Archaeology

The OI at 100

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This 10-ton bull statue was excavated during the Oriental Instituteʼs Persian Expedition (1931–39). (Photo courtesy the Oriental Institute)

The University of Chicago Magazine

Summer/19

UChicagoʼs Oriental Institute celebrates a monumental first century.

In 1919 James Henry Breasted founded the Oriental Institute at the University of Chicago. To celebrate the OI centennial, the Magazine took a look at the past, present, and future of the Universityʼs first research institute.

Fertile Soil
From small seeds, the OI thrived and grew.

From the Ground Up
A brief history in pictures of some essential people, places, and treasures.

Found in Translation
Director Christopher Woods, his work in Sumerology, and his vision for the OI’s second century.

Past and Future
How has the institute’s work evolved since 1919? A faculty roundtable.

Chalk Like an Egyptian
The museum’s public outreach taps the littlest Egyptologists.

The OI will celebrate its milestone throughout the 2019–20 academic year. To find centennial lectures, films, exhibitions, and more, visit oi100.uchicago.edu.

Do you have your own memories of or reflections on the OI? Write to us at uchicago-magazine@uchicago.edu. We’ll share your words with the OI and University Archives and publish a few in the Fall/19 issue.

Arts & Humanities

Archaeology

Middle East

Museums

Oriental Institute

Oriental Institute Centennial

Fertile soil

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This sculpture, part of a pair that once guarded the entrance to the throne room of King Sargon II, depicts a protective spirit known as a lamassu—a bull body, a human head, and bird wings. (Photo courtesy the Oriental Institute)

Laura Demanski, AM’94

The University of Chicago Magazine

Summer/19

From the seeds first planted by William Rainey Harper and James Henry Breasted, the Oriental Institute blossomed into something rare.

This article is part of the special feature “The OI at 100,” which commemorates the centennial celebration of the Oriental Institute.

In this issue we observe the astonishing century that the Oriental Institute is about to celebrate. The OI was established in 1919 as the University’s first research institute, but its seeds go back further, to 1894, when William Rainey Harper appointed James Henry Breasted to the University of Chicago faculty.

Harper, the wunderkind who was the first to lead this University, had crossed paths with Breasted at Yale. The newly minted president had been a professor of ancient Hebrew and the Old Testament there when Breasted attended as a divinity graduate student with a strong interest in Semitic languages and literature.

What Breasted set in motion in Chicago would have been hard to foresee when Harper brought to campus the brand-new doctor of Egyptology—the first American so degreed. Twenty-five years down the road, a decade after Harper’s death, the University established the Oriental Institute with a gift from John D. Rockefeller Jr.

Moving from its first home in the Haskell Museum to its current location in 1931, the OI thrived. More than in most fields, the assumptions, methods, and real-world contexts of Middle East archaeology changed with the volatile political times and technological leaps of the 20th century and early 21st (see “Past and Future”).

The OI’s blossoming, which continues, made the Magazine’s task on this occasion frankly daunting. The world of its research, archaeology, museum, dictionaries, public outreach, and conservation—I could go on—is as vast and rich as the cultures of the region that Breasted was the first to call the Fertile Crescent. In our centennial special section we’ve only scratched the surface of the OI’s past achievements, present work, and future ambitions.

Luckily, there are more opportunities to learn—and to participate firsthand. The OI will celebrate its milestone throughout the 2019–20 academic year. To find centennial lectures, films, exhibitions, and more, keep an eye on oi100.uchicago.edu.

Finally, we hope you’ll add your own OI memories to the record (archaeological and/or written). Send them to uchicago-magazine@uchicago.edu. We’ll share readers’ recollections with the OI and the University Archives, and print a few in the Fall/19 issue.

Oriental Institute Centennial

Editor's Notes

Chalk like an Egyptian

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Participants recreate a stela in the OI program One. Big. Egyptian. Mural. (Photography by Anne Ryan)

Susie Allen, AB’09

The University of Chicago Magazine

Summer/19

The museum’s public outreach taps the littlest Egyptologists.

This article is part of the special feature “The OI at 100,” which commemorates the centennial celebration of the Oriental Institute.

In the Oriental Institute basement, the next generation of Egyptologists is hard at work. They started the day with a tour of the museum’s Egypt collection; now they are recreating one of the items they saw, an inscribed slab, or stela, of the nobles Mn and Riya, on several pieces of butcher paper taped to the floor.

The first order of business, explains OI youth and family programs coordinator Calgary Haines-Trautman, AB’17, the wrangler of today’s group of nine junior archaeologists and their parents, is to create a grid on the paper, using essentially the same method the Egyptians would have used: covering a long piece of string in chalk, then snapping it across the paper to create a line.

Eloise, 7, treats this task with the seriousness it warrants. She carefully dips a piece of string in an etched vessel filled with pulverized blue chalk, then looks up at facilitator Catie Witt, AM’18. “Is this a real Egyptian jar?” she asks. (Though meant to look authentic, it’s not; archaeologists will be relieved to know no ancient artifacts at the OI are being repurposed as chalk buckets for elementary schoolers.)

Participants tour the OI Museum. (Photography by Anne Ryan)

The children have more questions as they transition from grid creation to drawing: What color should this flower be? (Blue.) What food items do they see in the stela? (A pot of mint tea, a small red onion, ham.) Were there chickens in ancient Egypt? (Unclear. Dad pulls out his phone to investigate.)

The program, titled “One. Big. Egyptian. Mural.” is part of the museum’s effort to engage the public through kid-friendly offerings, including school tours and learn-while-playing activities. This one is heaven for Eloise, who is in a hot and heavy Egypt phase. Her mom, Melissa, has no idea where the fascination came from but is happy to encourage it.

After the event, Witt, a PhD student in Near Eastern languages and civilizations, says she gets why some of the kids are so excited to be here. After all, she’s still in her Egypt phase too.

Oriental Institute Centennial

Past and future

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(Photo courtesy the Oriental Institute)

Laura Demanski, AM’94

The University of Chicago Magazine

Summer/19

How has the institute’s work evolved since 1919? A faculty roundtable.

This article is part of the special feature “The OI at 100,” which commemorates the centennial celebration of the Oriental Institute.

From satellite imagery to international politics, the world in which the Oriental Institute’s archaeologist-scholars and museum professionals do their work is very different from that in which the OI was founded. The Magazine spoke to three Near Eastern languages and civilizations faculty members and the OI Museum’s chief curator about how archaeological excavation and inquiry have evolved since 1919. This conversation has been edited and condensed.

Of all that’s changed in 100 years, what would you emphasize?

James Osborne A huge new discipline began in the mid-20th century: landscape archaeology. That didn’t exist at the time of the OI’s founding. It involves understanding ancient societies at a regional scale as opposed to what a single site looks like when you excavate it. What’s the larger sum of patterns? What’s the hierarchy between its urban center, smaller second-tier cities, and third-tier rural villages? And so on.

This is the kind of thing one only understands at a regional scale, and since the midcentury, new technological advances—aerial photography and declassified spy satellite imagery—have tremendously benefited archaeologists of all stripes. In terms of regional settlement patterns, we can identify the presence of thousands and thousands of tiny sites that are completely invisible otherwise. What you see in the satellite image is like a shadow—the soil color’s a little bit different than the soil surrounding it. It’s promoted a whole series of research questions that we didn’t know we could ask, and allowed monitoring of cultural heritage sites in combat zones. We can track what sites are being destroyed and what sites we need to prioritize for preservation.

David Schloen I would start with what’s the same. What is still being done since the 1920s is the recovery of primary evidence for the construction of historical, chronological, and cultural sequences correlating vast amounts of material evidence in space and time and linking it to the growing understanding of the political, economic, and social history of the region. That follows fundamentally similar methods to what had been worked out in the 19th century. The methods, techniques, and interpretive strategies for disentangling the complex layering and disturbances of ancient sites are better understood by far than they were. But still—the old results are usable and understandable within our frame of reference.

Nadine Moeller If you look back to 1919, or even 50 years ago, the main focus in Egyptian archaeology was a top-down approach. You would start with kingship and anything that’s glamorous: pyramids, tombs, temples. A lot of that had to do with nicely visual objects. When James Henry Breasted put together our museum collection, he went to Egypt and bought a bunch of really wonderful things, but without context—it was all about the objects. That has very much changed. The work that I do today is on settlements. We’re trying to understand more about how an ancient city develops: How do settlement quarters evolve, what are the long-term processes? It’s a bottom-up approach. We’re looking at all the people, not only at the kings and elite. Most of the time, what we see more easily is the elites, so there’s always going to be a bias, at least in my field. We still have not grown out of the top-down approach entirely.

