 Well, I'm very pleased to welcome back our internet audience to our latest installment in the in on silencing the archives Zoom lecture series. I'm Aaron Brody from the Bade Museum at Pacific School of Religion And before I have the pleasure of introducing today's speaker I'd like to introduce our Associate curator Brooke Norton who will read our introductory statement We would like to begin by acknowledging that Berkeley, California is on the territory of the huge team The ancestral and unceded land of the Chochenyua 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 We're in even our most venerated figures deserve reasonable scrutiny during his time directing the archaeological excavations at Telenazba WF Bade participated in harmful stereotyping of Palestinian Arabs That 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 with which they were acquired As stewards of the legacy of the body museum and its holdings It is our responsibility to faithfully evaluate the process by which the collections were acquired within the context of our contemporary moment One approach is to ask me questions of the archival materials In order to examine critically the manner 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 the excavations were conducted under the authority of the British Mandate government of Palestine In an effort to bring to light these issues to serve a broader public audience online And to connect to the local communities 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 an open access web exhibition and public programming like this lecture series Which highlight decolonizing themes We invite you to participate in these programs So that together we can listen learn and work towards creating a more inclusive museum community The body museum and the Palestine exploration fund would like to thank you for joining us today Wonderful. Thank you so much brook Well, it is my distinct pleasure to introduce dr. Rachel sparks today Dr. Sparks is associate professor and keeper of the collections at the university college of london Institute for archaeology Her phd is from sydney university She has a very rich background in fieldwork. She's worked on numerous excavations in jordan Including pella the petra church project tele a lot gasoul In the garandall archaeological project. She's also worked at axon in ethiopia She also served as field excavator for the scottish urban archaeology trust and the institute of field archaeology unit in the united kingdom and on a series of sites in sydney australia Her museum experiences include curating the petri Palestine collection at the ucl institute of archaeology researching south sudanese ethnographic collections at the pit rivers museum in oxford one of my favorites And her current role in as keeper of collections for ucl's institute of archaeology Dr. Sparks's research interests include the history of archaeology and british mandate palestine With a focus on the work of flinders petri and kathleen kenyon An interest that developed out of her work with the institute of archaeology's near eastern collections and archives Interests also include the archaeology of the bronze and iron age levant especially cultural interaction between egypt and the levant ethnicity identity and material cultural transformations And writing as material culture and she has published widely in each of these categories So today She will be lecturing on the development of archaeological communities of practice In british mandate palestine. So it is my pleasure to yield the floor to dr. Sparks Well, thank you very much. Um, right. I'm just going to Share my screen Okay, are we good now? We are good. Excellent So first of all, I'd like to thank all the organizers of this series for inviting me to take part. Um, it's actually been a very Interesting ride so far with all the wonderful papers we've had and it's really nice to be able to contribute to that When we're looking at something like the history of archaeology It's often presented in the literature as a history of the careers of great people So sort of prominent white usually male european or american archaeologists like flinders petri lennard woolly and so on And so people talk about their digs and their discoveries Rather like you find egyptian pharaohs talking in their inscriptions about single-handedly winning battles and the like This is actually part of the wider process that nick shepard has called the habits of elision in the archaeological record And this is where those that do the work on a dig gradually get edited out of its narratives With all the credit getting shoved on to the director or the figurehead And of course in the colonial context of british mandate excavations This becomes even more marked when you start looking at the role of the indigenous workforce on these projects So this is something that i'm trying to address with my paper today and to be able to return credit and some agency to the many Arab men women and children who worked on foreign excavation projects in palestine during the 1920s and the 1930s And i'm going to do this by exploring the idea of their archaeological communities of practice And show how these generated knowledge and also opportunities for their indigenous participants So these are my basic research objectives of um this work. I'm trying to characterise what these communities of practice in the mandate Are excavations are and a map of the professional networks that developed on them And through as part of that i'm going to be identifying the roles that individuals are playing in creating the networks and in producing and disseminating archaeological knowledge And i've got various sources of information that i've been drawing on to this very similar to some of my Colleagues in this series The most important institutional ones for me have been the reports of the department of antiquities of palestine And these are really important for understanding things like dig dig logistics tracing the movement of some of the people involved in the project Particularly the egyptian staff Um, but also learning incidentally about things like labour disputes on digs and so on So they give us a really good context for an excavation and its community But you can add to that the individual excavation archives, which are incredibly rich at times and these of course are Placed all around the world in various sponsoring institutions I've put on the screen some of those which you can find in london just as an example When we come to the site publications, these are the ones that suffer most from that process of the lesion that I talked about So often it's only the more senior arab staff that tend to get mentioned if mentioned at all And you can add to that autobiographical accounts Usually of the western participants in the dig which give a bit more of a personal perspective Okay, the quality and completeness of all these archives is quite variable Um, but one thing they have in common is they tend to present everything from a western perspective And through filters of kind of casual Colonial racism. So that's something you need to take into account Anyway to investigate these different networks. I basically Created a timeline of excavations in mandate palestine had a look Um at those excavations that had accessible archives and then followed that up by looking at individual projects in more detail And because of my background, I started with three digs of flinders petri in southern palestine Gemma furra and teller jewel and that's basically because I've already got a good knowledge of this material through my role as keeper of the collections at the Institute of archaeology Because we have a lot of these finds and archives But then I expanded it to look at a range of british and american projects at sites like samaria jerry co tell kai san plakish tell and nasbert tell by most sin and bethele At this point, I want to introduce one of the key concepts of my work Which is the idea of the community of practice And this is something that comes from the work of gene larvae and etienne venga, which was published back in 1991 the idea of situated learning And the idea behind this is that learning is actually a social process that actually gets embedded in everyday life So it's something you acquire through taking part in shared activities And it's been around for a while this idea and it's been a plethora of research It's been around for a while this idea and it's been applied to quite a few archaeological settings now to just give you two examples The work of danielle candelora. She