a field. And so a lot of female tasks because of this reproductive role would have been conducted within or near the dwelling and one of the most important tasks that was done in the dwelling would have been food preparation. And this would have been because of the female tasks being conducted at the household, as a result of the reproductive role, it's also very likely that the food preparation also fell under the female domain, in particular, the matriarch of the family, who over could have saw that element to it and would have thus given her a lot more authority and power that we then we give her credit for. So it's very likely as a result of the female reproductive role and the household space and the food that activities that were occurring there, it's very likely that the female household members controlled the household food preparation activities and dominated the eight houses main living space. Let's carry on a little bit more about food and gender. It's been estimated that the ancient Israelites obtain 50% of their daily caloric intake from cereals. That's a lot. So it's a really good reason why you hear that phrase that daily bread because your daily bread was literally your daily bread you they would have eaten bread or cereals in some form or another but probably mostly bread nearly every day if not every day. They were growing the grain which was relatively easy for them to do that as long as everything went well as far as no famine and drought and whatnot. And once harvested it you gained more than than you planted it could be stored for long periods of time if it was stored well. It could be made into a variety of different products that were filling. So if you're trying to survive off the land and the land sometimes cooperates and the land sometimes doesn't cooperate that the ability to feed your household and to feel full if and not very well nourished but full not hungry I should say is an important element to that survival. As a result, the food and food preparation of food is an important role to the family. And if things are as we guess that it was part of the female domain. Carol Myers figures that ancient Israelite women spent at minimum 10 hours a day engaged in domestic labor two of which were spent processing grain. The skill and technical knowledge of transferring grain from an inedible to an edible form was considerable and was essential to the physical survival of the household. So when we talk about space and how space is used, it's going to be multifunctional but there's going to be definite activities that are a prime focus that are so imperative to the survival of the household. And that those activities are by their very nature very important and the people who do those activities are important to the survival of the household. And as we saw in a house, we had space dedicated to food preparation. And as we're seeing here food preparation was dominated and overseen and controlled by the women of the household in particular the matriarch of the household. So the women were essential to the survival of the household not only in their reproductive role, but also in their food preparation role. But we also want to acknowledge the fact that food is not just about physical survival. It's also about the survival of the household into the future. And this includes how food preparation and food consumption are meaningful embodied experiences. And that these experiences are essential to the transmission of cultural norms, traditions, history and identity. I don't know about you but when I have a meal or had a meal with my family and the kids were little I was also trying to impart upon them, you know, different ways of eating at a table what's acceptable and what's not acceptable. You know, how to hold your cutlery, how to make sure you don't knock your water over. But then also the transferring of family norms and values, not just in how you eat, but in other areas of life, I think Thanksgiving is an excellent example of this. People bring or prepare dishes that mean something to their family. Maybe they're part of the general norm of that typical Thanksgiving menu. But maybe there's other things too and those other things have a story behind them and those stories are shared at that Thanksgiving feast. And those stories have concepts related to cultural norms and tradition and family identity, which could then lead to greater issues related to power and class and gender. So, as the anthropologist Catherine Twist writes, you aren't just what you eat but with whom you eat and how you eat. She also writes that food is used to express who we are, who we wish to be. Asserting our membership in certain groups and distancing ourselves from others. So food, not only is essential to the survival of the household in the here and the now, but also essential to the survival of the household into the future. And women, the women of the household played an essential role in that as archaeology shows us with the spatial analysis as food studies have shown us and as gender archaeology has shown us. I want to take this moment to say thank you again to the Albright Institute for the fellowship that allowed me to conduct this research to Professor Oded Borowski and the Lahav Research Center for the use of the materials and images to Dr. Aaron Brody and the Bud Day Museum at Berkeley for the use of the image and for inviting me for the talk and to my home institution of Baylor. Thank you very much. Thank you so much Dr. Shaper Elliott for this rich and informative talk with so many great examples of household archaeology from your field sites. I'd like to invite the live YouTube audience to post any questions that you might have in the chat box. And while we're waiting for some questions and comments to come in I have a few questions of my own. And the first is about the field work that you've conducted at your two main field sites. My question is about the quality of archaeological preservation of residential context that you have encountered and how variable preservation might impact the process of data collection and interpretation in household archaeology and if you could specifically comment on Tel Halif because you mentioned that it was destroyed by the Assyrian army to that quick episodic destruction helped to preserve the material. That's a great question. I do think it helped preserve that material the material that was left. I think we always need to keep in mind that when things are on sites are on the eve of destruction. We may get that snapshot of what it was like but we're getting a snapshot of what it was like on the eve of destruction. And so if there are extenuating circumstances when you know that the enemy is at the gate and that you are about your town is about to be destroyed. So when