Jean Evans From the perspective of the museum, there’s both continuity and change. For continuity, we have a vast collection of some 350,000 artifacts. It’s mostly an archaeological collection, and the bulk of that came into the museum in the early days of the OI. Part of what we do is to continue to make that material available for people to study and work on. I think it’s a reflection of the way the early digs were conducted that people can still come here to do research and ask questions of that material. And I would say it’s a challenge for us to make the displays in the museum both represent the solid foundations that the archaeology rests on and also communicate to the public the ways that the research questions have changed.

James Osborne, assistant professor of Anatolian archaeology. (Illustration by John Jay Cabuay)

How have these questions changed?

Osborne I can give one example. In the 1930s the OI excavated several sites in Turkey’s Amuq Valley, which is right on the border of northwest Syria. They collected several thousand ceramic sherds, which are now in the OI basement, primarily for purposes of typology building and chronology.

A couple of years ago I took some of these sherds that stylistically resembled sherds excavated on Cyprus. We used a technique called portable X-ray fluorescence, which zaps the sherds with a laser and provides you with the chemical signature of the clay used to make that pot. I then confirmed that chemical signature by grinding a sherd into dust and sending it to a lab for neutron activation analysis. Sure enough, it corresponds with the signature of clay sources found in Cyprus. We confirmed that indeed those pots were imported from that island. This would not have even crossed the minds of the archaeologists who excavated the sherds.

Schloen There has been a paradigmatic shift among archaeologists in the OI and more broadly. As Near Eastern archaeologists became more familiar with social theories that had long been known in other circles but took a while to percolate into our discipline, we began to imagine the social groups to which we link the primary data of these artifacts in a different way.

The old tendency was, to put it simply, that pots equaled peoples. In other words, a certain style of material culture, whether a production technique or style of decoration, would be correlated with some bounded ethnic group—some social group imagined as having a monolithic character and interacting with other monolithic social groups. But in recent decades, scholars are much more nuanced in their understanding of the relationship between patterns and styles in material culture and the social interactions to be inferred from those. For example, the question of social identity is a very complicated one. People today and in the ancient past have multiple, contingent, and fluid identities, to use a triad of description that is quite common now. You can go back 100 years and see philosophers and social theorists talking that way, but there was a tendency in archaeology to think in more reductive terms.

David Schloen, professor of Near Eastern archaeology. (Illustration by John Jay Cabuay)

Why was archaeology longer in getting there?

Schloen It had to do with the mode of training and the academic backgrounds of the people involved. Few scholars who became experts in material evidence and its excavation and classification had any systematic education in fields like social philosophy or economics. So there were critiques and interactions and people in other disciplines saying what about this, what about that? As we keep exploring and reading in a university like this—that’s why we’re in a university—we adapt our own modes of interpretation in order to make more persuasive arguments.

Osborne I don’t think anyone’s mentioned what may be the most obvious change between 1919 and now. At that time we could take objects from Middle Eastern countries and use our own excavations to create the museum galleries that are now visible downstairs. This is no longer possible in any of the countries where we work today. We’re still funding and sponsoring a half dozen major excavations in those countries, which are strictly for scientific purposes and not museum acquisition purposes.

Schloen This speaks to the challenges of continuing to do at a very high professional standard all the work we did before, but not being able to ship all the artifacts back here to work on with students. In most of the countries in which we work, we have to replicate labs and storage facilities on-site. We have limited time to study and publish the materials that we’ve excavated. Each of us who works on long-term field projects accumulates enormous quantities of material that simply can’t be removed from the countries anymore, so we have the extra logistic and financial challenges.

Moeller In Egypt I can’t even take out a small sample for scientific analysis. Everything has to be done in Egypt.

Nadine Moeller, associate professor of Egyptian Archaeology. (Illustration by John Jay Cabuay)

When did this shift take place?

Schloen It started after the Second World War. The old system was called partage, a division of the finds between the host country and the foreign team. That lasted for many decades in the Middle East but pretty much dried up by the 1960s.

We all sympathize with the desire on the part of these sovereign nations to assert some control over this material, which was in the past subject to a kind of quasi-imperial appropriation or expropriation. To be fair to the older generations of American and European excavators, there was a very well worked out and quite explicitly negotiated division that was trying to serve the interests of both sides.

Evans In terms of the museum collection, we find ourselves taking in archaeological materials that were exported legally for study and are not necessarily meant to go back to the country of origin. Say a faculty member here or at another university is retiring, and they’re done with the archaeological material they’ve worked on. Because of the restrictions, that material has become valuable for research in a way that couldn’t have been anticipated. We bring the materials into our own collection, because we see ourselves as a center for research and we want those materials to be available for other people to come study and ask questions about.

Schloen In Turkey I’ve helped with developing museum exhibits involving material we’ve excavated. They’re looking for expert help, which we’re happy to provide. Sometimes we find funding inside the host country for site conservation and public presentation, even restoration of ancient structures for purposes of tourism development. For the sake of public education as well as for being sympathetic to the needs of the host country, we try to help as much as we can.

Jean Evans, chief curator and deputy director of the OI Museum. (Illustration by John Jay Cabuay)

How have the tools and methods you use in the field changed?

Schloen The physical reality of digging up the dirt and mapping what you find in space and time hasn’t changed. But the techniques have changed quite a bit. We no longer map architectural features on a certain site by hand, for example. In my case, about 10 years ago we changed to using drones. These lightweight, small quadcopters that you can buy at Best Buy for maybe $500 had developed enough to where we could use them to create hundreds of overlapping digital photographs of each excavation trench on a daily basis. The drone technology was coming on the market at the same time as powerful software for automatically merging photos into a single orthorectified mosaic. Now we can create through entirely digital means, with relatively unskilled staff, a highly detailed photo mosaic that can be traced directly into mapping software to create highly accurate plans without the labor, time, and inaccuracies that were part of manual mapping.

Moeller You could never do this by hand. Also, the size of the area you can cover—you’re getting better accuracy and so much faster, and you’re recording the archaeological remains in the most precise way. We can also do 3-D models. We can show people who have never been there what the site is about.

Another thing is databases. Nobody’s using notebooks anymore. iPads can be carried around; they have long battery life and deal fairly well with heat and dust.

Osborne The technology better facilitates the things we already do, but it also makes possible better research questions. I think of that in terms of scale. We can now ask questions at a molecular level. And we can ask new questions at a gigantic, country-wide, or Middle East–wide scale. For example, a computer scientist recently teamed up with a landscape archaeologist to create an algorithm for the satellite signature of a site and generated a predictive model for 10,000 sites in Syria where we expect archaeological sites could be.

Schloen Archaeologists are also using instrumentation and analysis produced by other scientific disciplines for their own purposes. Ancient DNA analysis will be quite revolutionary— a complex topic that touches upon long-cherished archaeological theories about the movements of populations and peoples in the distant past. Sometimes archaeologists have gotten annoyed or touchy that the human genetics folks are coming in and replacing those narratives. The ideal is to have a close collaboration and honest, thoughtful interaction between archaeologists and population biologists or geneticists who do ancient DNA.

UChicago is poised to become a leader in this area and has established an ancient genetics lab, where three faculty are working with archaeologists. There are important questions to do with migrations of ancient populations and reconstructing ancient genomes from human remains, without falling back into the old monolithic models. We understand how complicated each population was. One culture isn’t simply replaced by another.

Evans For the museum, there are a number of different areas that are promising for research. For one, the study of pigments in ancient monuments. We’ve always known neo-Assyrian reliefs were colored, but the technology for analyzing those pigments is much better. On the Mesopotamian side there’s interesting work on sourcing gold. What’s important is that you have to grow the data sets to understand the significance of the results you’re getting. Even with the CT scans we’ve done with the human remains we have, it’s always worth going back again, because the results get better with improved technology.

Looking to the field’s future, what concerns you and what are you optimistic about?

Schloen For field research, in which we try to engage students as much as possible, the challenge is that political or security conditions can derail a wonderful pedagogical opportunity. We have to look for new ways and places to do field research, and be flexible about moving when we have to. It’s a constant challenge. You don’t want to take students to places where, after putting in all sorts of time and effort and money to get the team there, you have to abruptly pull out or the season gets canceled or you face anxiety about security.

Moeller The role of the humanities in society in general is a challenge we all need to focus on, and there should be more collaboration with the sciences. Archaeology is between the humanities and sciences, and we need to negotiate that interface.

