The term fieldwork is mostly associated with working on excavations, but this summer I spent three weeks conducting my fieldwork at the Carnegie Museum of Natural History in Pittsburgh, PA. There I worked with the groundstone tool assemblage from the Early Bronze Age (EBA) site of Numayra, located in modern day Jordan, which is one of the early proto-urban settlements in the region. Numayra was excavated as part of the Expedition to the Dead Sea Plain Project (EDSP) in the 1970s and 1980s. The goal of EDSP is to investigate how people lived and died during the EBA to study the emergence of the regions earliest small-scale urban society. As part of my dissertation project, I am investigating how the people at Numayra prepared their food in their day to day lives, and how their food practices connected them to their new urban community. This summer I was able to catalogue, describe, draw, and photograph the stone objects in the Numayra collection.

Inspecting the groundstone objects under a microscope for possible use-wear.

While I did not get my hands dirty – at least not as dirty as I usually do when I excavate – I was able to learn so much about EBA daily life by working with the Numayra collection, almost fifty years after these objects were excavated. Legacy collections are often underutilized in our efforts to understand the past, but they are a treasure trove of information, and working with them is part of an ethical and sustainable archaeological practice. I would like to thank ASOR and the generous donors who supported the summer stipend program for making this research possible, and the project directors Meredith Chesson and Morag Kersel for their support and providing me with access to the material. I am deeply grateful to Deborah Harding, Amy Covell-Murthy, and Gretchen Anderson at the Carnegie Museum for Natural History for welcoming me this summer and providing me with the support and access I needed to successfully conduct my research.

Hanna is a PhD candidate at the Department of Anthropology at the University of Notre Dame. In her dissertation research she investigates the role of food related practices in the creation and transmission of early urban communities during the Early Bronze Age in the southern Levant. Hanna holds a BA and MA degree in Near Eastern Archaeology from Freie Universität Berlin and a MA degree in Anthropology from the University of Notre Dame. Since 2012 she have participated in archaeological projects in Germany, Greece, Turkey, Jordan, Israel, and the United States.

During the summer of 2021, ASOR supported 27 undergraduate and graduate students through the Summer Stipend Program. These students undertook non-fieldwork archaeological research projects led by ASOR-affiliated project directors. They also took part in monthly cohort group meetings hosted via zoom. Read a summary of these cohort meetings here.

Stay tuned for more updates from the 2021 Summer Stipend recipients!