The Levantine Ceramics Project

By Andrea M. Berlin

 

The Levant, and ceramics

As a corridor between east, west, north and south as well as the center of gravity for three world religions, the Levant has lured scholars since the 19th century. Archaeologists have revealed the places behind the stories: sanctuaries and palaces; cities and farmsteads; houses, workshops, and graves. But in order to connect with the people who animated these places, we need artifacts that lead us down a human path.

Of all material remains recovered by archaeologists, the most abundant is pottery. From the sixth millennium BCE into the early twentieth century people used clay vessels to store, prepare, cook, and serve food; to hold perfume; to ship commodities; to burn oil for light; to contain or serve as votive offerings; and to help settle the dead in a more comfortable afterlife. Comparative study and analytical techniques provide evidence for dating, sources, production, and exchange. Pottery makes people visible.

 

Pottery from a single day of excavations at Tel Kedesh, Israel, laid out for study. Photo by author. Courtesy of the Tel Kedesh Excavations.

 

The Challenge and the LCP solution

The advantages of pottery go hand-in-hand with an enormous obstacle: it is very hard to effectively disseminate all the information it conveys. Print publication has been – and continues to be – the traditional mode. But when it comes to fostering discussion and relaying the most current understandings, print is too rigid . Information is scattered in unsearchable publications or, increasingly, unconnected specialist websites, generally partial, inconsistently presented, and couched in jargon. This can lead to conclusions that are incomplete or inconsistent, sometimes only a restatement of what is already known.

 

Peter Stone, looking for comparative data on excavated pottery. Photo by author. Courtesy of the Tel Kedesh Excavations.

 

Digital initiatives are an obvious solution, and several exist that focus on pottery. All, however, are static repositories with individual gatekeepers. They enfold what is known but are not active agents for scholarly work. We need tools that can accommodate new data and bring it into dialogue with older material, are easy to access and use, foster sharing and enable us to refine ideas so that we may readily learn from one other.

The Levantine Ceramics Project is such a tool. The LCP has two components: a custom-built application and public, crowd-sourced website; and periodic workshops and seminars. The project’s focus is wide: all ceramics produced in the Levant, meaning the modern countries of Turkey, Syria, Cyprus, Lebanon, Israel, Jordan, and Egypt, from the Neolithic era (c. 5500 BCE) through the time of Ottoman rule (c. 1920 CE).

 

LCP website, front page.

 

The site is designed to make it easy for anybody to submit, search for, browse, display, and compare all types of information: wares and petro-fabrics—ceramic wares and petro-fabrics, individual vessel descriptions along with drawings, photographs, context, and date; petrographic descriptions and thin-sections—whether newly studied or long published. There are no restrictions on terminology; contributors may submit the information they have, using their own names and descriptions. All submitted information remains linked to its original contributor(s), thus maintaining intellectual property. Items can be edited, re-arranged, or removed, making the LCP an archive and a research tool – a critical aspect since archaeology is predicated on new discoveries along with reconsideration of older material. The LCP’s easy-to-use application has attracted an expanding international research community. We began in the spring of 2011 with 29 contributors; as of January 2017 we have 240 contributors from 22 countries.

 

LCP website, submission page.

 

How it works

Submission. Anybody can consult the LCP – but to submit data one must register. There are two modes: user and contributor. Users submit data; contributors receive attribution credit. You can be both: when submitting the results of your own work, you are a user and a contributor; when submitting information published by someone else, you are acting as a user – and you enter the original scholar(s) as contributor(s). This feature makes it possible to add already-published information to the site and still maintain intellectual property. Entries also include publication references, which are added to the site’s master bibliography.

 

LCP website, registration page.

 

You don’t need all relevant data to submit information. LCP submission can be partial. For example, person A may submit a ware name and description; persons B and C may submit individual vessels that are made in that ware; person D may submit a petrographic description and thin-section of one of those submitted vessels. The ware page will link and display all relevant information, with all contributors named. In addition each submission has its own individual page, with its specific contributor cited.

 

LCP website, display page for Akko Sandy Cooking Ware

 

Akko Sandy Cooking Ware cooking pot from Tel Kedesh, Israel – spot it on the ware page shown in fig. 6! Photo by author. Courtesy of the Tel Kedesh Excavations.

 

Scholarly Citation. Every page displays the name(s) of its contributor(s), and a scholarly citation can be generated for that page by clicking a button at the top. This means that all submitted information is also a digital publication. LCP entries have started to appear in various ASOR-sponsored (and other) publications; in on-line versions the entries also function as hyper-links to the website itself.

Editing. Contributors can easily edit their own entries, whether by changing existing information, adding new aspects, or deleting portions (or an entire entry). If another user wishes to add information to an existing entry, s/he may contact the original contributor(s) or the LCP Editor.

Sharing and Privacy. When submitting data, one can select from three sharing options: public, meaning fully visible to anybody who consults the site; restricted to specified individuals; or private. The specific choice can be changed at any time.

 

Workshops

Since 2012 the LCP has held 16 workshops in Europe, Israel, and the United States – with four more already scheduled for 2018. Workshops usually focus on discrete regions, periods, and/or subjects – e.g., ceramic wares of Egypt from Ptolemaic to Byzantine times, or petro-fabrics of southern Israel and the Jordan Valley. Participants present information, broach ideas, hammer out issues of definition and terminology, and develop new syntheses. The website can be updated on the spot or after follow-up exchanges, making the latest data and consensus readily available.

 

Participants of the 2016 LCP workshop on pottery of Egypt in the Ptolemaic, Roman, and Byzantine eras (4th c. BCE – 7th c. CE), held at the Danish Institute of Archaeology in Athens. Photo courtesy of author.

 

Connecting scholars to scholarship

What is the future of this collaborative, crowd-sourced experiment? The numbers are encouraging. We launched LCP 1.0 in January 2013, with a grand total of 29 contributors. In January 2018, five years on, we are up to LCP 4.0, with a revamped submission process, new systems for comparing data, submitting references, and receiving notifications of new and edited information – and 240 contributors, 372 ceramic wares, 84 petro-fabrics, 21 kiln/workshop sites, over 6000 individual vessels, and over 5000 petrographic thin-sections (the numbers keep going up so check out the LCP front page to see where we’re at right now).

Eventually the LCP will allow archaeologists and other researchers to address the sorts of research questions for which ceramics offer basic evidence. Examples: what is the relationship between an imperial economy and local prosperity? under what conditions do small-scale producers expand? Is the vitality of major exporting centers a function of location, political circumstance, or resource advantages? Do certain clay types lend themselves to certain sorts of products across long periods of time? These and other queries are, today, very difficult to pursue because it is impossible to collect a sufficient amount and variety of data. By continuing to build up the LCP’s storehouse of information and introduce new analytical features into the application (for example, a layer that will allow data to be displayed on a map), we hope to continue expanding the site’s capabilities and create an ever more robust tool. If you are an archaeologist who works in the Levant, please consider registering and submitting material to the site. Together we are building a resource to open up the past to everyone.

 

Andrea Berlin is James R. Wiseman Chair in Classical Archaeology and Professor of Archaeology at Boston University.