people flee you have to imagine well what do they take with them do they take they take important things they make sure you know I think about and this is you know kind of a horrible example but it relates being from California and living in a part of California where I often had to evacuate because of fires or there was a threat of evacuation. We were always thinking about what would we take with us and you're not going to take the cooking pots. You're not going to take the storage containers you're not you're going to take the important things. And so I I try to keep that in mind as I'm looking at these households, especially if they're households that at least the building survived the destruction because we have to keep in mind that people would have taken things with them, what kind of things they took what did they leave behind, and that that snapshot we're getting is really on the eve of but that things there there could is some consistency there as well that it's not I don't imagine it would have been completely different unless they were besieged for like a long time that of course would make things very different. One of the great examples that you pointed out also from tell how leaf was that row of it was a 19 different loom weights. Yeah, on the wall of a house. So that seems like a good example of sort of a snapshot in time of something that wouldn't be taken with a family household group that is fleeing. And I'm wondering if you could discuss these cottage industries a little bit more and what other kinds of industry that people in the household may have been participating in. So you discussed food production and preparation that length. We have a little bit of an idea of textile production. So yeah, it would be great if you could elaborate a little bit on these aspects. Sure. In fact, there's one house in this row of houses at Halif same, you know, iron to be level that when and it was before my time there. They found a house that had a room which they're calling a loom weight workshop I think is what they call it they found hundreds of loom weights. The number escapes me right now. I have mentioned it elsewhere, but they have found a room with just hundreds of loom weights and then in the next room that was adjacent to it. They found what they call a stack of dirty dishes, and that it was all these bowls that were stacked up and the remains of food still a little bit inside a little bit within them. And so the conclusion that they're coming to is that this particular house was used in some sort of way relating to to weaving now whether it was big enough to have, you know, multiple looms or if they were producing the loom the loom weights themselves. And that got me thinking. And I've written a little bit about this and I hope to keep going in this direction a little bit more is not only what was the the function that what how did each house hold function, but how did each house relate to each other in the neighborhood. And does the neighborhood, like so for instance, you know our house the eight house has this grinding stone installation, and the house to the north of it had a grinding stone but not in an installation. And then the house with all the loom weights was just a little bit to the south of it. So it gets me wondering about how did neighborhoods function. Did one house have, you know, oh this is so and so has the grinding installation we're going to go there and use their grinding installation because we got to make a lot of flower. And just how these different household units whether they are related to each other or not I mean that's a whole nother social kinship type question, but how, how they functioned as a community. I'm really glad that you brought that up because I was another question for you as that's great relationship between these different household units especially because they're sharing party walls. And this relates. I'm going to put in a plug for some of the research conducted by the body museum director Aaron Brody as well as other people. So, for example, at Nozbe have hypothesizing cooperative labor based on distribution of materials and material culture specifically within the households. So yeah, Aaron good you're popping up here to elaborate on that. I can just jump in because it dovetails perfectly with what Dr. Schaefer Elliott was just talking about but actually here the research was done by by Jeffrey Zorn already back in the early 90s. You know, but for this, you know, more or less contemporary site, it, it, it's iron two phase ends a little bit later in a different location it's north of Jerusalem, but still within, you know, certainly certainly the same political entity that the Kingdom of Judah. You know, for a site that had somewhere between 750 to 1000 inhabitants and here again I'm basing this off of Jeff Zorn's research. I believe that there were only three working olive oil presses. You know, that's just one example and I'm not sure if you'd have any from belief, but where this idea of you know so perhaps, you know, these three households that that had this equipment and put investments into this equipment would have pressed the olives for the entire community. But you know, I can't think of, you know, an equivalent because we don't have that fine tuned archaeology from Nasbe. But perhaps another you know household had extra flower and so they would, you know, pay, quote unquote, the household to press their olives and make olive oil by you know giving them by bartering, you know, a little bit of extra flower that they had, etc, etc. And one can even sort of think about the economy in general and that's another paper that hasn't yet. But sort of rippling up from those household levels. So weaving isn't another great example actually because we know from, sorry, I don't want to steal, I mean, gone too long but so we know from Assyrian texts that these kingdoms were providing the imperial, you know, overlords with textiles. And where were those textiles being made. They were being made in individual sites in individual households. So this is something in economy called household thing. And it shows you the power of that of the household, right, in so much that even the empire has desires that are met only through at the household level. So I'll leave it at that but No, I love that. I think that's so helpful. And I think you're right in that the household. It's more than just, you know, just doing what it needs it's if the community says, you know what we, we have one olive press and we all have to use it. We have one threshing floor and we all use it, or so and so is really good at making loom weights so they're going to make loom weights for all of us and we're going to give them a go or something. You know, but I think that household economy and that