looked at um ancient egyptian military communities from this perspective And then laurenck decide who applied it to modern salvage excavations in turkey, which obviously has closer relevance to what i'm doing today So what are these communities of practice? Well, I think it's a useful concept to start to apply to fieldwork in mandate palestine And if you look at it in that setting the community is obviously going to be the dig And the digs have a certain number of features that they share they create communities that have this shared purpose And they're quite intensive. So you get a lot of interaction between its members over a short period of time typically a few months People enter that community with quite different levels of experience and expertise But when they're there they engage in what we can call situated learning and so they're acquiring knowledge through participation in their shared activities And often this is quite informal. So knowledge is created and transferred between participants As they're interacting, but it's not necessarily sitting down and being told. This is what you have to do Then for the duration of the project what you find is that you get a sort of gestalt where members become part of a single Dig culture and so they learn first of all was expected of them in their various roles on the project But also the appropriate dig culture and the dig ways of doing various things So who belongs to this community? well With this research he actually excluded local labor from his community practice because he felt they weren't directly involved in research But I actually think this is quite a narrow interpretation of what research is And for me, if I look at my communities, I see the local diggers are contributing to the research design In many ways, for example providing local knowledge of their own landscape So often you read in accounts of the digs that people who are working for them are drawing their attention to suitable places to work They're telling about where things have been found in the past in their communities and so on The diggers are of course also producing the evidence that is going to actually be used to interpret the site And the value of this data depends very much on their skill In distinguishing between things like different types of deposits, but also accurately recording the fine spots of their objects So in this view, my community of practice is quite wide Has got everybody in it from the manual labours, skilled excavators, field supervisors, field recorders, architects, surveyors, potwashers, photographers, conservators and dig directors They're all creating this shared experience Okay, I'm just going to run a very short bit of film from Tellerla Jewel or while I make my next point just to see some of this community in operation In a recent paper, Alison McKellen and Nyla Bird made some interesting observations where they pointed out that early archaeologists Had rather double standards regarding their attitudes to their field labour So basically they underplay their intellectual contribution to the dig But at the same time they're completely reliant on the data these contributors are producing They also pointed out there was similar hypocrisy in the way, for example, scientists Treat their laboratory assistants. It's a very parallel sort of situation and I think it's important to realise here that In the mandate period the diggers who are at the coal phase of excavation They're not just passive tools in the hands of some random western experts They are active agents in that process of knowledge acquisition and they should be credited with that So let's look at what the dig is. Well A dig is made up of, you know, you all know this stuff, three basic core activities You've got excavation, field recording and research But the colonial framework in which these projects are operating in the Middle East meant that the western staff members on the projects tended to have The greatest flexibility within the system in terms of how they might move between these different activities And we can think of it like a dig hierarchy Now I've done a little sort of pyramid here to show that Because mandate digs were very hierarchical in structure and of course they're being framed By boundaries of class and nationality And this is something you might remember that Mahmoud Hawari was talking about When he gave his seminar in this series back in February So here's the hierarchy on my hypothetical dig Your position in the pyramid is reflecting things like your status, your wage level and so on So right at the top, of course, you've got the dig sponsors But because they're operating at a distance and they tend to go through the dig director For most things, they weren't really a part of this active dig community of practice But I think everybody below that in the pyramid we can consider to be an active participant What we don't see in these tiers, of course, is what a person's skills are Or the type of activities they're actually engaging in And I think that's an important point Because many of the different tier represented here are actually doing the same things So you've got your locally sourced diggers, your diggers recruited from other districts Your foremen, your Western field stuff, they're all involved in actually excavating But they're not being accorded equal status within the system And the same if you look sort of midway up Around about here where we've got our Arab surveyors, draftsmen and secretaries They're doing the same jobs that Westerners are holding on other projects And a lot of the American digs, the Arabs are given these roles This is, for example, where you find people like Labib Soryal The Egyptian surveyor we met in Jeffrey Zorn's lecture back in last December Yet with the underlying racism we've got at this time They're not considered part of the same social sphere as the Western colleagues they're working inside So it's all very uneven Okay, so that's your basic structure What I want to do now is move on to look at the roles played specifically By the Egyptian and Palestinian field staff in our dig communities Okay, so the most well-known of these groups are probably going to be the Egyptian workforce And these are often known collectively as gufties Which is shorthand basically for anyone from the villages in and around Guft in Upper Egypt Flanders Petri, the Egyptologist, first began working with these men at Coptos in Egypt in 1893 And he found them so useful to him that he actually started hiring them for other projects He had elsewhere in the country where they were brought into work alongside locally sourced labor And part of their role on his digs was to actually train up less experienced workers And over the next three decades, he actually ended up employing about Well, over a hundred different gufti workers on his digs You can read a lot more about these men and their wider contemporary context In the works of Stephen Quirk, his book Hidden Hands here, and Wendy Doyle What's interesting is that the gufti workforce really managed to carve out and maintain an Effective monopoly on the supply of skilled archaeological technicians throughout Egypt And they were a very tight-knit community and they stayed that way With many of their sons and grandsons following them into archaeology And of course, their descendants continued to be employed as archaeologists across Egypt today Well, the practice of employing gufti workers was soon adopted by other Egyptologists including George Reisner, who we see here And Reisner is particularly interesting in his role and relationship with these men Because he gave them much greater autonomy and responsibility on his projects and petri and some others Here we see Reisner in the Giza dig house along with Mohamed Said Ahmadiraz, who was his head Reis or foreman in the late 1930s And we see Mohamed and his brother on the other side playing chess on the dig Mohamed's father was a guy called Said Ahmad Saidiraz And he had actually been head rice rice for Reisner before him And he's particularly well known in the industry for keeping really detailed fieldwork diaries in Arabic with lovely measured illustrations and everything with them And Reisner was very unusual for his period in that he involved his Egyptian staff so directly in the record keeping for his projects And he was maintaining records in both English and Arabic Which most of his colleagues did not do Okay, so that's the background from Egypt Let's look now at their role on mandate here are excavations in Palestine And again, we