| BAR Interview - Andrea Berlin
Kathleen E. Miller (BAR Staff): Our first question is always: How did you get started in archaeology?
AB: This is kind of a funny little story. When I was in high school, the year that I was going to graduate and  begin college in the fall, my parents decided it would be a good thing if they sent me to Israel for the summer on some kind of student program. Mostly I think that they were worried that I would lose touch with my heritage when I went off to a big university. But they were a little delinquent about getting themselves organized about this, so by the time they contacted the local Jewish community center - I grew up in Detroit - there were really very few programs left with open spaces. One of them was a program where you took a class for a few weeks at Tel Aviv in archaeology and then you went and worked on an excavation. They thought I might like it because I'd always said that I liked history. I'd never said anything about archaeology; I'm not even sure I knew it existed. I was actually more interested in politics, but those programs were all filled up. So this was 1973, and it was actually the summer right before the Yom Kippur War. So they signed me up for this and I agreed because it was a free trip, and I went and fell in love with archaeology and was astonished to learn from my supervisor, who was Anson Rainey, who still teaches at Tel Aviv and was one of the people in charge at Beer Sheva (the dig that I worked at) that he actually did this for a living. People paid him to do this! So when I found that out, I came home and announced to my parents that I planned to be an archaeologist. I majored in it as soon as I started college that fall. And, of course, they were appalled, since they wanted me to be a lawyer. And that was it.
First trip to Israel in 1973.
KEM: And so it was an immediate love the first time you experienced it. What made you start focusing toward the ceramics?
AB: That was something that happened a long time after and that was also a complete fluke. I did in fact major in archaeology in college, at the University of Michigan. I studied for three years and I graduated, and I went to graduate school at the University of Chicago in Near Eastern archaeology. I didn't really like it there at Chicago, so I dropped out for a while. I worked for the Department of Energy; I wrote the archaeology sections of environmental impact statements.
Then I decided that there was really no future in that, so I decided to go back to graduate school and get my Ph.D. I went back to Michigan, mostly because my family was still living there and I knew people there. I really hadn't done much research about graduate school. I went back and ended up having as my advisor Sharon Herbert, who was the person whom I'd studied with when I was in college. In the meantime, of course, I had been working every summer in Israel, because I had gone back to this thing that I'd gone on originally. And Sharon had started a few years earlier re-excavating at Tel Anafa, way up in the north, a classical site in the north of Israel. And she had been trying for a number of years to give the pottery to a graduate student to work on. But none of the graduate students in the classical archaeology program at Michigan wanted to work in Israel. They didn't want to specialize in Israel, they didn't know Hebrew, because they had all come in to do classical archaeology. They wanted to work in the Greek and Roman area. So I was a very logical person for her to turn to offer this body of material, all the pottery that she hadn't been able to dump on anybody else.
I actually didn't like pottery at all. I thought it was boring, I thought it was complicated. I didn't think I was good at it. I co couldn't seem to remember anything at pottery readings from one time to the next. But I agreed to do it anyway because it had what I had already realized was the most important aspect that a dissertation topic could have: It was a finite body of material. Because I'd already been out in the world a little bit and come back to graduate school after a couple of years of working, I was pretty serious about actually wanting to finish. I had noticed that there was a bad correlation between large, wonderful, theory-driven topics and the not-finishing of a dissertation. So I agreed to do it, thinking, well, I'll just do it. That way I'll be done and then I'll go and do what I really want to do. But it didn't actually work out that way. I grew to like what I was working on and then there were lots of other sites that had similar material. So I kept getting invited to other places and I just kept piling up the work, so I couldn't leave to go do something else.
Berlin at Tel Anafa, her birthday, 1981.
KEM: What was it that you really wanted to do?
AB: I was in love with, and I still really like, the decoration on architecture, architectural moldings. I had thought I was going to work on a dissertation that categorized workshops and types of moldings and differentiated between moldings of different sorts of classical buildings. Well, I never really did get to anything like that at all.
It's difficult to visualize some clean and nice whole vessel from the crud that you pull out by the crate-load on a site.
KEM: And now you're working on a book on pottery.