Osborne The trend on the part of Middle Eastern countries to be less encouraging of Western archaeologists working in their territories is only going to increase. The era of us being able to descend like a UFO and do our work and take off again is completely gone.

The challenge is to realize that reality and use it as an opportunity to foster true collaborations with archaeologists, scientists, and intellectuals who’ve been working in those countries and graciously hosted us for a century. Now we need to be working together truly. If we can foster that dialogue in a productive and responsible way, then it becomes less of a challenge and more of an opportunity, for us and the next generation.

Oriental Institute Centennial

Found in translation

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Christopher Woods, director of the Oriental Institute. (Photography by John Zich)

Sharla A. Paul

The University of Chicago Magazine

Summer/19

Director Christopher Woods, his work in Sumerology, and his vision for the OI’s second century.

This article is part of the special feature “The OI at 100,” which commemorates the centennial celebration of the Oriental Institute.

Through the very nature of his work, Oriental Institute director Christopher Woods uses the word isolate a lot. In philological terms—after all, Woods is a philologist—a linguistic isolate is a language that is unrelated to any other known language.

Sumerian, the language that Woods studies, is an isolate. It was spoken by the Sumerians, a people in ancient Mesopotamia who created one of the earliest civilizations. They farmed the rich land along the Tigris and Euphrates valleys in present-day southern Iraq, established the world’s first cities, built temples and palaces on a monumental scale, and created a canon of literature that includes stories about Gilgamesh, the legendary Sumerian king of the city of Uruk.

We know so much about the Sumerians because they also wrote. Around 3300 BC, roughly the same time that the Egyptians developed hieroglyphs, the Sumerians invented cuneiform, possibly the world’s first writing system. “Making language visible” is what Woods calls this remarkable moment. “What you’re writing right now”—he gestures at my jotted notes—“has its origins in what was invented in Sumer nearly 5,500 years ago.”

It’s early May, and Woods is fresh off visiting the OI’s archaeological dig in Nippur, Iraq, where work has recommenced this year for the first time since the outbreak of the first Gulf War. Woods has applied to the Iraqi Ministry of Culture, Tourism, and Antiquities for the archaeological concession to open new sites, heralding what he hopes will be a “new golden age for the OI” in the region.

Dressed in suit and tie, his desert attire retired for now, he sits in a maroon upholstered armchair in the ornate, wood-paneled director’s office. Asked about his vision for the OI at this centennial mark, Woods’s answer is immediate: to increase its visibility and profile—not necessarily academically, which needs no burnishing, but nationally and locally.

By local, he means for the OI to become a destination on the South Side, a hidden gem that’s hidden no more. To that end, the OI is adopting its initials as its brand and moving away from its outdated moniker, which Woods admits can be jarring to contemporary ears, though it’s actually a geographic term—oriental, as opposed to occidental—that was used to describe the Middle East when the OI was founded.

Woods also means to increase the OI’s visibility on campus. Building on a surge of new hires to the OI faculty in recent years, he anticipates a corresponding surge in interdisciplinary projects, with faculty drawing in colleagues from departments such as classics and art history.

Increasing visibility is an apt task for an isolate specialist. Woods, the John A. Wilson Professor of Sumerology, majored in physics at Yale and in his early 20s found his way into Sumerology by way of a lunchtime Akkadian class he took at Columbia University while working at a patent law office. He earned his PhD at Harvard and applied for a UChicago faculty position while still a graduate student. Since then, he’s spent his career at what he considers the field’s premier institution worldwide, the last two years leading it.

His work deciphers what he calls the “conceptual framework of Mesopotamian culture,” the mechanics of how the Mesopotamian mind conceived its world, as recorded on hundreds of thousands of extant clay tablets bearing the Sumerian language. These tablets have been dug up by archaeologists for more than a century, and the vast majority remain unpublished and untranslated. The ancient Sumerians shaped them from the alluvial clay of river beds and made styli from reeds to record economic transactions, literature, law codes, religious hymns, and historical narratives in wedge-shaped markings. During the third millennium BC, Semitic populations that dominated northern Babylonia mingled with Sumerians in the south, and by the early centuries of the second millennium BC, after a long period of bilingualism, Sumerian died as a vernacular
language and Akkadian became the language of the land.

All evidence of the Sumerian language was swallowed up by the earth in the multicentury process of municipal upkeep: constructing new mud-brick buildings atop fallen and eroded ones, layer upon layer, until conquerors came along, towns were abandoned, and finally giant earth-covered mounds, or tells, dotted the river valleys. Recovering the lost isolate of Sumerian has been the work of three generations of philologists and epigraphers around the world, including OI faculty Miguel Civil, who died this past January at age 92, and Thorkild Jacobsen, PhD’29, a Sumerologist who also served as OI director.

Such work is often done from museum collections, including the 350,000-plus-artifact research collection housed in the OI (more than 5,000 of them are on display). Woods is completing a monograph on early cuneiform writing and has another planned on Gilgamesh in the Sumerian literary tradition. His 2008 book, The Grammar of Perspective: The Sumerian Conjugation Prefixes as a System of Voice (Brill), analyzes an important but little-understood feature of Sumerian verbs: their conjugation prefixes. For well over a century, Sumerologists have proposed various, often incompatible, hypotheses to explain individual prefixes, but their basic functions and meanings remained ill-defined or unknown. Woods proposed that they constitute a complex system of grammatical voice that provided Sumerian speakers with a linguistic means of altering the perspective from which events may be viewed and ways to approximate in language the infinitely graded spectrum of human thought and experience.

Lining one of the built-in bookcases in his office is a massive set of blue hardbound books. The Chicago Assyrian Dictionary “took 90 years of scholarship to produce and resurrected the Babylonian and Assyrian languages that were the lingua franca of the ancient Middle East. There’s something very UChicago about that,” Woods says. Similarly, the Epigraphic Survey in Luxor, Egypt, has been in the field for 95 years, recording the hieroglyphic inscriptions and art of Luxor’s ancient monuments. As esoteric as the OI’s projects might seem, the work, says Woods, stays relevant because it’s actually the work of more deeply understanding ourselves. “Indirectly we are the cultural descendants of the people in the areas the OI studies. Mathematics, literature, political and religious institutions, how empires rise and fall—all of these things have their beginnings or a very early data point in this part of the world,” he says.

To anyone who ventures through its doors and stands face to face with its colossal Assyrian winged lamassu, Woods believes the OI provides a distant mirror revealing how people lived, how they loved, what they believed in.

“The parallels connect us to the past, but the differences are enlightening as well,” says Woods. “They tell you something about what it means to be human, about the scope of the human experience.”

He invites all of Chicago—all of the world, even—to come see for themselves.

Sharla A. Paul is a writer in Chicago.

Oriental Institute Centennial

From the ground up

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The OI’s excavation at Tell Edfu, Egypt. (Photo courtesy the Oriental Institute)

Susie Allen, AB’09

Laura Demanski, AM’94

The University of Chicago Magazine

Summer/19

A brief history in pictures of some essential people, places, and treasures.

This article is part of the special feature “The OI at 100,” which commemorates the centennial celebration of the Oriental Institute.

In July 1919, this publication reported the establishment of the Oriental Institute at the University of Chicago. “The ultimate aim of all its work,” the editors wrote, “will be to furnish a basis for a history of the origins and development of civilization.” The OI’s scholars would discover and examine millennia-old evidence that could illuminate collective human life in the past—and, by that means, our present lives.

With a century of exploration, excavation, scholarship, and education now behind it, the OI has achieved a deep history of its own, and a singular one.

Both a robust academic research center, creating knowledge about the earliest societies in the ancient Middle East, and a museum for the public, it holds treasures. Uniquely, most of them were excavated by the OI’s own archaeologists in its early years for study by experts and the education and marvel of all of us.

A baked clay incantation bowl inscribed with a pseudoscript, AD 500–800, excavated at Nippur, Iraq. (Photo courtesy the Oriental Institute)

Those artifacts tell scholars much about the Egyptians, Babylonians, Persians, and other past peoples but also inspire and inform larger questions: How do humans build and structure their societies? How do people’s physical environments shape their ideas about mortality, nature, identity? And how are those ideas embodied in their material culture?

The OI’s home within a major research university has enabled still other kinds of contributions. Willard Libby’s development of radiocarbon dating in the 1940s relied on testing artifacts of known age from the OI’s collection. Its ancient language dictionaries—Assyrian, Hittite, Demotic—are massive, decades-long efforts requiring the concerted work of generations of scholars.