have to go back to Reisner here because he was probably the first one who actually introduced these gufti archaeologists to Palestinian digs And he takes several Egyptians out to him when he works at Samaria in 1909 and they're acting as Foreman and also household staff on the dig Later under the mandate the practice of hiring Egyptian workers becomes very widespread And here again Reisner seems to have still been involved in facilitating this although he didn't actually go back to work in Palestine himself And we see many of the archaeologists who do go to work in Palestine. For example Clarence Fisher or John Crowford Had actually worked closely with Reisner in Egypt And they were able to tear for take advantage of the contacts that he had with the gufti community there Now here in in this slide we see Fisher on the right seated in the center along with his Egyptian workers at Megiddo Um in the other side we see Four well, there's actually five but one man is is unidentified of his Egyptian workers Which he took to work with him at Tel Gemma in 1926 in Palestine So what were these guys doing? Well One of the most common roles they got given was the role of Reis I've mentioned this term already or Foreman and you often see them in contemporary photographs sort of carrying out that role And you can often identify them because they dress differently to the local workers And quite often they carry this kind of rod of authority as well to see this guy on the edge of the photograph doing just that And on those digs, they're managing the workers on site But they've also been called in as excavators themselves when they've got a problematic deposit or something that needs a delicate hand Like cleaning skeletons, excavating burials and so on And we also hear of some of these gufti's being involved in things like blocklifting mosaics on sites They're senior, they're better paid than their fellow workers But the rates are quite variable and you can see this in the document I've got on the right And Basically the rates don't seem to be based on age They seem to be more related to experience and perhaps the perceived value This list is really interesting It's part of a longer document that was prepared by Clarence Fisher for the 19th fieldwork season at a site called Antiochon and Lontes If you know your geography or know that's in Syria, not Palestine But it's a very useful archive because Fisher was director for a number of seasons And he worked very for long periods of time in in Palestine And it gives us good insights into his views on the workforces he employed particularly these Egyptians Anyway, from this document we get a good insight into the gufti network of of the region at the time Which extended all the way from Egypt through Palestine into Syria And we learn for example that Reisman got his information For who he might employ on the dig at Antiochon from two of his head Reisers The full list we've got names 23 men who are all from guft And many of these men as we can see from their CVs have prior experience of working on American and British digs in Palestine When we combine this information with other records, we can see that many of these men and actually work together on these digs They're they're contemporary for seasons and several had also worked for Fisher So while these men are going to be parts of individual community practice on numerous digs There are also a lot of interaction and crossovers between those communities So now I'm going to look at the career of one particular man in a little bit more detail As an example of how their careers sometimes panned out. And this is a guy called Sultana Bakit He doesn't actually appear on Fisher's list of employees potentially to be used at Antioch Probably because he's already engaged elsewhere. He wouldn't have been available He came actually from a village called Balas, which is near Guft, but not Guft itself in Upper Egypt But he's part of that Gufti community And he worked for Petri at various sites in Egypt between 1919 and 1924 He's one of seven Egyptians that Petri decided to take out to work with him in Palestine until January 1926 And he goes on to work with him for three more seasons at Farah and two seasons at Tellajul And I should point out here that Leslie Starkey was field director on all of these projects And in fact for two of the Farah seasons, he was the only director because Petri was actually wintering in Rome So there is a relationship not only with Petri and Sultana but also with Starkey That needs to be taken into account He's actually shared a family name with a guy called Umbarak Bakit Who was another Egyptian Petri hired to work in Palestine but had also a long career back in Egypt Where he worked with other family members So there's family relationships in this community that have been carried on to the projects they work on And what we find happening is when Starkey actually breaks away from Petri in 1933 and goes to study his own dig at the quiche He actually steals Sultana and takes him with him as one of his main foremen Then after the duel and the quiche field season ended Sultana moves across to other digs in Palestine So he goes to work for Rice, for John Crowfoot at Samaria and for William Bardat, Tella Nuzba And I think from the record Starkey seems to be acting as an intermediary in arranging this setup And then when he's not on other digs, Sultana is also acting as a head guard at the quiche And he actually continues in that role after the dig finished all the way up to 1942 So, you know, he had a very successful career and he actually invested quite a lot in that Palestinian part of his career as well To the extent that he eventually wound up living there for a number of years As for other Egyptian staff, Petri tended to be fairly restrained Petri tended to be fairly restricted in how he used his Egyptians So he tended to focus on using their excavation skills and also using them to train up his local workforce in that community of practice, of course But in contrast, if you look at their roles on American projects, we see people like Fisher, Bardat, Albright Actually giving their Egyptian staff a lot more diverse roles on their digs And so some RISers are also working as pottery conservators, assisting site photographers, liaising with local landowners and so on So, why did this group of Egyptian field specialists come to be so important in Palestinian digs? It wasn't like there weren't other people available Well, I think it's no coincidence that many of the foreign archaeologists we find directing projects in the region Having a prior history themselves of working in Egypt And when, from their background, I think they came to like quite heavily on Egyptian expertise And so they were probably quite biased in favour of it And this did lead to a view that kind of spread that Egyptian workers were superior to the Palestinian Bedouin or Felaheen In the roles that they were given on excavations To give you an example, we've got a letter here on the right Written by archaeologist John Crowfoot, who was head of the British School in Jerusalem And about to excavate at Samaria when he wrote it And he looks pretty colonial as he's seen in this picture with his pit helmet and everything Anyway, he puts forward a fairly standard visa request to the Department of Antiquities on behalf of his Egyptian workers Who he wants to bring across the border And he justifies bringing them on his dig by saying I cannot find men of the same calibre in this country So basically I've got to bring them over because nobody else here is competent It's quite interesting if we look back a bit in time at Reiser When he published the results from the same site, Samaria, which he dug first in the 1920s And I should say Crowfoot knew Reiser very well Reiser praises the trained skill, the industry and the loyalty of his Egyptian workers And characterises the local village workforce as undisciplined, inexperienced and indolent And you can't kind of help think that maybe some of this attitude is being rubbed off onto Crowfoot Of course, neither men are allowing for the fact that the local labour force, when they're brought in to work on a site for the first time Are usually just agricultural labourers who are not going to be at all familiar with what excavation requires So it's not going to be that surprising if initially they don't have any skills in this type of work And yet, Reiser himself does go on to acknowledge that after a season or two in the field The same local workers became capable of identifying