AB: I am. I am. I'm working on a book with another archaeologist, Mark Lawall, who teaches up in Winnipeg, the University of Manitoba. He's an amphora specialist and I do everything but amphoras, so were a good match. We're working on a book for the University of California, Berkeley, Press on Hellenistic pottery in the East. All of it, throughout the entire Hellenistic East from the Black Sea, through the first cataract of the Nile and from the Coast of Ionia to the Euphrates.
KEM: You have been on digs in all of those places?
AB: I have, and that is why we have the geographical range that we do. In fact, both of us have that kind of range, which is very rare. We're good friends. We worked together even when we were graduate students. So we've known each other for a long time and have actually worked together on a lot of projects. A few years ago we realized that we had been working on this book for decades, in pieces. Because we have noticed as the years have gone on and we've gone from place to place that it really matters that you can bring knowledge of a place pretty far away but of the same time period to the project that you're at now. There's no book at all for drawing this material together. It's really a huge hole for people who are working in the Hellenistic East because what happens is that people tend to stay in a modern country, within a country that they start working in. They begin to impose modern orders on their conception of antiquity. They just don't get out much. That's very disabling to our understanding of how things really worked. Mark has worked around the Black Sea. We've both worked at Troy up near the Dardanelles, at Gordion in central Anatolia. That's as far north as we've both worked. And I have worked for a little while at a site on the Euphrates, Zeugman, and we'll be incorporating material from another Hellenistic site on the Euphrates, Jebel Khalid. And we worked at other sites throughout Turkey, Ephesus and sites in Lycia and Cilicia and in central Turkey, Sardis, and then throughout Israel and on Cyprus - I've worked at a number of sites in Cyprus and we've both worked in Egypt, as far south as Coptos, which is not too far north of the first cataract of the Nile.
Berlin at Tell el-Ajjul in 1985.
KEM: That's a huge project.
AB: It's huge, yeah.
KEM: It's going to be very interesting to read it.
AB: Parts of it won't really be readable, I have to confess. Parts of it will be kind of like a field guide or a manual. There will be lots of figures, lots of drawings and hopefully a fair number of photos as well. That's the plan anyway, that will allow people to see what representative groups of tablewares and cooking pots and storage vessels from all of these various regions look like. That, I think, will be something that people will use as a reference. But we plan to have a series of discussion chapters that bring a lot of observation together, and those will be the parts that I think will be more readable. So it will be geared to both working archaeologists in the field and also people who are interested in how there are other angles of entry into what we know about the past - about the Hellenistic period of the East - through material remains and especially through pottery. We hope in those parts to be speaking, not to ceramicists or even necessarily to archaeologists, but to historians cultural, social, economic historians. I'm more interested in lifestyles and the changes that occur throughout this time.
KEM: Would your book help to understand the minutia of the daily lives of all of these different people of this huge, vast empire?
AB: It will be what I think of as a series of spotlights. The region as a whole will not be fully illuminated. The reason is that we just don't have the data from all zones, nor from every sub-period. We talk about the period as a whole thing, but of course 250 years is not a single thing; it's like a number of generations. That is how we tend to think of the periods. We tend to think of them as groups of about three generations apiece. So we are dependent on the kind and quality of the information we have, both chronologically and geographically. Some places we've got a lot of data from the middle section of the Hellenistic period or the later section of the Hellenistic period but not another part of it. Then there are stretches - geographical stretches - where we just don't have any sites with stuff excavated. So it will be, like I said before, a series of spotlights trained on certain places and certain times. Where we can make connections, we will. Where we can identify the holes, we will. Hopefully, it will become a template for people to expand and also fill in the gaps. If specific areas inspire certain sorts of questions or queries, then people will know what to go looking for.
The best thing about this is that when I am on site working on material, I am just like a time traveler.
KEM: What sort of things can it tell us?