The people, excavations, and objects that shaped the OI over its first century are too numerous to present here exhaustively. In the following pages we highlight a few that just begin to capture its illustrious first hundred years.

Giants

Among the many archaeologists and scholars who made the OI what it is today are these pioneers.

(Photo courtesy the Oriental Institute)

James Henry Breasted

The first American to earn a PhD in Egyptology, James Henry Breasted (left, with his family) was a titan of the field. Alongside scholarly works, he wrote popular histories of Egypt and the ancient world, which sparked enduring public interest in Egyptology. Despite these successes, his greatest ambition, to form a research institute devoted to the ancient Middle East, remained unfulfilled until John D. Rockefeller Jr.’s 1919 gift created the Oriental Institute. Breasted wasted no time, traveling that year to Europe, Egypt, Iraq, Palestine, and Syria to explore and document ancient sites and acquire artifacts still held by the OI today, securing the institute’s—and his own—legacy.

(Photo courtesy the Oriental Institute)

Robert and Linda Braidwood

The marriage of Robert Braidwood, PhD’43, and Linda Schreiber, AM’46 (top right), in 1937 marked the beginning of a personal and intellectual partnership that would shape the field of prehistoric archaeology. Together, the Braidwoods documented the human shift from hunting and gathering to settled life. In 1947 they founded the OI’s Prehistoric Project, recruiting botanists, zoologists, and geologists and introducing interdisciplinary scientific methods that were previously unknown to archaeology. The Braidwoods discovered in southeastern Turkey the world’s oldest piece of cloth and some of the earliest known buildings. Collaborators until the end of their lives, Robert and Linda Braidwood died within hours of each other in 2003.

(UChicago Photographic Archive, apf1-09116, University of Chicago Library)

Robert McCormick Adams

In 1950 Robert McCormick Adams, PhB’47, AM’52, PhD’56 (right), joined the Braidwoods on an expedition to Iraq. (“I think he wanted to take along someone who could fix his cars,” Adams joked later.) The trip transformed Adams from an aspiring journalist into an archaeologist. Among the first to use aerial photography and satellite images in his work, Adams focused on the relationship between geography and civilization, arguing that how societies adapt to environmental change defines their trajectories. After serving as OI director and University provost, Adams went on to lead the Smithsonian Institution.

Places

Excavation sites past and present reveal settlement patterns, artifacts, and more.

(Photo courtesy the Oriental Institute)

Nippur

The Mesopotamian religious center Nippur lies in modern-day Iraq, 100 miles south of Baghdad. The seat of the supreme god Enlil and considered the bond between heaven and earth, Nippur was settled around 5000 BC and endured almost 6,000 years, remaining relatively protected from the region’s wars because of its religious and cultural significance. The OI first excavated the city’s trove of artifacts and clay tablets in 1948, focusing on the historically important religious quarter. In 1972, under the direction of McGuire Gibson, AM’64, PhD’68, professor of Mesopotamian archaeology, these efforts expanded to a residential part of the city before all work on the site ceased at the time of the first Gulf War. This year the OI returned to Nippur, restored its expedition compound, and prepared to fully resume excavating the city’s rich remains.

(Photo courtesy the Oriental Institute)

Tell Edfu

Ruins beneath ruins characterize the Egyptian archaeological site Tell Edfu, where the OI has worked since 2007 under the direction of Egyptologist Nadine Moeller. The site comprises the well-preserved Temple of Horus and a nearby settlement whose growth from a provincial town to a regional capital is recorded in archaeological layers going back to the third millennium BC. Last year Moeller’s team discovered a large villa of the early New Kingdom (1500–1450 BC), among whose features was a rare domestic shrine to the residents’ ancestors. The site illuminates broad patterns of ancient urban development.

(Photo courtesy the Oriental Institute)

Luxor

The OI’s Epigraphic Survey has been at work in Luxor, Egypt, for 95 consecutive seasons. The project’s epigraphers are joined by artists, photographers, librarians, conservators, stonemasons, and others in their work to record, in situ, the inscriptions and carvings that cover the vast reaches of Luxor’s temple and tomb walls. In that work they adhere to the collaborative, painstaking “Chicago House Method” refined over the decades since Breasted launched the survey. The method’s name refers to the University’s headquarters at Luxor, home to research and support staff, currently directed by research associate professor W. Raymond Johnson, PhD’92.

(Photo courtesy the Oriental Institute)

Persepolis

The tens of thousands of ancient tablets discovered in Persepolis in 1933 by OI archaeologists contained an overwhelming cache of records of the inner workings of the Achaemenid or Persian Empire of Darius I and his successors—but much of it is encrypted in the extinct Elamite language, known by few living scholars. To decipher the tablets, the OI brought them to Chicago on loan, where they have been studied by generations of scholars given the rare opportunity to learn about the empire from Persian sources. Most recently, Matthew Stolper, professor emeritus of Assyriology, and a team worked intensively to transliterate the tablets for further research prior to their upcoming return to Iran.

Artifacts

In the collection are objects that awe while telling us about the cultures that made them.

(Photo courtesy the Oriental Institute)

This copper alloy hand mirror, excavated from a tomb at Qustul in Egypt, dates from 1390–1352 BC. The figure of a young woman that forms the handle, about six inches high, is elaborately detailed, with earrings, a decorative collar, and even fingernails on her hands. Her curled hair suggests the goddess Hathor, associated with dance, love, music, and fertility. The disk she holds aloft was reflective when polished.

(Photo courtesy the Oriental Institute)

Excavated at Istakhr, just north of Persepolis, the six-inch inscribed clay bowl dates from AD 800–900. It boasts an early Islamic glazing technique thought to have been developed in imitation of Chinese ceramics. Opaque white wares like this were new to the Middle East at the time it was made. The cobalt blue inscription, in Arabic, is illegible.

(Photo courtesy the Oriental Institute)

During the Early Dynastic period (2900–2300 BC) in modern-day Iraq, this limestone plaque was part of a door-locking device. It’s decorated with a relief depicting a lavish banquet. The piece missing from the lower right is held by the National Museum of Iraq and shows two men wrestling.

(Photo courtesy the Oriental Institute)

This six-inch-tall portable Egyptian healing stela was used to treat ailments, possibly including animal bites, which were common in the ancient Middle East. Dating from the Ptolemaic period (fourth century BC), it depicts the sky god Horus stepping on crocodiles, signifying his domination over the beasts and hopefully auguring the patient’s recovery. Water was poured over the stela, then consumed by the patient.

(Photo courtesy the Oriental Institute)

Painted limestone with stone inlays for the eyes, these statues of a woman and man, researchers think, may portray ancestors of the statues’ owners. On their heads is bitumen, a tar-like adhesive, that once attached hair or headdresses. The substance also holds the eye inlays in place. Excavated in modern-day Syria, they date back 9,000 to 11,000 years ago to the early Neolithic period.

Oriental Institute Centennial

The littlest Egyptologists

rsmith — Mon, 20 Aug 2018 14:27:20 +0000

rsmith Mon, 08/20/2018 - 09:27

Kids and parents get to work at the Oriental Institute’s One. Big. Egyptian Mural event. (Photography by Dylan Petiprin, Class of 2019)

Dylan Petiprin, Class of 2019

Web exclusives

08.20.2018

At the Oriental Institute, pint-sized archaeologists make their very own ancient Egyptian mural.

When kids hear “ancient Egypt,” what images first come to mind? Sphinxes? Pyramids? Royal tombs? More likely than not, many picture stone structures of some kind.

While the Oriental Institute may not have the requisite limestone or real estate for constructing Abu Simbel 2.0, it provided a group of five- to twelve-year-olds the next best thing. With crayons rather than chisels in hand, the participants at the One. Big. Egyptian Mural event got to emulate an artform that predates color by number by a couple thousand years.

According to Calgary Haines-Trautman, AB’17, the OI’s youth and family program coordinator, the event is one of a series meant to increase early involvement with ancient history.

“Our museum is a lot more academic and adult focused, but I think our kids programs really show how much you can do with the objects on display,” she says.

One. Big. Egyptian Mural certainly seemed to prove so. Before starting the project, parents and children alike took a guided tour through the Joseph and Mary Grimshaw Egyptian Gallery. They viewed some of the more necrotic artifacts (“Whoa, that mummy’s dead!”) and the 656 BC funerary reliefs that they would soon be replicating.

Equipped with a crash course in sepulchral design, the junior Egyptologists finished their tour and set upon the OI’s basement. There, a 7-by-15-foot butcher paper canvas awaited some serious doodling.

