Excavating Everyday Life In The Ancient World

I had the opportunity to interview Dr. Andrea Berlin, an archaeologist who studies everyday life in the ancient Mediterranean and Near East, with a particular focus on the Levant. Rather than concentrating on temples, palaces, or monumental sites, her work examines the objects ordinary people used in their daily routines, especially pottery. She studies cooking vessels, drinking cups, and storage jars found in houses, towns, and villages to understand how ordinary people prepared food, shared meals, traded goods, and connected to larger empires.

Dr. Berlin is also the founder of the Levantine Ceramics Project (LCP), a collaborative digital research platform that brings together pottery from archaeological sites across the eastern Mediterranean and Near East. She is a professor of archaeology and religion at Boston University.

Here is an excerpt from the interview:

V: You have been excavating in the eastern Mediterranean for quite some time now. What kinds of things have you uncovered, and what do they reveal about the lives of early inhabitants?

Prof. Berlin: I have always focused on places where ordinary people lived — what we tend to call daily life. Which is a funny phrase when you think about it. What other kind of life is there besides day-to-day life? 

But in classical archaeology and Near Eastern archaeology, the two fields I work in, much of the attention has traditionally gone to monumental places. By classical archaeology, I mean the worlds of Greece and Rome. By Near Eastern archaeology, I mean the geographic region that roughly corresponds to the modern Middle East.

These landscapes are filled with impressive sites: temples, sanctuaries, city centers, and grand public buildings. In the Near East, many sites are also tied to the Bible and the New Testament. Because of that, archaeologists have historically been drawn to excavating these monumental and symbolically important places.

What I do is different. I don’t excavate city centers or public monuments. I dig in houses, towns, and villages — the places where everyday people actually lived. What I learn from these sites is about ordinary lives unfolding in real time, often off the page of written history. For me, that is incredibly rewarding. There is something almost enchanting about it, because it allows us to connect with the past in a very human way. In those traces of daily life, I often feel like I can relate to the people who lived there.

V: Yes, most of the history we know has been written from the perspective of the people in power. It's so important to look at how ordinary people lived in the ancient times. What stories and practices have you discovered through the remnants of pottery?

Prof. Berlin: I will give you two examples.Pottery is probably the artifact more than any other that reflects daily life. People need it to store food, carry water, hold oil, cook meals, and serve them.

If you think about your own kitchen or pantry — your dishes and the pots and pans your family cooks with — you’ll probably notice that some of them are very particular. They reflect the kinds of cuisines you like, your family traditions, and your past. At the same time, they also reflect what people living in your place and time tend to use. They are simply the kinds of dishes that people living in North America, or in Massachusetts in the early twenty-first century, have in their kitchens. It was the same in antiquity.

The first place where I did serious research, the site I worked on for my dissertation, was a small archaeological site in what is today northern Israel. It was a modest place, and like many sites, we don’t even know what its ancient name was. It’s just a small settlement that has come down to us without a written record.

Archaeologists found three different levels there, representing three distinct phases of occupation. You can think of it like a house that people lived in during colonial times, then abandoned for a while, then reoccupied after the Civil War, and then again in the 1960s or 1970s. It would be the same physical place, but the world around it and the people living there would be completely different in each period.

Because we don’t know the name of the site, we can’t find it in any history book. We don’t know who the people were who lived there.

The only way we can learn about them is through what they left behind. One of the things they left behind, and something that changed in each phase, was their cooking vessels. In the earliest phase, the people living there used only one type of cooking vessel: a cooking pot. It was a round-bellied pot with a relatively narrow mouth and two small handles. It would have been perfect for boiling water or making soups.

In the second phase, people still used cooking pots, but they also used another type of vessel that archaeologists call casseroles. These were wider and shallower dishes, better suited for stews or for braising fish, meat, or vegetables.

By the third phase, the kitchen had expanded even further. People still used cooking pots and casseroles, but they also had a very shallow dish with low walls and a flat bottom,  something that looks a lot like a modern quiche pan.

When I studied who used these types of cooking vessels, the patterns became very clear.

The cooking pots used in the first phase were the traditional cooking vessels of the Near East. People in that region had been using them for hundreds and hundreds of years. That tells us that the people living there in the earliest phase were local inhabitants, most likely Phoenicians, based on the geographic region.

In the second phase, the casseroles appear. That shape was originally invented in ancient Athens. I don’t think the people living at the site were themselves Greek, but they were clearly open to Greek culture and interested in Greek cuisine.