floors, distinguishing different deposits Preparing features for photography and so on And of course here, what we're seeing is proof that the Kufti Reises were fulfilling their expected role of training up the local workers And that this community of practice they were developing was starting to reap benefits for its practitioners Okay, while Deeks of the period were hiring a handful of Apologies, I'd went a little bit forward there Okay, so while Deeks of the period were hiring handfuls of Egyptians in these supervisory roles The Palestinian labour force was actually much larger And it could number anything anywhere from 50 to several hundred workers at a time And these were working in teams, we're usually known in the literature as gangs And people were given very specific roles in their teams So you've got Pikmen who do the actual digging unless they got put aside by their Kufti or Western supervisor who came in to do the tricky jobs The homen are putting the soil into baskets, it's been carried away to the spoil heap by the basket carriers And then people are sieving the spoil looking for missed fines And in this there's a hierarchy, the Pikmen are the most skilled and best paid, the basket carriers the least Despite having fixed roles in this system, everybody's working together of course and they're able to learn through observation And what we find is that those who show aptitude or interest tend to get promoted within the team And eventually they start getting assigned to more challenging work on the site However, this opportunity to develop their abilities and so on wasn't open to everybody And this is where my side with the women comes into it, because women's roles on the digs actually were quite fixed And they're allowed to carry baskets, they're allowed to sieve things, wash pots, but that's kind of it So here I've got a little bit of footage showing some of the women at Tel-Alajul washing pot up on the site And this is a sort of typical routine that they got restricted to The only exception really that I know of for this is the digs that were run by Dorothy Garrett up in Mount Carmel Because she actually hired a lot more many women than other projects and she was giving them more responsibility than was usual for the time But this is quite rare Okay, well now I'm going to move on to a bit of documentary evidence And this very useful notebook here we have in the archives of the Institute of Archaeology Which gives us a bit of an insight into a make up of some of these work teams And this was written by the field supervisor Carl Pape when he was working for Petri Tel-Alajul Fortunately he's got good handwriting which is one of the reasons why this particular notebook is so useful to us And he records here on these two pages 110 workers who are being organised into 17 different teams Each team has its own team leader and you see them in capital letters and between four and seven workers with them All the names we have on this list of Palestinian there aren't any Egyptians here And there's 49 different family names in the group but with some repetition suggesting that some members within this community are related to each other And because we've got the first names of these individuals we can actually work out something as a gender balance in the team And we see the team leaders are always male but most of the groups are including one to three women Sometimes we can go a bit further and we can actually follow individuals through the field records to learn more about their activities on the dig And I want to follow this particular man here as an example of this, Hassan Saleem So here he is one of these team leaders within the field workers And if we look elsewhere in the notebook, I've got a rather delayed reaction on going forward, let's see what happens There we go, we can find, let's see it's forward too far, we can find him appearing on another page of the notebook I've circled in here where he just says LH2, Hassan Saleem Well LH2 is a field context, I'll show you the plan of it on the other side So this tells us he worked in that particular room on the side, probably him and his team I suspect he's been used as proxy for the whole group In other records we can trace him for example on this object envelope which contained a toggle pin And my arrow unfortunately, my little snap circle has slipped but just above where I circled we can see Hassan Saleem's name And then on the other side we've got an example of a team card from Tallulah Jewell in this instance where he's circled on the back of the card and is named as the excavator of that team And there's actually a number of these cards with his name on them from both Tallulah and Tallulah Jewell So what can we tell from this evidence? Well, if you put together all the references I've found for him in our various records We know he was employed by Petrie from at least 1928 through to 1933 We know he dug tombs at the Jewell and Fara and that he was trusted enough to be allowed to work on his own as sole excavator of a number of tombs And this is a sign that he was conceivable to be quite skilled The fact also that he becomes the leader of a work team in the third Jewell field season also is a sign of confidence And it's interesting because this sort of level of responsibility was initially limited by Petrie to his gufty men So it looks as though we're seeing Hassan's personal ability allowing him to learn from his peers and advance through the system himself This is actually reflective of a bit of a wider trend on Petrie's digs because over time we see him relying less on these gufty workers So in his first 1926 dig he brings out seven Egyptians from Egypt to do the digging But within five years he's reduced this number to two and then he stops bringing out any Egyptians at all And we can see here a rise in confidence in the abilities of his Bedouin workforce who by now of course have got several years worth of field experience Okay well most of the labour that Petrie was using on these sites in Southern Palestine were Bedouin from the Wadi Gaza region And here we see a number of them at Tel Fahra and their tents where they're living were actually in the distance behind them In the mid-1930s Petrie actually began a new excavation project in Sinai at a place called Sheikah Sawad And rather than looking to Egypt for his field staff here he starts to hire a number of these former Palestinian employees from Southern Palestine to come down and train the local Sinai workers So we see our untrained Bedouin of the Wadi Gaza region and now being redefined as experts in the community of practices creating in Sinai On the left here I've got a letter written by Hilda Petrie to a daughter from the dig and then she actually names a number of these men Which is really useful because we can match them to our records from the earlier work at Fahra and the Jewel and of course circled here We can see our old friend Hassan Salim so now we can tie his career even further in history and we can see he's working in the 1930s in Sinai as well Well while this is all going on, other members of the Wadi Gaza archaeological community are actually being drawn north rather than south and they're going up to work at Lakish And this was because Leslie Starkey who had been field director at Gemma Fahra and the first couple of seasons at a Jewel decided to start his own excavations there in 1933 And like Petrie he wanted a body of experienced workers around him so what he does is he hires his former Bedouin diggers who move up to Lakish with their families for the season He steals Petrie's last two Egyptians Sultana Bakit and Sadiq Abdeen and takes them with him and he also pinches a number of Petrie's western supervisors such as Olga Tufnel, Gerald Harding and photographer Ralph Richmond Brown And then for the rest of the local labour he hires them from villages around Lakish So here we have Starkey creating his own new community of practice from the foundations of an earlier one Okay let's now look at another little biography here And one of the things we do tend to see is that outside Petrie's excavations in Palestine Egyptian workers did tend to have privileged access to the high paid roles on digs So the supervisor positions the specialist jobs But occasionally we see Palestinians getting employed in comparable roles And one such man is this guy Oda Jarius who I find very interesting He's a Christian Arab from a little village called Gifna in the west bank of Palestine, you can see it here on the right And he seems to have been hired first to work with