AB: One category of lifestyle that ceramics especially are well suited to tell us about is how superficially or strongly the new cultural ethic of Greek lifestyle was adopted in the East. Greeks as a tribal entity, the Greek language and also Greece as a political force were well known throughout the East for hundreds and hundreds of years prior to Alexander coming through. So it's not as if Alexander's conquest changed the world in that particularly fundamental a way. It didn't, but it's also not as if, after Alexander's conquest, all the people who had been living throughout the East disappeared. Of course they didn't. They were all still there. What did happen was that the East became more attractive to Greeks. It wasn't that Greeks necessarily became more attracted to people in the East, because they'd known about them. But the East became an easier place for Greeks to move into because it became politically comprehensible to the Greek world. It wasn't ruled by an Eastern dynasty, which previously had been the Achaemenid Persians, but they were just the last of a long line. Instead it had, first of all, Macedonian kings, who had systems of governance which were in many ways recognizable to Greeks. They allowed cities to have counsels and constitutions and mint their own coins and so on and so forth. So a lot more Greeks moved into the East. What is the attitude of the people who lived there, and what is the amalgamated result of this immigration? What the pottery reflects are superficial and also deep lifestyle and cultural trends. Like how you set your table, what sort of food you like to cook, what kind of intoxicating beverage you drink, do you switch from beer to wine, what kind of wine do you get, do you have sorts of parties, drinking parties of the sort that were very common in the Greek world symposia but were not in that common in the Near Eastern world? And how far down the social scale did these lifestyle changes penetrate? Were they just something that elites indulged in? Do you find the ceramics that support these lifestyles in villages, for example? Those discoveries, what kinds of pots, how many, what the styles of them look like and when they appear let us know when people opened themselves up to this, to these new lifestyle options and this new cultural idea. And it also tells us when they stopped, because we can see changes over the course of the Hellenistic period, and we know, therefore, when the Romans take over in the second century B.C.E. in some parts of the Near East and how slowly Roman cultural choices penetrate. (Very slowly. It takes about 150 years.) So Roman political control comes in, but Roman culture doesn't. It stays this amalgamated Greek/Near Eastern form. But the Greek culture that comes in, comes in fast. It comes right away. And it comes in practically wholesale across the region. It has to be a pretty enthusiastic adoption by the people who are already there. That many Greeks don't move in that fast.
Surrounded by pottery, Tel Anafa storerooms.
KEM: That's a lot from pieces of broken ceramic.
AB: It is a lot. But you know the pieces of broken ceramic are the bulk of most people's household goods. And so while it looks pathetic when you find it in the field, it's not only broken, it's dirty and it's difficult to visualize some clean and nice whole vessel from the crud that you pull out by the crate-load on a site. It was, from most of these places and most of these times and most of these villages, the bulk of what folks owned. It's what they cook with, what they set their table with, what they drank out of. So it carries a lot more interpretive weight than a similar array of vessels in a modern American household would carry.
KEM: It must be painstaking work. I was re-reading your "What's for Dinner?" article (What's For Dinner? The Answer Is in the Pot, BAR Nov/Dec 1999 ). You said that one site had yielded over 11 tons of pottery? How does one organize 11 tons of pottery sherds?
AB: Bit by bit! You really do. You know, you can't go into this particular specialty unless you are undaunted by organizational challenges. For one thing, the material is excavated, so it comes to us in a certain kind of organization already. It comes to us from the pottery buckets, soil loci and various fills and floors of the site. And it comes in order, therefore. It comes in the stratum order in reverse that it had been laid down in. So we can organize it all in chronological terms. One of the things that I figured out early on how to do and one of the points of the "What's for Dinner?" article: chronology is important, but it's just the beginning. It's not the end of the organizational process because to create the kind of meaning that we want from this material, we have to put it into organizational units that are culturally meaningful. And time period is only partially culturally meaningful. Function is the real key that unlocks the door. Once you rearrange it within it's chronological unit by function, so you put all the cooking-vessel fragments together and all the drinking-cup fragments together and the plates and the storage jars and so on and so forth when you lay that out, that becomes a very exciting moment because it's suddenly like you've opened up the pantry door and you're looking in. That kind of excitement and ability to really see the whole from the parts is what drives you to then get to the next part and get to the next part. And that's what allows you to get through 11 tons.
KEM: How do you maintain a family life and an academic life and an archaeological life, and how does that whole dynamic work?
