Three months in the Levant

a debriefing from a 2006 research stay at the CBRL

In 2006 I spent three months in Amman as a research fellow at the Council for British Research in the Levant, the British Academy's institute for the humanities and social sciences in the region. The CBRL is the merged successor to the British School of Archaeology in Jerusalem and the British Institute at Amman for Archaeology and History. Two buildings — one in Amman, one in Jerusalem — and a permanent staff of researchers and support people who make the whole apparatus of British fieldwork in the Levant possible. The stay was an opportunity to spend a long, slow stretch visiting Early Bronze Age sites, sitting in on conversations between people who'd been doing this work for decades, and gradually building the contextual scaffolding that PhD research on the southern Levant actually requires.

What follows is a debriefing — the trip in its original slide-export form lives on at jordan.arkygeek.com/debriefing.html if you want to see the deck as it was. The version below is a rewrite, with the better photographs pulled out and the slide-deck bullets unpacked into something readable.

The institute

At the time I arrived, the Amman office was run by Dr. Jaimie Lovell as Research Officer, under the broader directorship of Prof. Bill Finlayson back in Edinburgh. Both, in their separate ways, taught me that the most useful thing a junior researcher can do on a trip like this is listen — to people in their offices, on tells, and in the long taxi rides between.

Sites visited

The Levant has a density of archaeological sites that no amount of preparatory reading really prepares you for. The list below is the shorthand of what we managed to get to — most as day trips, some as longer stays. A few are obvious touchstones (Hazor, Jericho); some are less well-known but mattered for the specific research question.

• Hartuv
• Horvat Illin Tah Itit
• Tel Yarmut
• Tel Maresha
• Lacish
• Ashqelon
• Afridar
• Barnea
• Palmachin
• Tel As Sultan (Jericho)
• Tel as Shuna
• Tel Dan
• Tel Megiddo
• Tel Hazor
• Bab edh-Dhra
• Beth Shemesh
• Zeraqon
• Tel Arad

Tel Yarmut

Tel Hazor

Tell esh-Shuna (North)

Jericho (Tel al-Sultan)

People

Beyond Bill and Jaimie, the rest of the trip was a quiet running list of conversations with people whose work I had read in fragments. Dr. Charlotte Whiting on ceramic analysis and Iron Age archaeology. Dr. Eliot Braun on late prehistory and the Chalcolithic–EB I transition. Dr. Raphael Greenberg on the Tel Bet Yerah excavations. Dr. Graham Philip on Bronze Age complex societies and the role of remote sensing in archaeological survey. And a longer list besides — Yuri Stoyanov, Alison McQuitty, Edwin van den Brink, Sy Gitin, Rebecca Foote, Barbara Porter, Chris Tuttle, Kate da Costa, Anne Poepjes, Bernd Muller, Neil Faulkner, Wajeeh Karasneh, Gundula Muldner, Michela Sandias, Roderic Dutton, Lucy Wadeson, Richard Lakey, David Thorpe. Most of what was useful about the stay came from those conversations.

The original deck

The 2006 LibreOffice slide deck — the version this rewrite is based on — is still online at jordan.arkygeek.com/debriefing.html, along with the source .odp for anyone who wants the original layout.