One attendee proclaimed that working with chalk and yarn to create a grid on the mural was “the funnest part” of the experience. (Photography by Dylan Petiprin, Class of 2019)

Ever notice how shoulder-to-waist ratios seem identical in ancient engravings? That’s because of an artistic grid system created by Egyptians. It ensured continuity of design across murals and was the kids’ first priority in creating their own.

They organized their grid-like blocks with yarn, a process that particularly excited six-year-old Naomi Shannon. “You have to put chalk in it, and that’s the funnest part I think,” she says, sprinkling bright blue dust onto the ground with impunity.

Chalky hands and all, the kids colored in their blue blocks using instructions from a predesigned handout. While the room’s organizationally inclined parents shouldered much of the artistic burden, the real progress was made among the kids themselves. As the blocks grew increasingly connected, so did the kids in the collective effort to create their pièce de résistance.

According to Haines-Trautman, increased cooperation is typical for these events. “In the beginning they’re a little bit shy, as usual. But they all sort of dove in and at one point it seemed like everybody had a job to do.”

They also, apparently, ended the day ready to return for more. Exiting the basement with her mom, Naomi made sure to let the room know, “I’ll come back again to answer more questions!”

Education & Social Service

Archaeology

Arts

Oriental Institute

Ground truth

admin — Thu, 03 May 2018 21:44:49 +0000

admin Thu, 05/03/2018 - 16:44

(National Geographic Creative/Alamy Stock Photo)

Susie Allen, AB’09

The University of Chicago Magazine

Spring/18

Chris Begley, AM’92, PhD’99, is an archaeologist with a taste for adventure. Just don’t call him Indiana Jones.

Chris Begley and I are on a drive, a little outside Lexington, Kentucky, when he gets an idea. “I want to show you a shipwreck,” he says. Begley doesn’t need a map as he navigates his tan Jeep Cherokee toward the banks of the Kentucky River. We pull over and clamber to the water’s edge. It’s late November and the riverbank is slippery with dead leaves. Thirty feet or so ahead, the promised shipwreck is just visible above the water’s surface.

The Brooklyn, a 1903 stern-wheeler, was once a floating restaurant. The vessel met an unhappy end in 1988, when, after a bad drought, its hull was punctured by the river’s rocky bottom. Since then the Brooklyn has slid deeper and deeper below the water’s surface.

An archaeologist whose recent work focuses on shipwrecks, Begley, AM’92, PhD’99, has his eye on this one. There’s been relatively little archaeological investigation of life along Kentucky’s water routes, and he’d like to take students and fellow scholars out to study the Brooklyn and other craft submerged in the state’s rivers and canals, as well as the remnants of historic water infrastructure, such as water lines and pumping stations. He likes shipwrecks because they help you understand what people valued: What did they buy and sell, and what were they willing to ship over long distances?

But Begley, an associate professor at Transylvania University in Lexington, hasn’t as much time to devote to the fledgling Kentucky Waterways Project as he’d like, in part because he’s been busy doing research on shipwrecks in the Mediterranean and El Salvador.

It’s worth pausing here to consider that, in Begley’s world, this constitutes an entirely unexceptional explanation: I have not had enough time to devote to domestic shipwrecks, because I have been too busy diving for shipwrecks internationally. Begley’s work and the stories it generates are so abundant and so entertaining that talking to him is like meeting the guy from the Dos Equis “Most Interesting Man in the World” commercials. He had a run-in with a famous Honduran bandit! His grandfather was an Appalachian folk hero! He was one of Men’s Journal’s “50 Most Adventurous Men”! He explored the jungle with Ewan McGregor for a BBC documentary!

When, a couple of days into my visit, Begley mentions offhandedly the underwater search-and-recovery missions he’s done, it barely registers. That he searches for murder victims in the deep is not even the most exciting thing he’s said that day.

So, yes: Begley does in many ways resemble the swashbuckling Indiana Jones archaeologist archetype, and he knows it. Yet this archetype and the way he so tidily fulfills it make Begley nervous too. In fact, when he teaches Intro to Archaeology at Transylvania (“Transy,”as it’s also called, is named for a short-lived colony established in Kentucky in 1775), he devotes an entire class session to Indiana Jones and whether he’s ultimately good or bad for the field.

He admits he loves the movies, archaeological flaws and all, and the interest they’ve generated in his field. But he fears the stereotype discourages those who don’t see themselves reflected in it: people of color, for example.

When journalists write about him, they tend to focus on the most Indy-esque elements of his work, adventure and danger. It’s understandable—Begley is best known for his research in eastern Honduras, including the Mosquitia, a roughly 32,000 square mile rainforest region often characterized as forbidding and difficult.

Begley doesn’t fundamentally disagree with these descriptions, though he’s careful to point out that danger isn’t what drew him to archaeology. He went to eastern Honduras because he wanted to know about the people who once made it their home, and he dives for shipwrecks because they tell us how people lived and what mattered to them. To answer those questions requires a certain amount of adventure, but it isn’t the point. Nor is discovery, a word that provokes an almost allergic reaction from Begley: everything he’s studied and documented, he tells me more than once during my visit, was known about and pointed out to him by the local and indigenous populations who have been indispensable to his work.

“I don’t know that I’ve discovered anything. … I don’t even know which sites I first documented, or some other archaeologist,” he says. “It just doesn’t matter.” He’s fond of a phrase credited to the archaeologist David Hurst Thomas: it’s not what you find, it’s what you find out.

Begley isn’t shadowboxing when he expresses frustration about the portrayal of archaeology in the media. For several years the area in Honduras where he began his career has been at the center of a dispute about exactly these issues: the sometimes distorting force of publicity on complex scholarly work, the media’s love of danger, discoveries, and firsts. He’s seen up close what happens when the popular appetite for a great story devours a more nuanced reality—when it gets in the way of the truth.

Begley says he’s drawn to archaeology in difficult environments, “because I like those challenges, but also because places with those attributes tend to be less explored, providing an opportunity to fill a need.” (Photo courtesy Chris Begley)

From his grandfather Joe, Begley inherited not only a deep connection to his home state of Kentucky but also the idea that you should fight for regular folks against the powerful. (His grandmother Evelyn Gaynell Caudill Begley, EX’39, attended the University of Chicago.)

Joe Begley was among the earliest anti-strip-mining activists in Kentucky. When Joe settled in eastern Kentucky, “immediately he saw people being abused by coal companies,” Begley says. His grandfather found ways to get things done: Joe Begley knew everyone, talked to everyone, worked with everyone. “It was that connection that really allowed his effectiveness,” he says. Without those relationships, you “just end up screaming from the sidelines.”

Joe was also comfortable working outside the system when it suited his purposes: during one particularly cold winter, when county residents couldn’t get enough fuel to heat their homes, he convinced the railroad to illegally dump an entire carload of coal by the side of the tracks, which he distributed to locals like an Appalachian Robin Hood.

Begley’s father, J.T., continued the family’s social justice tradition by working as a poverty lawyer. When former president Jimmy Carter signed the law authorizing the creation of the Office of Surface Mining Reclamation and Enforcement, both Joe and J. T. were there. Later J. T. became a lawyer for the office.

Begley got his first taste of adventure exploring the hilly outskirts of his grandparents’ house in Blackey, Kentucky (present day population: 156). Sometimes he’d find his way into abandoned coal mines, or happen on an old mine car. During those backyard excursions, he felt a visceral connection to the past. When he got dropped off back home in Lexington, dirty and exhilarated, he’d watch Jacques Cousteau on television. That was what he wanted to do, he decided: go places he’d never been, see things he’d never seen.

Begley picked up field techniques as an undergraduate at Transy, with the help of summer field schools and volunteer work with University of Kentucky archaeologists. By the time he enrolled in graduate school in anthropology, he felt well prepared for fieldwork. At UChicago he bulked up on postmodern theory and absorbed everything he could from his professors, including Marshall Sahlins, the Charles F. Grey Distinguished Service Professor Emeritus of Anthropology, with whom he played basketball a few times a week.

In graduate school Begley heard Instituto Hondureño de Antropología e Historia (IHAH), the government agency responsible for archaeology in Honduras, was looking for someone to document prehistoric sites in the eastern part of the country.

He knew relatively little about the area, and his Spanish was rudimentary. His first field season was rough—not so much a baptism by fire as a baptism by constant, unending dampness. But Begley discovered he was well suited to working in challenging conditions. “I don’t have any particular skill that makes me any good at this stuff, except that I can just stand being uncomfortable forever,” he says. (Physical fitness helps, but “sometimes you imagine that getting in shape will make something easy. It just makes it possible.”)