the Danish team at Shiloh sometime in the 1920s And this Shiloh dig within close contact with the American archaeologist William Albright To the extent that they're loaning each other equipment giving each other advice and so on And it seems they also appear to have passed on the services of Jarius as well And so here we see a little bit of his career He moves from Shiloh to work as a foreman for Albright from 1930 onwards at various sites that Albright is digging including Talbide and Sim And he's working alongside Egyptian writers, Egyptian surveyors, Labib Soriel and William Gad And also a Palestinian called Buloth El-Araj who was actually from Ramallah Not far from where Jarius was born and was also acting as a surveyor at this time Albright though uses him more extensively and he sends him off to negotiate with local landowners and owners to secure permission to dig And then in 1934 he's going up the ranks and he gets promoted to head foreman He then moves across to work at Telenazpin in 1935 where he becomes a field recorder And this is quite an interesting job on the dig where they have somebody who especially has a role of allocating context numbers in the field Filling out the labels for the pottery and the fines baskets and also liaising with the surveyors about context and so on He then moves on and works again for Albright at various places And this last dig that I know him of is in 1936 at a site called Anata and sometime between then in 1943 we hear that he dies So that's his career. Where does he fit into this community of practice? Well in many ways Jarius is standing at a nodal point between different groups within his network He's got a role as dig negotiator and there he's liaising between the director and landowners As foreman though he's standing between the diggers and upper management And in his role as field recorder he's connecting the foreman and their gangs with all their knowledge of object context and so on To the surveyors and anybody else who needed to use that information So he's basically an enabler of many logistical aspects of the dig and also a key player in collecting research data Okay, so we've got communities of practice developing within these projects They're allowing some participants but not all to develop particular expertise And they're able to promote themselves in what is a rather specialized labour marketing period Selling their skills off to numerous foreign run projects With this of course networking is absolutely key and their success in selling themselves is dependent very much on the personal recommendations of the co-workers And particularly here the head rays Their opinion is often sought by foreign directors when they're looking for new staff But also trusted staff members like LeBeeve Sorial and the project directors And here I've just got a little example of that looking at the tell-byte Massim dig that Albright ran over four field seasons If you look at where he's getting his workforce for you can see he's actually using his academic contacts or his peers to tie him up with his workforce So Clarence Fisher is finding in surveyors, ricers and conservators He's taking over a number of staff from Elihu Grant's project at Bess Shemish And he's also getting his Palestinian overseer Oda Jarius from the Danes at Shylo Okay, so there's a lot of interaction of this type happening on digs of the period Well while I draw my conclusions for this talk I'd like to run a short film for you made by Gerald Harding during one of the dual field seasons Just showing more members of our community of practice there at work This series basically if we look back at what we've been doing it's been all about showing how archives have the potential to change the types of narratives we tell about the history of our profession And how despite their colonial origin we can use the data they provide to counterbalance some of the biases of these contemporary accounts So I hope I've been able to demonstrate how even some really mundane types of records can actually help us achieve this And bring more parity into how we represent the agents who are contributing to our understanding of the past Now my research into these work and networks in Palestine is still at a preliminary stage The next steps I'm going to take are basically going to dig deeper into the existing archives and try and identify more of these key individuals and more of these cross project links But I also want to try and learn more about the Palestinian digging communities because they're quite underrepresented in the information that we have Just to see if the professional mobility that I've seen for the Wadi Gaza Bedouin is happening elsewhere in the country And then putting all this together I'd like to do some more formal network analysis to try and help visualise and interpret the complex interactions we're getting between these community practitioners So I'd like to conclude by thanking our contributors to my research And of course that very much has to start with the many Egyptian and Palestinian men women and children who excavated so many sites over this period and whose work has obviously provided the foundation for what we're doing now I would also like to acknowledge the contribution made by the many organisations whose fabulous archives have been the cause of my research And I know it's a little bit of regular but I'd also like to thank all my fellow speakers in this series because I can't tell you how useful and inspirational your work has been and it's certainly helping my research go forward from here So thank you very much Wonderful Rachel. Thank you. And I'm wondering. Oh, great. You sorry you stopped sharing your screen. Thank you very much. And I know that we have some questions that are coming in. So, yes, let's turn to those So, let's see. I'll just read them off of my screen. Are there any examples of local Palestinians who were trained by the Guftis, but then we're able to move up the ranks in the dig hierarchy. The roots of the Western dig staff towards the local Palestinian excavation laborers change or become more positive as these worker skills improved with time experience and training under the Guftis. Yeah, I think the answer to both is yes. I mean I did show a few examples through that presentation of where people were able to sort of go up the hierarchy. Part of the difficulty is we can only track certain individuals because quite often our records are problematic in that we've only got abbreviated names we can't always be sure that the names we see in the archives are the same individuals and so on. But it was possible to advance we can see certainly people getting their skills valued more in terms of promotion for example from carrying baskets to wielding a pick I mean that's a fairly low level promotion within the system, but we know of individuals where it happened. Because in letters in particular there was occasionally people will make comments about that he started with us as a young boy and now he's you know, one of our most reliable workers and things like that. There is certainly a change of attitude. I find in the letters as well, as I mentioned Ryzener certainly improved his view of the workers around Samaria after a couple of years of working with them. He was very disdainful at the beginning he was, you know much more appreciative towards the end. At the same time we see that with Hilda Petrie talking about her Bedouin workers working in Sinai, she actually she's got some disparaging comments you know they do tend to put in personal things about what they look like or whatever. But then there's somebody, you know, she describes as those she'll say one of our best men you know extremely reliable all this sort of stuff. What I find really interesting is actually I was going to show but I didn't have time. There was a series of camera scope images stereoscopic images produced of the dig at Telfar for commercial sale to raise money for the dig. And one of the things they do in that is they show shots of the excavation in progress and a few sort of close ups of some of the workers and there's two shots of the Bedouin workers and they've got titles that reflect their expertise. They've experted a delicate task, a skilled excavator. It's not the sort of language that you usually find where they talk about our native workers and all this sort of stuff. And it's interesting because when they've got a couple of similar shots of Westerners doing similar sorts of activities and they don't they don't name them they don't name any of them to be honest, but