Winter 2001-2002
Digging for Cookware: Stories of Daily Life
Photo by Diana Watters
ANDREA BERLIN
Education
Ph.D. 1988, U of Michigan
A.M. 1979, U of Chicago
A.B. 1976, U of Michigan
Professional history
1997-present: faculty, Classical and Near Eastern studies, U of Minnesota
1994-1995: Georgetown U
1989-90: visiting faculty, U of Virginia, U of Maryland, College Park
Selected honors & awards
National Endowment for the Humanities Multi-Year Collaborative Research Grant, with Sharon Herbert, 1999-2001
Shelby White-Leon Levy Fellowship for Archaeological Publication, Harvard 1997-1998
Selected publications
"Coptos: The University of Michigan-University of Assiut Excavations (1988-1992)." Co-ed. Sharon C. Herbert. Journal of Roman Archaeology. Forthcoming.
"What's for Dinner? The Answer is in the Pot." Biblical Archaeology Review (Nov/Dec 1999).
Sitting sideways on the chair in her Folwell Hall office, her legs dangling over the chair's arms, Andrea Berlin is explaining the allure of kitchen dishes.
Pots and pans and cooking utensils, you see, tell the story of everyday life--and that's where this associate professor of classical archaeology finds her passion.
Going straight to the source
"I pick up a fragment of a cooking pot and I can see the hearth, imagine the shopping, picture the family eating," she says. "I remember once finding two differently shaped pots made of the same material with the same pattern and saying, 'Oh, look, a wedding present!' You get a close-up, crystal-clear view of how people actually lived their lives, without looking through the prism of other observers' agendas."
Berlin, an internationally recognized expert on the archaeology of Hellenistic and Roman Near East and Palestine, joined the Department of Classical/Near Eastern Studies in 1997 with a Ph.D. in art and archaeology from the University of Michigan. She's here, she says, by a happy combination of serendipity and a singular enthusiasm for finding meaning in antiquity, for what she calls "the completely unglamorous."
On the serendipitous side, her focus on the classical and Near Eastern worlds was just what the University was looking for when she was hired. "Once, such a hybrid department was considered a marriage of convenience," she says, "but by the mid-90s, it had became one of conviction. These worlds were so close, they should be studied in sync. So with my specialization in Greece and Rome, I had the focus."
The path to pots and pans began with her dissertation. "I was offered this junk for a dissertation," she laughs, "pots and pans: the plastic of antiquity. And there was lots of it--not decorated, not special, not sexy at all.
"The director of excavation had been trying to give this stuff away for a long time. I came along and she offered it. I thought, 'This is a finite body of data. I can finish this.' So I took it, not because it was interesting or important but because it was a means to an end. Then, as I was compiling data, all of a sudden I realized that the kitchen dishes at this site were different in each of three phases. I found the correlation between the shapes of the dishes and the people who lived there."
It's this kind of surprise that energizes Berlin. "What I really like is when what you think you know is all rearranged," she says. "The bound pages in a text need to be ring-bound and rearranged. You keep revising the history books."
Berlin is currently directing such a ring-binder project in an area called Tel Kedesh in northern Israel. Looking for the personal archaeology of a site that once had been on the border between modern Israel and ancient Phoenicia, Berlin and colleague Sharon Herbert from the University of Michigan began digging in 1997, expecting to find what conventional wisdom assumed was a small farming village.
What they found instead was an enormous public building with major storage facilities and an archive that included 14 massive jars with nearly 2,000 stamps--or bullae--from local officials, an indication that the building had been a depository for official documents. The site, they concluded, may have been a major administrative center of the region during the Hellenistic era.
"It was like finding lower Manhattan when we were looking for upstate New York," says Berlin.
Berlin probably wouldn't need words to communicate the passion she feels for her profession; she radiates energy. "I get jazzed frequently," she laughs. When she does put her passion into words, she barely takes a breath, and speaks of her work in almost reverential tones.
"When I am standing in a room holding something that was last touched in the eighth century, it's a straight line to that person," she says. "It's like being in the middle of science fiction."
Some people, says Berlin, are a bit bemused by her great fascination with such homely artifacts of antiquity. They're "surprised I can get as much out of this dead stuff as I do." But it's not about "stuff," she is quick to add: "I feel like I'm ennobling lives that didn't end up in the history books."