In the third phase, the shallow dishes that resemble quiche pans appear. That vessel shape was invented in Italy. That strongly suggests that the people living there at that time were Roman soldiers, and that the site had become a small guard post serving a larger city nearby.

So, just from the cooking vessels, we can learn an enormous amount. We can reconstruct not only the kinds of food people were cooking and eating, but also the larger cultural worlds they were connected to.

All of that insight comes simply from the dishes they used to make their dinner.

V: Amazing! Who knew one could learn so much from just pots and pans! It is possible to figure out their diets and agricultural practices from these pots also, right? 

Prof. Berlin: Yes, you can. I don't know that it necessarily tells us what kinds of grains were being grown, but it tells us the different ways food was prepared at that time. Take the shallow pan that looks like a modern quiche pan. When I saw that shape, it reminded me of recipes I had come across in a book written by an ancient Roman author named Apicius. In that book, there is an entire chapter devoted to a dish called a patina.

The recipe is surprisingly familiar. You place vegetables, meat, or fish in the bottom of a pan, beat eggs and pour them over the top, and then bake it. In other words, it’s very much like a frittata or a quiche. And that turns out to be a popular Roman dish.

V: That's super cool. Was there a specific event that brought your attention to the scattered information on pottery and motivated you to start the Levantine Ceramics Project to create a consolidated database?

Prof. Berlin: I don’t think there was a single moment that led to this work. It was more the result of a lifetime spent studying pottery — moving from site to site, country to country, and from one historical period to another.

The earliest material I’ve worked on and published comes from Middle Kingdom Egypt. The latest comes from the Byzantine era. That spans nearly three thousand years, from the early second millennium BCE to around 1000 CE. Over that time, I became increasingly interested in what kinds of stories pottery can tell us. As you’ve seen, pottery can reveal a great deal about everyday life.

Most of the time, however, when archaeologists publish pottery, they aren’t using it to tell stories. They are focused on identifying and classifying what they have found. That work is important, of course, but I’ve always felt that archaeologists could do more with these artifacts,  that we could make them more meaningful and bring them more vividly to life for people.

One way I thought this could happen was by creating a central resource where archaeologists could easily find examples of pottery from different places and periods. Researchers could use it to compare their findings, and they could also contribute their own examples so that others could benefit from them as well.

Eventually, after I moved to Boston and found that I had a bit more time available in my professional life, I decided to give the idea a try. I knew it was a long shot. I knew it might not succeed.

But I also thought that I might be a good person to attempt it. I had worked in many different countries, across many periods, and I had some research funding through my job that could help get the project started.

So I thought: why not try? If it doesn’t work, that’s fine. But if it does work, it could be something really extraordinary.

V: It is amazing. You put the spotlight on pottery.

Prof. Berlin: I hope so. I hope so.

V: Has pottery revealed any similarities between the ancient empires you study, such as the Archaemenid Persians, Alexander the Great, and his Hellenistic successors, and the Romans?

Prof. Berlin: That’s a great question, and the answer is yes, but in different ways.

During the time of the Achaemenid Persian Empire, the Persians ruled over an enormous geographical area. Their empire stretched from what is now Afghanistan to the edge of modern-day Turkey, and as far south as Egypt. Within this vast territory lived many different people, speaking different languages and practicing different laws, religions, and cultural traditions. And yet, across this entire region during the Achaemenid period, there was one particular drinking vessel that became very popular among elites. It was a distinctive kind of cup with sharply angled, or carinated, sides and a rounded bottom. Because the bottom was rounded rather than flat, you would hold the cup in your hand while drinking rather than setting it down.

I can even send you a picture of what one of these cups looks like. (See attached images below)

(A bronze bowl that was found at Persepolis, the capital of the Achaemenid Persian Empire. It comes from a large building called the Treasury, and was discovered by archaeologists from the University of Chicago when they excavated there in the 1930s.)

(A composite showing two silver Achaemenid bowls, drawings of three ceramic ones, and an image from the relief sculptures of the Apadana, a large ceremonial building at Persepolis; this shows a tribute bearer holding two Achaemenid bowls in his hands. Since they were gifts to the court, they were almost certainly silver.)

(Two ceramic versions of Achaemenid bowls that were found at the site of Sardis, in western Turkey)

Prof. Berlin: It had a round bottom, and so you would drink like that.