AB: That is a good question. Obviously, it works with both a lot of support and a certain amount of sacrifice by all parties involved. That's the short and simple answer. The details are not details that are actually at all surprising. I have two children who are now 15 and 13 (hard to believe). I started when I was still a college student, before I was married or had kids. My husband endures a lot of my summer absences. I've gone almost every summer - I think there have been a couple of summers in our marriage that I haven't been gone - but basically I go away every summer. When our kids were babies, I would take one with me and he would hold onto one at home. He's also an academic, so the good news about that is that he's off in the summer. But the bad news is that he has his own research that he has to pursue in the summer. So we had come up with various options for people to watch whatever child was left behind and also options for people to watch whatever child came with me during the workday. But I won't say it wasn't brutal. When the kids were babies, it was brutal. When I think about the schedule, you know, getting up at 4:30 in the morning and getting my 18-month-old son off to his babysitter and then going and working a whole day at pottery tables until 3:00 in the afternoon or so, and then retrieving him, and then I had another whole day of work with him. He was 18 months old and he was still getting up at nights sometimes. I really do look back and wonder how I did it. The truth is that if you love what you do, you will make it happen. There was a stretch of a number of years in there from when they were about 5 until they were about 11, so that's quite a few years, they really hated it when I went away. They would cry when I went to the airport, and it was very hard. I have friends who stopped at that stage. They couldn't work through it. I just loved what I did, for one thing. I also felt like I couldn't stop. If I stopped I wouldn't be able to start again. I guess it's perhaps a combination of rationalizing and excuse-making, but we did say to ourselves they're home, they're with their friends, their grandparents would come to visit, their dad is there. It's a hard thing when mom goes away for two months. But children are actually very resilient. Once I was gone, they bounced back and they were fine. People live the lives they have to live and when the kids get older they'll appreciate the fact that I do this interesting thing, and that's turned out to be the case.
Berlin and Prof. Sharon Herbert.
KEM: Has either one of them caught the bug, or do they never want to see a mound of dirt again?
AB: You know, I wouldn't say that they never want to see a mound of dirt again in the sense that they never actually had to work at the site. When they went with me they were such little kids they just went to babysitters. So they haven't really done that. They have expressed a little bit of interest, on and off over the years, of accompanying me. But it's a very, I think, humbling and useful experience for all grown-ups to realize about their kids: They are their own people with their own interests. One of the things that they've both discovered is wilderness camps in northern Minnesota that they've been going to for the last couple of summers that they just love. This is something that they like better. It's very useful for a parent to discover that the thing that they think of as the intellectual center of the universe doesn't necessarily cut the mustard for their kids.
KEM: Last question: You've touched on this throughout what you've talked about. What is the best thing about this? What do you just love?
AB: The best thing about this is that when I am on site working on material, I am just like a time traveler. I am right back in whatever moment of history it is that I'm reconstructing in front of me. Not physically reconstructing. I don't mean putting the pottery together with glue, I mean mentally reconstructing - visualizing the actual parameters of people's daily lives in a way that no text (even though we have a lot of texts from this period) and no history book can possibly capture. Because real people just getting through their day-to-day lives and picking up this fashion or setting the table in this way or deciding to cook something or another for dinner, nobody writes about that. But it's how we live ourselves today, and I should feel like I'm part of this long chain of humanity and I'm enabling me and others to see them when they were invisible. And that feels great.
I'm looking into their lives and really feel like I can see a lot about their lives. That's the piece of antiquity that I love. I think that all of us, everybody, one of the big challenges of life in general is figuring out how much of the past and the present and the future we want to make our lives consist of. You have to have pieces of all of them. The future is easy; everybody knows that we have to build towards it and look towards it and live in that direction. And present is obvious; we're all mired in it. But the past is the real tricky one. Some people are really just aficionados of history channels and biographies and various totems that connect them with various places and time periods of the past, but no matter how you choose to do it, even the most future-oriented person, even somebody like your dad, who was an aerospace engineer and probably really lived towards the future and possibilities that science and technology could bring, can't ever truly ignore the fact that they're linked with people who have come before them. So I think it's just important that some of us are able to illuminate larger and larger chunks of the past so that everybody has more to choose from.
KEM: Where were you when I was telling the mechanical and aerospace engineer that I wanted to study history instead of science?
[Laughter]
Well, thank you very much, professor, it's been wonderful.
AB: You're welcome.
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