In its early stages, the research consisted of what Begley’s dissertation describes, decorously, as “pedestrian survey” and “pedestrian reconnaissance”—essentially, walking around in the jungle, looking for ruins, and trying not to die.

Getting yourself killed is easier in eastern Honduras than in many places, thanks to its arsenal of poisonous snakes, including the deadly fer-de-lance, and insect-borne tropical diseases. Bad luck and quotidian disasters (sprained ankles, sunken canoes) can also add up.

On rare occasions, people posed as much of a threat as the snakes and bugs. During one of his last field seasons in graduate school, Begley and his local guides, one of whom was just 15, encountered a well-known bandit—the Jesse James of Honduras, “the boogeyman you scare the kids with”—brandishing a gun. The bandit had been hiding in the jungle to evade law enforcement and was less than thrilled to cross paths with an American academic who might reveal his whereabouts. Begley and his companions got away by sneaking off at night. To avoid leaving footprints, they waded through a river.

Begley tells this story over a beer at a nearly deserted bar not far from the wreck of the Brooklyn. His shoulders suddenly drawn tight, he says he doesn’t know how to reckon with this memory, so he tries mostly not to think about it, how it would have taken days or weeks for anyone to find their bodies. For hours they had no idea whether they’d gotten away or not.

As they walked, Begley found himself imagining the movie version of the escape, where he’d come up with some ingenious plan if the bandits caught up with them. But no scheme announced itself. He was just tired and afraid. “I remember thinking, I could have gone to law school.”

When Begley started his fieldwork, archaeologists had been working in eastern Honduras for about 70 years. There was a lot they still didn’t know about the people who had lived there centuries earlier. But they had an essential source of information all around them—the indigenous Pech, the group’s likely descendants.

Begley turned to the Pech for help throughout his research. He was part of an early wave of archaeologists paying close attention to the needs and knowledge of local populations, says Rosemary Joyce, an archaeologist at the University of California, Berkeley. “We needed to learn to be collaborative. We needed to learn to talk to the local people, to listen to them,” Joyce says. Begley was “consistently already there.” Others have written about the Pech, but “Chris is the person who has spent the most time with them, and that definitely comes out in his writing,” says Mark Bonta, a geographer at Penn State Altoona.

Without their help, Begley says he would never have found the 125 sites he documented in his dissertation. (He estimates that since completing his dissertation he’s documented another 75 and that around 400 sites belonging to this group have been identified in total.) His Pech collaborators knew where all the sites were, big and small. They also helped Begley interpret what he was seeing. When he found the remains of grinding stones at some of the sites he excavated, he assumed they must have been used to mill corn. The Pech corrected him, saying they used grinding stones for manioc, or cassava, as well.

Completed in 1999, Begley’s dissertation offered the most reliable modern data about the archaeology of the Mosquitia, according to Joyce. “He’s the one person who’s actually done extensive work in this area,” she says.

Begley’s research helped pin down basic information about the group—what they ate (probably manioc), what language they spoke (most likely something in the Macro-Chibchan family, like the Pech today), when their culture reached its height (1000–1200 AD, give or take). The culture appears to have declined drastically by the 16th century, though some of the larger sites were abandoned even earlier, before the arrival of Spanish explorers.

There’s no modern-day name for the group. When Begley was writing his dissertation, he considered coming up with one, just for convenience, but decided it wasn’t his place to do so. “If the Pech want to come up with some name for their own ancestors, that’s great,” he says. “I’ll be glad to use that.”

For years scholars defined these ancient Mosquitians mostly by what and who they weren’t. The architecture and pottery they left behind didn’t look quite South American, but it wasn’t quite Mayan either—though there were clear signs of trade and cultural exchange with their neighbors to the north. As occupants of a border region, the people of the Mosquitia had their own distinct identity and material culture, but they adopted some characteristics of the powerful societies around them.

Begley’s research revealed one big surprise: the sites he studied contained ball courts—rectangular arenas bordered by two parallel mounds with sloping walls. Ball courts were used to play the Mesoamerican ball game, a sport used for recreation, diplomacy, and ritual. At times it ended with human sacrifice, though some believe this element has been overemphasized. (One scholar I spoke with recalled hearing a guide at a major Mayan ruin tell tourists that the winners of the ball game were always sacrificed. She found this hard to believe: “That would seem to lead to low-scoring games.”)

To archaeologists, finding ball courts in the Mosquitia was a big deal. According to the prevailing theories at the time, they simply didn’t belong so far east. But there they were. “It really required us to rethink the way that ball courts figured into social life,” Joyce says. Building them was not an arbitrary architectural choice. “It has implications for your belief system, for your cosmology, for everything,” Begley says. To him it suggested that the upper crust of the ancient Mosquitia had imported the game from the Maya and used it to prove they were the source of mystical knowledge from faraway lands. “Elites were borrowing certain elite public elements—ball courts, site plans—from their powerful neighbors as a way of gaining and maintaining power,” he explains.

The presence of ball courts also shed light on the social relationships between the various cultures that inhabited lower central America. “That says to me that they were very closely related to their neighbors to the west,” says John Henderson, an archaeologist at Cornell University. “Once Chris began to make it clear there are some really big sites out there, then the fact they had ball courts in them was really interesting.”

In recent years Begley has been focused on underwater archaeology. With the help of local fishermen, he and colleagues documented 45 shipwrecks off the coast of Greece. (Photo courtesy Chris Begley)

If you work in Honduras for a little while, you’ll start to hear stories about the White City, or Ciudad Blanca—a mysterious place, tucked away in some remote part of the Mosquitia, perhaps full of treasure. Stick around long enough and you’ll meet people who claim to have found it. (“Somehow they never seem to have photographs,” says Henderson, his eye roll nearly audible through the phone.)

No one knows exactly when or how the present-day White City legend emerged. The myth has some similarities to Pech stories about a place called Kao Kamasa (the White House), filled with gods who fled their villages after Europeans arrived in Honduras. The only people who can enter the “Place of the Ancestors,” as the Pech also call it, are those who speak all seven indigenous languages. And since no one does anymore, Kao Kamasa remains inaccessible. Another local indigenous group, the Tawahka, also have a legend about a lost place special to them.

Early Spanish explorers told a story of their own. In 1526 Hernán Cortés wrote to Emperor Charles V about a town “eight or ten days’ march from that town of Trujillo. … So wonderful are the reports about this particular province, that even allowing largely for exaggeration, it will exceed Mexico in riches.” Nearly two decades later, a Spanish priest named Friar Pedraza wrote about a wealthy civilization living on the north coast of Honduras.

Somewhere along the way, the indigenous tales of Kao Kamasa got conflated with these Spanish reports, resulting in an El Dorado–like legend, one that has proved irresistible to generations of explorers and treasure hunters. Their hunts for a singular, fixed location belied the shifting, elusive quality of the White City legend. It wasn’t clear which version of the story guided these adventurers in their searches—was it the Spanish accounts of cities filled with gold, or one of the many indigenous versions? For the hunters, it seemed not to matter.

The early 20th century saw a succession of American explorers setting out in search of the White City. One of these adventurers, Frederick Mitchell-Hedges, didn’t find it but said he’d heard from locals of a place called the Lost City of the Monkey God. Another, R. Stuart Murray, got closer. He reported that a local had brought him several stone artifacts from the Lost City of the Monkey God, but the man was bitten by a fer-de-lance and died before he could reveal the city’s location. Next came Theodore Morde, who, after a four-month search, claimed to have seen the lost city with his own eyes. The media went wild. But key excerpts of Morde’s journals, rediscovered in 2016, show him to be a fraud: he never found the city, or even got close.

Begley had heard the stories, and like many scholars of Honduras, he didn’t put much stock in them. He knew there were lots of large and interesting archaeological sites in eastern Honduras, but as far as he was concerned, none of them could be the White City, because the very idea of the White City is an assemblage of fact, fiction, and misunderstanding. Even the indigenous versions of the legend, he argues, may not be tied to a single location, or a site of any size: for the Pech and the Tawahka, Kao Kamasa represents an idealized past, a golden age before the arrival of Spanish explorers and other outside threats.

But the probable nonexistence of the White City hasn’t stopped people from continuing to look for it. In fact, it was a recent quest for the elusive site that sparked a scholarly debate about archaeology’s relationship with the media.