they don't actually emphasize that they're experts you know it is. It's as if they're bigging up their their Bedouin contributors and I you know I did find that much more interesting as a kind of change in attitude. And I do feel actually that it was probably Petrie or one of the staff on the dig who wrote the captions for the camera scope images they were filmed by visitors of the dig. The guy called Richard since Barbara Baker, but the language that's used in all the captions very much reflects the language that Petrie uses in his publications. I'm pretty much pretty sure that that he's probably writing a more starchy or someone like that. But yeah, there is a lot of changing attitudes but of course it will vary from person to person, you know, and how open they are to actually recognizing, you know, you don't get away from the colonial framework completely you don't get away from the casual racism completely either that's always an underlying thing. And that's fascinating, especially with, if I understood you correctly those is stereoscope images were really a sort of public facing, you know, kind of artifact, you know from from these projects. That's also interesting. A question from Helen Dixon from our internet audience. First of all, she'd like to thank you for all this fascinating data and context and then she asks, she says, I'm especially interested in all of the film footage you found. Why were these made, and were they used for public facing purposes, as far as you know. Yeah, well there's two categories of film footage that was made on Petrie's digs. There was formal film footage that was filmed by the guy who did the camera scope images actually Richard some Barbara Baker. He made some live footage of the project, and they were shown as, you know, shown it sort of after lectures or as part of lectures to raise money money for the dig and things like that so it's part of the publicity machine. Unfortunately, that footage doesn't seem to have survived. There were hints about what was in it because people like all the tough little talk about in their letters and so on. You know when they were actually filming on the dig, but I've never come across traces and actually Barbara Baker's house got bombed in mobile to maybe it got lost in, but there were probably several copies because I showed it at America as well as England. So that's the first thing. There was however informal personal film footage taken and that's what I was showing you today. It was taken by Gerald Lancaster Harding who was one of the team members at Gemma, Farah, a Jewel and then Laquiche. He went on to become the director of the department equities in trans Jordan, and he just liked taking film as a lot of people of the period did, and he made a lot of very informal films of all sorts of things including the work on the dig he's also got things like a visit to the Dead Sea footage of a black and white sunset which really doesn't work I've got to tell you. And so on and so forth, but you know it's amazing to see these faces and people who, you know, previously they'd only been instilled photographs actually doing their jobs. And that footage was discovered a few years ago when we acquired at the Institute of archaeology, the archive of Harding which is a friend and executor Michael McDonald gave to us very kindly. We got all this film it was all just in big canisters and stuff and we didn't know what was on it but we got it digitised. And it's been put online a lot of it on YouTube and if you look at a website called filming antiquity, you can find all sorts of blog posts written about it people have done some analysis and looked at things in all sorts of detail. But it's a really incredible source of information, and it brings these people to life. You know in unexpected ways which I really like quality isn't always great but you know it's privately done you don't expect it to be professional. Fascinating and so nice that it's been made available on the internet so it's you know, that's, thank you. Well I've got to actually thank Amara Thornton for that she was behind the whole digital project, one of my colleagues at UCL. Wonderful and also another good example to how, you know, some there may be important elements of archives that are still in, you know, private holdings. Absolutely, and I'm sure there are. In fact, one of my colleagues a guy called Bart Wagamackers, who is over overseas he's done a fabulous website where he's basically been gathering data and old testimonies and all sorts of things from private individuals who worked on digs in the Middle East. And if you look it's called the non professional archaeological photo. I'm going to get this wrong non professional archaeological photographers. I'm going to have a look and put it tell you what it is but anyway, archaeological photograph project in PAPH I think that might be it. But he's got he's got all sorts of very informal stuff but it would have been lost and he's actually found the individuals who have it and preserved it. And it's the sort of thing we need more projects like because as you know this stuff gets lost so easily. You know somebody dies a relative throws it in the thing because I don't know what it is. You know we've got to save this material because it's so useful for future study and to understand our own, you know, our own discipline. Absolutely. Absolutely. So a follow up question. The attitudes of certain directors like pro foot are visible and traceable in correspondence. To what extent did these attitudes impact the relationships with these excavation communities of practice. Is there evidence in the archives of relationships between the Western staff members and local workers that comes through photos, letters or film where these workers treated fairly. Of course it's always very difficult to judge how people are being treated and you know still images, whatever you get a sense of fondness if you like. I think that the Westerners had of the people they were working with because you see them in the houses of their fellow co workers. You see them interacting with them. They're engaging a lot of social activities off of the actual dig out of work hours. Lancaster Harding for example would often go and play his musical instrument with the local workers and things like that. In the sense that there was affection there and appreciation one hopes as well and Harding in particular came I think to exercise that more than anybody in his later career because he worked very closely. You know, with everybody he doesn't seem to have shown the same prejudice that some of the sort of more senior dig directors perhaps sometime shown and so on. I think with some of the directors there is, you know, definitely signs of uncomfortable relationships. And we do have a lot of evidence which I didn't go into here of things like labour disputes and signs of a lack of communication a lack of understanding a lack of appreciation. They talk in letters about how they can cut the wages and you know because you know the economy is quite bad and things like that, which shows very little compassion or understanding I think. The management side of things which could be quite brutal and then there's personal things because people are working with with the locals side by side and they're becoming friends with them and you know that's what you get from the private archives, where the official archives as I said can actually sometimes be quite negative. It's interesting because Clowns Fisher, who has come up a few times in this series, was one of the key facilities I think for getting people moving people between digs in various roles. In Egypt he had very bad labour relations with the Egyptian workers. There was actually a big scandal out there because he seems to have tried to take away some of the authority they've been given in things like managing pay and stuff like that and there was a great deal of resentment. And yet when he comes to work in Palestine you actually see when he gets sacked from the ghetto as director there, the local workforce actually seemed to go out and strike in sympathy. So you get the feeling that maybe they had a better relationship there but of course you're reading lots of documents, putting the pieces together as the last seminar in this series kind of showed. Incidental information comes together and you read between the lines a lot of the time. But you know it's variable it depends on individuals and some of the the individual staff who came on dig for a ride. I don't know what to call them but you know they