V: Was it like a goblet?

Prof. Berlin: Well, it’s not a goblet, because it doesn’t have a stem. Instead, it’s a rounded vessel with a slightly flaring rim and a curved bottom.

Across the vast territories ruled by the Achaemenid Empire, people made local versions of this cup. From Troy in northwestern Turkey to Egypt, from modern-day Israel to Iran, communities produced this same style of drinking vessel using their own local clay.

A helpful modern comparison would be a teacup or a coffee mug. The small teacup, with its rounded body, little ring foot, and handle, was developed in Britain in the seventeenth century. As the British Empire expanded across the world, the practice of drinking tea spread with it. People throughout the empire adopted the custom in part because it connected them to this larger imperial world.

The Achaemenid drinking cup functioned in a similar way. Using that particular style of vessel signaled participation in the broader cultural world of the empire. Today, when we think about empires, the idea often carries negative connotations. But objects like these remind us that many people living within empires also found value in belonging to something large and powerful. It could make them feel connected, important, and part of a wider world.

The teacup across the British Empire — from India to Australia to New Zealand — worked in much the same way as the Achaemenid cup did across the Persian Empire.We see similar patterns in later periods as well, including the Hellenistic and Roman eras. One example from the Roman world is the large transport jars used to ship goods such as wine and olive oil. These jars are called amphoras, a word derived from the Greek term meaning “a vessel with two handles.” They were large containers designed specifically for transporting goods across long distances.

How tall are you? 

V: I am 5'2".

Prof. Berlin: An amphora would have come up probably about your chest.

V: Wow.

Prof. Berlin: Imagine a vessel about half as wide as your desk, with two large handles on either side. When filled with wine or oil, it would have been extremely heavy.

These jars were produced in many different regions across the Roman world. In a way, they functioned like advertisements. Much like the shape of a Coca-Cola bottle signals what is inside, the shape of an amphora could indicate the type and origin of the product it carried.

Because these vessels circulated widely across the Roman Empire, they show that the Roman world was connected in one economic system.  Pottery like this helps us understand how empires actually operated for ordinary people.

V: So, pottery can also reveal social aspects of civilizations?

Prof. Berlin: That's exactly right.

V: That's amazing! Can you share more about your research at Tel Kadesh?

Prof. Berlin: Tel Kadesh is no longer an active excavation, and we are trying to complete the final publication. What we found there was one large building that functioned as a kind of administrative hub. It was a place where people collected agricultural produce. There was an archive, there were storerooms, and there were dining rooms, so it was a very large building.

It is located in what is now northeastern Upper Galilee in Israel, right on the border with Lebanon. It is a dangerous area at the moment, and no one is there now because the area is under active missile attack. But the fact that it is on a border today is a mirror of its past. It was also on the edge of a territory in antiquity. It has always been a strategic location.

As political control of the region shifted from the Achaemenid Persians to the Ptolemies of Egypt and then to the Seleucids of Syria, the building came under new authorities. Each group made changes inside the building to meet their needs. The Ptolemies added more storerooms. Under the Seleucids, larger dining rooms were added. They also remodeled and rearranged parts of the building so there could be more entertainment rooms.

We are carefully disentangling all the finds from all the layers, so that we can understand exactly how people used the building in each one of its main phases. We have thousands of finds, so it's taking a little while.

V: That is so cool. For my last question, I want to ask what sparked your interest in archaeology?

Prof. Berlin: I went on a dig when I was 17. I had just graduated from high school and had not yet started college. I was excavating at the ancient site of what is today the city of Beersheva in southern Israel.

I was working in a room of a house and uncovered a large jar sitting in the corner of the room. Balanced on top of the jar was a small dipper juglet that someone could have used to scoop things out of it. It was sitting there as if someone had left it the day before.

As I was digging, I could see the top of it. My supervisor told me I had to be very careful and remove all the dirt around it so that it stood free. I was not allowed to move it until we could see the entire jar.

Day by day, we dug down around it. Eventually, we reached the floor of the room. The jar was sitting there in the corner, and I had watched it gradually come to light. My supervisor told me that the jar dated to the 8th century BC.

When I finished excavating the room so that the jar stood by itself, with the small juglet still on top, I was the first person to touch them in 2,000 years.

As soon as I held it in my hands, I felt like I would just like to spend the rest of my life doing this.

V: Wow. That must have been an amazing feeling!