Documentary filmmaker Steve Elkins had long been fascinated by the White City legend and, in 2012, decided to take a high-tech approach to the hunt using lidar, or light detection and ranging. It was a long shot; even some involved in Elkins’s mission suspected it wouldn’t work, given the density of the rainforest in eastern Honduras.

But the technology did its job. When Elkins’s team, accompanied by journalist Douglas Preston, flew a lidar-equipped plane over a 55-square-mile region of the jungle, the imaging system penetrated the canopy of trees and revealed, among other things, what they believed to be a major archaeological site.

Initially Begley was thrilled by the news. The Under the Lidar (UTL) group, as Elkins’s team came to be called, had found important remains of the culture he’d been studying for years. “With lidar, you can find archeological sites that you could never before,” Begley told Preston in a New Yorker article published in 2013. “There is incredibly valuable information in those images.” He offered to help the team interpret the lidar results, but no one took him up on it.

Meanwhile the press got the bit between its teeth and ran. The UTL team announced in a press release that they had located “what appears to be evidence of archaeological ruins in an area long rumored to contain the legendary lost city of Ciudad Blanca.” The wording was cautious—and largely ignored. A typical headline was this, from the Daily Mail: “Scientists ‘discover’ legendary lost White City of gold in dense Central American jungle thanks to advanced laser mapping.”

Three years later, Douglas Preston, who had continued to follow the UTL team’s work, wrote an article in National Geographic that described the lidar-located site as the “never before explored” remnants of a “vanished culture.” (In the same article, the team was more careful to reject association with the White City appellation. “Archaeologists … no longer believe in the existence of a single ‘lost city,’ or Ciudad Blanca, as described in the legend,” Preston wrote.) Another wave of sensationalized media coverage followed.

To Begley and other archaeologists specializing in Honduras, the tenor of the media coverage and the UTL team’s willingness to cooperate with it violated fundamental principles of their field. Begley cowrote an open letter outlining his objections. Twenty-six scholars including Joyce, of UC Berkeley, signed it. They were troubled by the language of discovery used to describe the newly located site, and by the characterization of the culture that inhabited it as unknown and vanished—how vanished could it be, given that the culture’s likely descendants, the Pech, were still living in the area?

Henderson, of Cornell, didn’t sign the open letter Begley cowrote—“I was kind of irritated at the politically correct quality of the objection,” he says—but shared some of the same frustrations. He took particular issue with articles in which the find was “pitched as astonishing and entirely new.”

In fact, “there had been a whole lot of work out there, much of it done by Chris,” Henderson says. He believes the archaeologists studying the site should have intervened more forcefully to point out how much was already known about the ancient residents of the Mosquitia. “They were happy to let the publicity machine generate a lost civilization,” he says.

Throughout 2015 Begley and others traded barbs with the archaeologists involved with the UTL team. Preston, who’d covered the team’s work in the New Yorker and National Geographic, went on to write a book about it, The Lost City of the Monkey God: A True Story (Grand Central Publishing, 2017). In the book Preston alleged Begley didn’t have the proper authorization for his field work in the Mosquitia after 1996. Begley denies the charge. (Dario Euraque, a professor at Trinity College in Connecticut who was the director of IHAH from 2003 to 2006, told me he does not find the accusation against Begley credible.)

It was, all in all, a bruising controversy. Begley remains angry about the attacks on his reputation but has tried not to dwell on them. He had stopped doing fieldwork in the Mosquitia years before, mostly out of fatigue. “Every field season felt like some special forces training or something. Here’s a 70-pound pack, carry that for a month. … I was ready for something else,” he says. He was more concerned about the Hondurans who were critical of the UTL research. The mission had the support of the Honduran government, so speaking out carried greater risk for them.

Meanwhile, the UTL team continues to report from what they now call the City of the Jaguar. Some of their findings echo Begley’s previous research about the early residents of the Mosquitia—among other noteworthy elements of the site, the team in 2016 reported the presence of “two parallel mounds that may be the remains of a Mesoamerican ballcourt.”

Begley still goes back to Honduras occasionally, but his research is now focused on underwater archaeology, which, not unlike the rainforests of Honduras, comes with logistical challenges. Depending on how deep you dive, “you may be able to work for 15 minutes at a time a couple of times a day,” Begley explains. At depths of 100 feet or more, cognitive impairment—divers call it the “rapture of the deep”—kicks in. “It’s like being drunk,” he says.

His work on shipwrecks has taken him to Central America and the Mediterranean. In all of these places, just as in the Mosquitia, getting to know the local population was essential. In Greece, a project he was involved in managed to find, over a pair of two-week field seasons, some 45 shipwrecks, “a quarter of all shipwrecks ever recorded in Greece,” Begley says. Everyone wanted to know how they’d done it. “Folks would ask, what technology are you using?” The answer was fishermen.

Local fishermen had a wealth of knowledge from years spent on the water, and once the team gained their trust, they were eager to share what they knew. For instance, where nets got caught on something deep below the water, and stories they’d heard of what might be down there. Of the 45 shipwrecks the group documented, 37 had been shown to them by locals. There was no magic technology, just people.

That’s not to say Begley isn’t interested in gee-whiz gadgetry and the ways it can help archaeology. For the past decade he’s been working on developing and testing a portable 3-D imaging system that can be used in remote and hostile environments, including underwater. Begley has proposed that the light, portable system could be used on everything from historic cemeteries to ancient foot impressions to maritime archaeology. He’s tested the system in Honduras, Spain, Albania, Montenegro, Croatia, and closer to home in Missouri and the Kentucky River.

More and more, he’s drawn to projects in his home state. He wants his students to know that there is important archaeological work to be done, even in their own backyard.

“I love Kentucky,” he tells me on a rambling drive through horse country outside Lexington. He points out little things: historic buildings, bluegrass, the way the properties are lined by a particular type of stone wall. Later we walk across a natural stone bridge in Daniel Boone National Forest, and he tells me about the rock formations. He describes the scenery as we pass—sycamores, oaks, Virginia pine. His roots here are deep.

Though teaching at a small liberal arts school can feel limiting for someone so attracted to research and fieldwork, he also likes working with kids from Kentucky, who make up the majority of Transy’s student population. He wants them to hear a professor who sounds like them.

After a day of teaching Begley goes home to his family in the same Lexington neighborhood where he grew up and first imagined a life of travel and adventure. He’s glad that his children know where he comes from. He is an archaeologist, after all. He wants them to know their history.

Law, Policy & Society

Archaeology

At first site

rsmith — Tue, 09 Feb 2016 17:10:23 +0000

rsmith Tue, 02/09/2016 - 11:10

(Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago)

Hannah Gitlin, AB’16

The University of Chicago Magazine

Winter/16

In the 1930s Oriental Institute archaeologists used photography to capture the history and grandeur of Persepolis.

When Oriental Institute archaeologists Ernst Herzfeld and Erich Schmidt directed excavations at Persepolis, one of the great dynastic centers of the Achaemenid Persian Empire (550–330 BC), photography offered a way to document their findings while capturing the grandeur of the ancient site. Between 1931 and 1939, the team amassed a total of 3,700 photographs, the negatives of which are now housed in OI museum archives.

Field Negative P-1174 (above), taken in 1939, depicts the Gate of All Lands, the formal entrance to the terrace at Persepolis. The image, on display in the OI’s current exhibit Persepolis: Images of an Empire, is valuable both for the record it provides of the historic site and for its sheer beauty.

It tells us something about the archaeologists too. “The boundaries between art and science and documentation are easily blurred,” says OI curator Kiersten Neumann, also the exhibition’s curator. Neumann is researching the role of photography in early excavations of ancient sites and says that archaeologists of this era were more interested than many of their modern-day counterparts in capturing their personal responses to the art and architecture they encountered.

“They were explorers,” says Neumann. “They were imaginative and thought of possibilities rather than just hard cold facts.” As a result, the photographs taken during the expedition have an aesthetic force. The images evoke a sense of wonder that, she says, may have contributed to Western perceptions of the East as exotic and mysterious.

Persepolis: Images of an Empire is open through September 11, 2016.

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Sweet honey in the rocks

jmiller — Wed, 28 Oct 2015 16:27:44 +0000

jmiller Wed, 10/28/2015 - 11:27

(Illustration by Elvis Swift)

Lydialyle Gibson

Gil Stein

The University of Chicago Magazine

Fall/15

The history of beekeeping stretches back centuries, the director of the Oriental Institute found when a hobby turned into a scholarly pursuit.

Archaeologist Gil Stein is director of the Oriental Institute and professor of archaeology in the Department of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations. From 1992 through 1997, he led excavations at Hacinebi, a Mesopotamian colony in Turkey, part of the world’s first-known colonial system.