sharing economy that cooperative work economy. I think, I think it's a direction that we could do a lot more work in. Sorry, just to finish the plug is also so it's something that's frankly been overlooked scholarship. Yeah, and in essence, you know, if you think of, you know, the agricultural village as incorporating a minimum of 85% of the population. And that means that essentially 85% of this ancient economy has been overlooked. So instead of taking a top down perspective, thinking, oh, you know, goodness what is the palace and the government doing. We should start thinking more from the bottom up. I agree, because those are the foundations of any economy, regardless. And no, I completely agree with you and I think that if you want to learn more about daily life, you have to shift your attention from the palaces and the temples and the battlefield, and you have to shift your attention to the home, and the household and the people who are part of it. And I think, I think there are some of some people who are doing that and more and more and I think that's great. But it also means we need to start we need to try and start excavating some of these more rural sites. And there's, you know, that long complaint of that is the excavation of ancient Israel and Judah has been very, you know, tell minded or, I mean, but I mean, Halif is a tell, but it's a small one, and so we can get a better view of I think, you know, agricultural town daily life, but it would be so great if we could, you know, start getting some excavation of some of these smaller sites I would just love that. And sorry, and just to add on top of that to I would love to see more of an emphasis on not just the collection but the analysis of botanical remains. And because again those are just so important and instead of making assumptions about what these folks are growing, you know, why don't we look at the direct evidence. Same thing I'm looking over on my screen but Sarah Kansas in there but you know emphasis on zoo archeology so the animals that were being domesticated. And, you know, we're such important aspects of the lives. And what I've suggested in this future piece to is that there are even different kinds of economies that are both interacting and intersecting with each other. And, you know, sort of go to sort of build up. You know, one can't just sort of say that it was a demand economy. It might have been a demand economy for certain kinds of things. Right. But if we if we leave out, you know, the important aspects of production as you've talked about. And frankly, in terms of archaeology a lot of this stuff is mostly going to be in like, like the textile industry that was so vital, you know, that empires were desiring these textiles and requiring that they were given in tribute. And yet of course, what remains. I'm looking around the archaeologists so we get this but other folks who don't study material culture, you know, might not understand that, you know, because of decomposition that something so important, you know, mostly is, you know, sort of ghost remains and that's sort of why ethnography is so important to help, you know, sort of fill in a lot of these blanks that we get. I couldn't have said a better myself that's, I love the discussion I think you're so right Aaron, that there's so much more we could be learning about, and hopefully, you know, we'll all have the chance to do that. So just another one or two questions of pickups on some of the points that were just being made in that really excellent discussion. So Aaron pointed out the importance of confirming some assumptions about the agricultural economy and what kinds of crops, people may have been growing. There have been any residue analysis conducted like for example on the stack of dirty dishes to show the kinds of cereal grains that people were consuming or if they were making bread and beer, these types of different products in those vessels. Yes, we are in the process of getting all those types of reports, the sample reports. We hope to do some residue analysis as well. And as far as the samples we got some of the sample reports, especially from the stack of dirty dishes. I don't have that the data right in front of me but there is some typical things you would expect you know all of pits and different grains and stuff. What I would also like to do though is to possibly get some residue analysis inside the remains once we the storage jars that we found surrounding. I mean they're fragmented, but surrounding the grinding installation because one question I have and it may be, you know, a silly question I don't know but is worthy storage jars just storing the grain or did they put the flower in them afterwards. I would love to find out about that as well. But I do think that the the the residue analysis the micro analyses the study of micro remains and animal bones and zoo archaeology. I mean, that is just essential now to to the study of archaeology in general but really closely needed in a household archaeology. So it's not just the the big stuff it's also the little stuff and I've loved that development within archaeology within the past. I don't know maybe 20 years or so, where more and more excavations are employing some of these other more micro scientists or zoo archaeologists I can think of the Weitzman Institute that was part of the excavations at Telasafi got when I was there and just being on base and doing the work right then and there and the type of information detailed information that we're able to get from those types of research is fascinating. Yes, and perhaps another avenue related to that is to look at the bioarchaeological remains as well impacts on health and teeth decay, especially with these carbohydrate and cereal grain heavy diets. I agree that would be fascinating information to have see how how malnourished were they. And if they were I mean we we assume having such a high cereal based diet and you know a seasonal diet, which, you know, none of a heart I can't imagine too many of us really practice at a seasonal diet all that well. Maybe we try but of course, if that's all you can do we we can't, you know, estimate how it would have been for them but having a seasonal diet and lack of sugar, except for you know honey and the press date syrup and pressed fruits and and whatnot I can imagine that they, they would have been maybe a little bit healthier than we imagine them to be. I would like to thank our speaker Dr Shaper Elliott once more and thank the audience for tuning in today. And to remind audience about our next talk in this series which is coming up on November 3 at 930 am Pacific time that will be delivered by Dr Alex Roberts Ortiz titled agency theory and the agencies of daughters in the Hebrew Bible. Thank you so much. Thank you.