weren't the sort of people who were inclined to get to know the people they were working with you know and they're the most colonial of all of course. But quite often they're not the ones who stay the ones who stay the ones who learn Arabic become friends with their communities. And for example Olga Toughnell. Sultana Burkita was guard at Laquiche apparently was writing to her in England. So you know these these relationships do extend sometimes when the digs finish as well. Well, speaking of Olga Toughnell, we have a question from Jack Green, a researcher. So coming in from from the internet and the first of all he says thanks for the fascinating presentation. And then asks, were there transfers of knowledge and skills beyond the immediate excavations or field work as part of these communities of practice. And for instance like English language, increasing knowledge of other sites and archaeological ancient history of the region, etc. I think that definitely were one of the interesting things I saw. I think it was to do with the Jericho project I'm trying to remember my sources now Garstang project Jericho was that there's a lot of letters in the archives about him trying to arrange a local guard and so on and he's actually using a guy who's running a local shop in that role for some of the time. And at one point this guy wants to get a role as a sort of site tour guide. So he's trying to get the department to authorize that and clearly you know he's bringing in his local knowledge of the excavation she's been quite heavily involved in various you know ways but although he's not necessarily been digging himself. And he's building that things that he's learned into you know a new career for himself locally as well, and making the dig part of the local community more. The next thing about visitors to site tourism at the site so I mean I didn't go into any of that but that's a whole new sort of output of knowledge production as well because the people who are leading these tool guides are the locals. You know it's not the westerners they don't stay behind when the digs over they go back home again. So that knowledge is going out into the community. What they're not doing of course is any effective program of training the community, telling them what their outcomes are of the dig giving them any feedback, letting them know what the publications have said about the dig. That sort of formal transfer of knowledge doesn't seem to be built into the system at all. There are also parallel situations where locals are being excluded and in some sites they're not even able to visit the dig in progress, you know, which is the best worst kind of exclusion that you could have it's their land and they're not allowed on it. So yeah it swings around about but of course I talk about community practice on the dig. It doesn't end there because the people on the dig come from the local villages and communities, and they engage with other people and create other communities of practice. So there are many potential ways in which knowledge could be passing out, and I haven't started to talk about the departmental representatives who are going, you know to various sites doing their jobs. Their connections with local businesses and local landowners, you know there's all sorts of stakeholders who get involved. And I just in a conversation recently with Jeff Zorn was reminded and impressed by the distances that so you'd mentioned Antioch, which is of course in modern Syria. And then all the way down to Sudan I saw in one of your, you know, so the cookies moved around quite far distances. You know, the, if you think of it sort of from a network perspective which of course you are in each of these locations you have sort of different hubs. And, but the, the, the territory that's represented and covered is really quite impressive beyond Palestine. And there's all sorts of things that come out of that as well because if you think about it, they're being taken out of their communities and put somewhere completely different so you're going to get these little expect communities forming where they go. I mean, the Antioch archives are really fascinating they've digitized and put them online absolutely amazing. One of them, Fisher talks about his Egyptian and Palestinian house start getting staff getting homesick. You know, and you've got to think about the impact of this they're being taken away from their families for very long periods of time. You know, they're the breadwinners so you know they're doing it for economic reasons. But, you know, they usually weren't able I mean the better one at bodyguards that could take their families with them because they were more mobile, but quite often that's not happening. So, you know, these are going to be isolating environments as well to some extent. And, you know, you've got a one to two when you see people going to work on a couple of digs in past time and not appearing again. You know, is that because they're preferring to work in Egypt, you know, they've obviously got the choice about where they sell their labor. Yeah. So such a such a fascinating set of windows onto this. Absolutely. Yeah, thank you. I believe that Melissa Craddick, who is our curator might have some questions of her own so I'll let her do that directly, please. Hi, I've been looking in the background of the zoom call so quickly introduce myself to you and to the viewers. I'm a curator at the body museum and I co curated the archive exhibit. So thank you so much for this incredibly rich and fascinating talk. And one of the most important contributions from my point of view having gone through the archives for the exhibit material is your focus on the individual career biography of people throughout the bottom. And one of those figures several of them overlap with the house they are guys one of the speakers curious to be introduced. And, as you mentioned, he worked with body at non say only in 1935 which is the final season. So he appears as a somewhat big and shadowy figure figure in the archives that are available to us so we don't know a whole lot about him and he's pretty scared so when you present it fill in a lot of the gaps. And I'm curious if you could go into a little bit more depth about which specific archival sources that you use to follow his career and what interested you in following him specifically. Okay, well I mean I sort of one of the things I was doing is I was going through obviously all the records looking for individual names building up a database of names and then looking for connections and seeing who were the most connected people that I could maybe follow. And one of the nice things about William Albright, who, who serious work for a number of projects is he is very good in his publications, particularly preliminary reports that actually giving credit to the people who do particular things including his Arab stuff. And he mentions curious on numerous occasions. And that's how I know what it was doing for buddy that's how I know he came from Shiloh. I haven't actually got hold of the Shiloh reports to try and see if they say anything about him. So one of the things I don't know is exactly when he starts working for him for example. But that was one of my sources and then once I knew he existed I started looking for him elsewhere. He doesn't really appear in the mandate archives I've seen but I haven't exhaustively searched every single relative dig yet. But that's because he's not getting visas and you know permits to get railway vouchers and the things that the bureaucracy that usually shows up these individuals. So it was from that mostly that I found the links, and then just finding out where it was he lived and where the geography of all the different digs were and seeing how far he was going out of his own area and stuff like that. I found him not mentioned where was he he was. There was a photograph of him now where was that that was in the tell in the book all the things wasn't it. One of the publications which actually named him so we could see that was actually him that's the only photo I've found of him so far. And of course, you know, fabulous job on the on the online exhibit, by the way, I mean, Nasbur is one of the best digs for studying these issues anyway, because it's just got you know you've got the field manual body and you've got the fabulous rich photographic record and everything but it's just, that just gave me the links to sort of take him a little bit further and see who is who is working with of course we know more about because we're a bit more