Stein is also a beekeeper. He and his wife have about a dozen hives, and their experience raising bees and collecting honey sparked his interest in the history of beekeeping, particularly in the ancient Near East. Stein spoke to the Magazine about the insects and their Old World story.—Lydia Gibson

My wife, Liz, is the one who really got me interested—she’s been a beekeeper for more than 10 years. She and I are both archaeologists, and for me it was a natural progression from intense curiosity about bees and beekeeping, and thinking how strange and wonderful this practice is, to wondering about its history. Beekeeping is pervasive in our culture and in cultures around the world. How old is it anyway? What’s the archaeology of it? How did people keep bees and think about honey in the ancient world? What did it mean to them?

So I started to investigate. As I talked to people—friends who are colleagues at the Oriental Institute, who are specialists in the textual record of ancient Mesopotamia and ancient Egypt—I’d say, “Do you have any material about honey and bees and beekeeping?” And they’d say, “Yeah, we have material about honey everywhere.” I’d say, “Great! Can you steer me to articles that give an overview?” And they all said no. It’s just bits and pieces here and there.

Sometimes those are the most interesting problems: when something is so completely pervasive in our lives, we don’t even think about it; we don’t question it. Once you start looking, you realize that honey and bees and beekeeping are everywhere in the Old World—in ancient Europe and Eurasia and Africa and in the ancient Middle East. Honeybees are an Old World group of species.

Honey was considered an almost magical substance in the ancient Near East. People used it for everything: as a food and as a raw material to make alcoholic beverages like mead and honey wine. There was honey in the alcoholic beverages found in the tomb of King Midas, he of the fabled golden touch. And it’s the most common ingredient in ancient medicine in Mesopotamia and Egypt. It has antimicrobial and antibiotic properties; honey will kill Staphylococcus and E. coli. It will suck the moisture out of wounds. And it’s invaluable in treating burns. Ancient people also used honey as a universal sweetener, of course, because it’s one of the sweetest substances in nature. They even used it for mummification. When Alexander the Great died in Babylon in 323 BC, he was preserved in honey and placed in an enormous golden sarcophagus drawn by 64 mules.

There are representations of ancient Egyptians beekeeping—tomb paintings that show people managing beehives, using techniques that are recognizable today. Once you know the artistic conventions, you can easily see it. They’re applying smoke to pacify the bees and then drawing honey out of the hives. One of the clearest examples is from the Tomb of Rekhmire in ancient Thebes, which dates to the 15th century BC. That was almost three and a half thousand years ago. Beekeeping is really deep in culture.

You see honey in literature and religious texts as a common metaphor for love, for God’s love for his people, and for God’s law. Psalm 19 says that the Lord’s ordinances are “sweeter also than honey and drippings of the honeycomb.” In Exodus, God talks about delivering his people from Egypt and bringing them to “a land flowing with milk and honey.”

Then there’s the big question: how did beekeeping originate? The Egyptians seem to have taken it up, at an industrial scale, long before the Mesopotamians did. The earliest evidence we have of beekeeping in the Near East is from Egypt—those tomb paintings. They were also keeping bees very early on in Anatolia, which is now Turkey. Hittite laws dating to the 13th or 14th century BC contain severe punishments for thieves of bee swarms or beehives. Honey was commonly used in rituals there, and it was readily available and inexpensive; “honey bread” sold for the price of a single portion of lard or butter.

The first known mention of beekeeping in the Mesopotamian cuneiform record is centuries later. It comes from the stele of ama-re-uzur, a regional governor on the Syrian Euphrates in the middle of the eighth century BC, who claimed to have been the first among his people to capture and domesticate wild bees: “I, Samas-res-uzur, governor of the land of Suhu and Mari, I brought bees—that collect honey and which from the time of my fathers and forefathers no one had seen nor brought to the land of Suhu—down from the mountains of the Habha people and settled them in the gardens of the town of Algabbaribani.”

So, did beekeeping develop independently in different parts of the ancient Near East, or did it spread from one place to another? That’s one thing I’m trying to find out. I think probably there were two independent centers of invention, in Egypt and Anatolia, because there’s no evidence of beekeeping in Israel for several centuries after those two places. But we don’t know for sure. The evidence is spotty and scattered around.

One thing we do know is that the shapes of beehives in the ancient Near East seems to be a common technology used all over: clay cylinders laid on their sides, with a lid at one end where you would reach in and get the honey, and a little hole at the other end where the bees would fly in and out. It makes sense; that shape mimics the hollow of a tree, where many wild bees build their hives. In modern-day Egypt you can still see some of these traditional cylindrical hives, stacked up in rows.

One of the first people to pull together the information we have about ancient beekeeping was Eva Crane. Her Archaeology of Beekeeping [Duckworth], a wonderful book, is essentially the standard work on the subject. Since it was published in 1983, we’ve gotten more information. Several years ago, Israeli archaeologists working at a site called Tel Rehov, in the Jordan River Valley, excavated the remains of an Iron Age beekeeping complex, a huge apiary. At one time, there were stacks and stacks of ceramic hives. They found about 100 hives, which could have housed as many as 1.5 million bees.

For archaeologists, a huge part of the work is simply knowing what you’re looking for. These ancient cylindrical beehives don’t look like the box hives that most of us are used to seeing today: the Langstroth hive, which was invented in the 19th century by an American. Many people would see the remains of these ancient cylindrical hives and think, “Oh, those are roof tiles,” because you see a curved shape. Or, “Those are drainpipes.” I’m certain that there are many, many ancient beehives out there misidentified as drainpipes. That’s why we’re so lucky to have these Egyptian tomb paintings. It’s undeniable proof.

I read a little bit about beekeeping almost every day. My wife and I have 11 or 12 hives, which is really small scale but still an amazing experience. Bees are such an alien species, so different from all the other domesticated animals that humans have been breeding and exploiting for millennia. We’re used to cattle and pigs and chickens and goats. But enormous colonies of insects? And this stuff they create, which we steal from them? Honey and pollen, beeswax and propolis, the resin-like substance that bees use to seal the hive and keep out pests and predators. It’s a very hard glue that also has incredible antibiotic properties to it, just like honey does.

And bees’ social intelligence is incredible. For bees, the unit is not the individual, but the collective. A beehive has 50,000 bees, and they communicate with each other using pheromones and with what’s called a “waggle dance”—used by the scout bees to tell the rest of the colony where a good source of nectar is located. The Austrian ethologist Karl von Frisch won a Nobel Prize in 1973 for figuring out the waggle dance. Bees have a division of labor and a complex social hierarchy. Virgil describes it vividly in the Georgics: “Some supervise the gathering of food, and work in the fields to an agreed rule: some, walled in their homes, lay the first foundations of the comb, with drops of gum taken from narcissi, and sticky glue from tree-bark, then hang the clinging wax: others lead the mature young, their nation’s hope, others pack purest honey together, and swell the cells with liquid nectar: there are those whose lot is to guard the gates.”

The population of a hive is not constant through the year. It peaks at about 50,000 to 60,000 in the summer, during the honey flows, and then it drops off in October and November. During the winter, a solid basketball-sized clump of bees will cluster, huddled tightly together for warmth. And they’re all beating their wings constantly. Inside the hive, it can be 92 degrees in the dead of winter.

In keeping bees and doing this research, I’ve learned wonderful and surprising things. One of my favorites relates to the apiary at the eighth century BC site of Tel Rehov, whose excavation tells a very interesting economic story. The Jordan River Valley, where Tel Rehov is located, has a native honeybee: the Palestinian honeybee. But when entomologists looked under the scanning electron microscope at the bees they found in the residue inside the hives, those were Anatolian honeybees—a different subspecies. So the people in ancient Israel were importing honeybees all the way from Turkey, easily 1,000 kilometers away, bringing them across Syria and into the Jordan River Valley, and keeping hives of Anatolian honeybees. Because they’re gentler bees and they make more honey.

So that tells you something about how economically important these insects were. People were raising them on an industrial scale and importing colonies from across the region. You can just picture some caravan transporting these bees for weeks, all the way across Syria. How could they do that? How did they keep the bees alive? But they did. If you were on the road in the ancient Near East, you might come across a bee caravan.

That’s what my wife and I do too, in a way: we buy boxes of bees that get shipped to us from California. People were doing the same thing almost 3,000 years ago. That’s fascinating. And what I love is, when you ask the right question, archaeologists can actually find the answer. Not every time, but often. It’s amazing.—Gil Stein

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