visible. Where else did I find him. I'm just actually going to have a very quick look on my database and see if I've got any other sources in there. So let's see. Okay, so here we go. Actually, I actually just googled his family name and his village and actually found out he's got quite a couple of famous relatives and they're still kicking around. You know, heavily involved in Palestinian politics and things. But yeah, it was mostly the all bright publications, the. Yeah, literally, literally the actual site publications is where this has all come from, which is unusual because mostly I'm getting it from the informal records. But yeah, it's interesting though because sometimes you look at the final publication and they may not be very much and then look at preliminary reports and there's a whole lot more. So, you know, but I'm hoping because I haven't looked at you know the original field archives of all the American digs I mean quite probably he's going to be much more prominent there as well. I would accept that. So I've a somewhat related question that he is wider professional networks within the greater community of practice of archaeology than traditionally Palestine and you mentioned that the goodies and skilled laborers who originally trained by the They tended to have quite tight or close knit professional networks. Often it seemed like those roles were even potentially characterized as hereditary or they could be passed down to younger family members who were trained along with their older relatives. And he also gets great examples of some of those Egyptian workers who are moving from day to day to follow specific directors. And I wonder if you have found that trend within the local Palestinian community practice in terms of. So you also pointed out a couple of individuals follow specific directors around for several decades. Did they also train their family members or involve their own communities in the same kind of hereditary training way. I haven't found formal evidence but I have found several relatives working together at Laquiche for example, among the Bedouin that Starchy hires are three brothers. Okay, so, you know, we know that they're they're obviously related. We don't know the age differences between them. But you know, if you think about also you've got a community you're looking for employment opportunities of course you're going to try and get your relatives hired. And there is a tendency I think because you know, these jobs were quite highly sought after because with economic depressions and so on, you know, there wasn't always that much work available. There is a tendency to to try and keep it in the family to a certain extent if you can. And with the gufties we see it because they sometimes bring their sons onto the digs in more junior positions and train them up. But this when with some of the Egyptians in Palestine, I think there was there was an example of one of the former whose son went to work on dig on another site maybe it's Megiddo. Somebody was was had his son on the dig as well, but there's actually some references in some of the official directorial correspondence saying, you know, we will have him back but we don't want his son he wasn't any good. So just having that connection didn't necessarily mean they were going to be successful. You know you had to prove yourself as well. But I think it would get your foot in the door particularly if you're somebody who is being considered, you know, long term employee very reliable, you are going to probably listen to the recommendations. You know, and that kind of makes sense. But it also made sense that that you'd also you know have many members of the extended family being brought on these digs. One of the interesting dynamics you get is conflict between the different groups who are employed. Because you we talk about community practice like it's one big happy family but actually we find there's often a lot of tensions depending on where you're from. And this is down to who's getting those employment opportunities a lot of the time because you saw this actually with your nasberg online archive like you know you have a lovely story there about this sort of the tensions between the hiring people from this village this village does not getting enough work complaints are made. The same thing happens with John Garstang at Tel Kaisan he actually gets recommended by the department to hire less men from one village because it's causing discomfort in the area. And he actually said, I can't because when I signed the land agreement with the leaseholders, they told me I had to employ 60% of their villages. So he actually was bound by his legal agreement to employ a certain number of men from that community. But yeah, they're not all equal and at Kaisan in particular there's great stories the one a conceit and Williams tells us who worked on the deep one season about you know, fights breaking out. And if Garstang was there, they were quickly settled if his I'm trying to remember who his, his field man was, if he was there one of the other Westerners, he couldn't handle it at all and he go back to the dig house and then she'd have to settle it. So it's kind of like, you know, there was varying degrees of authority exercised by the individual members of the team with with the people they're working with as well. But yeah, there were problems in Sinai Petrie made his his local better and leave all their weapons by the side of the trench and that seemed to work quite well. So, but you know you can imagine there's a lot of resentment. I mean I'm thinking about the men at McKee's, who are coming from Wadi Gaza. What are the locals thinking of one you know what's the pay rates like are they being paid more than the local workers are certainly being valued for their expertise. Surely that's going to be causing all sorts of issues as well. Yeah, and something else that has brought to mind as we were speaking is that in the Nazi archives not only do we have correspondence from the, the Elbira village young men's club wanting to hire some people from the local village. But there's also sort of a bit of the opposite issue. So you mentioned sometimes the land owners would provide to the projects that have to be a certain number of workers locally and not say the one of the land owners and the owner of the dig house, Rachel Malu was having some kind of issue or tension with a lot of the local people and she was pushing back and even letting them cross the land or use the house at all by the later seasons. So we have an interesting contrast there and certainly shows a lot of the conflict that was happening within these communities of practice. So thank you so much. And yeah, some some people manage these these issues well, and others obviously aren't so good at communication I think it's a key part of the whole thing and how how much you go and talk to people about what's going on. You know, the more the westerners held back and sort of wave their sticks and what have you I think the worst relationships tended to get. So fascinating. Well, thank you so much. Dr. Rachel sparks for a really just fascinating talk and and I was just trying to think through I think yours is is the first actually that's looked at some of these ideas between sites. Right, we've had because archives oftentimes will only represent well at least I can talk about the one at the body museum represents a single excavation. But, you know, sort of thinking between excavations really opens up such a rich, rich set of data, and, you know, thank you for the insights into these networks, and for further, you know, telling us about, you know, the daily lives of these people who are so underrepresented in our final reports and the, you know, the sort of the western knowledge production that came from that era. So very much appreciated. And just as a way of concluding I'd also like to tell our audience that we have two upcoming talks in May. So very excited about that. We're going to move away from the region of Palestine. And Kirsten Newman will be presenting on May 12 on her research into a ancient Persia and, of course, more more modern views of it. And then Helen Dixon will be presenting on May 19 of views from projects in Carthage. So in Tunisia. So we're very much looking forward to those talks. So stay tuned. And, right, we'll just shift geographic focus a little bit, but similar themes will be tackled. So thanks again to Dr. Sparks for her addition to this series and we look forward to seeing you all back for our two presentations in May. So thank you.