Uzi Baram

Clay Tobacco Pipes and Coffee Cup Sherds in the Archaeology of the Middle East: Artifacts of Social Tensions from the Ottoman Past

Nearly all discussion in historical archaeology exploring issues of consumption and commodities is focused on the Euro-American world. This paper contributes data from archaeological investigations in the Middle East for exploring modern consumption. Commodities of pleasure, such as tobacco and coffee, entered Middle Eastern social life after the fifteenth century and greatly impacted the cultural landscape of the Middle East, entangling the peoples of the region into larger socio-political arenas. Examples from provincial corners of the Ottoman Empire illustrate the potential of historical archaeology for uncovering the material self-definition of peoples in the Middle East and for breaking down perceived divisions between components of the modern world.

The development of historical archaeology in Israel: An overview and prospects

The Ottoman Empire ruled over Palestine from 1516 to 1917; the nature of imperial control and the legacy of the Ottoman centuries are contested. A decade after several calls for archaeology in Israel to include the Ottoman period, in part to address some of the debates, several archaeological projects have yielded the parameters of an historical archaeology in Israel. The difficulties associated with the terminology of historical archaeology in the Middle East are briefly considered, and the definition of historical archaeology in the region as the archaeology of the Ottoman Empire is advocated. Four archaeological examples —Tel el-Hesi, Ti’innik, Yocne’am, and Akko—are employed to illustrate the contribution of this research to resolving historical questions and for contextualizing Palestine within regional and global processes of change. The prospects of the research trajectories conclude the review.

TOURISM AND ARCHAEOLOGY

Tourism is widely recognized as the worlds largest industry, and heritage tourism is one of its fastest growing components. The intersection of heritage tourism and archaeology raises questions for archaeological practice, and the discipline has growing concern over the implications of archaeological sites receiving tremendous tourist attention. Research into the dynamics of heritage tourism for archaeology includes participant-observation studies, exploration of legal frameworks, studies of tourist advertisings and souvenirs, and ethnographic interviews with managers of historic sites.

Images of the Holy Land: The David Roberts Paintings as Artifacts of 1830s Palestine

Historical archaeology is delineating the impact of Western European influence and imperialism on the Middle East, particularly the period the Ottoman Empire ruled over the eastern Mediterranean (1516–1917). Material assemblages from the Ottoman period illustrate the global connections that entangled the eastern Mediterranean with Western European capitalism after the 16th century. Other categories of material culture illustrate such global interactions: the accounts of travelers to the Holy Land in the form of books, paintings, and photographs. These accounts have been understood as part of the Western domination of the Middle East. Orientalist paintings as artifacts of Ottoman Palestine are the focus here, complex interventions in the assumptions about the Holy Land that can be appropriated for archaeological understandings of Palestine’s past. The paintings of landscape artist David Roberts (1796–1864) are used as an example. He traveled through Palestine in the late 1830s and created an unparalleled collection of images.

Cosmopolitan Meanings of Old Spanish Fields: Historical Archaeology of a Maroon Community in Southwest Florida

Since 2005, a multidisciplinary public anthropology program has been looking for Angola, an early-19th-century maroon community south of Tampa Bay. Angola provides a link between the beacons of freedom in the northern tier of Florida (Fort Mosé, Prospect Bluff, and the Suwannee settlements) and the later settlements of African Seminoles in the Bahamas and Central Florida. With few documentary resources available, a map is used as an entry point to the lifeways of the maroons of Florida. While labeled Old Spanish Fields, the location represents a place where diverse individuals came together as maroons and interacted with Seminoles, British filibusters, and Cuban fishermen, among others, in the shadow of the Spanish Empire. Their crops indicate the resilience of the peoples who fought for their freedom from slavery. With American rule, the community was devastated, its landscape erased, and the cosmopolitan community unmixed.

Experiments in Public Archaeology as Civic Engagement: My Five Years with the New College Public Archaeology Lab in Sarasota, Florida

A few years after I took an assistant professor position in Anthropology, Teaching Archaeology in the Twenty-First Century, edited by Susan Bender and George S. Smith (2000) was published and sits on my shelf alongside The Teaching of Anthropology: Problems, Issues, and Decisions (Kottak, et al., 1997) reminding me to centre students in my archaeological endeavours. Over the last decade, my research energies have focused on a building a studentcentred community-based heritage programme through public archaeology. The programmes began from practical considerations of offering nearby experiential learning opportunities for undergraduates, but moved to larger goals as experiences built up and as more and more public archaeology programmes provided inspiration for expanding research. The social impetus has been based on the simple proposition that when we know what happened around the places we live, work, pray, play, and so on we get a sense of place; the unique attributes of our surroundings, and that sense of place helps build community because the historical knowledge is a commonality. When the common heritage is commemorated by the community, we can build up social ties among residents and even visitors. This simple proposition makes sense to community leaders and the inclusive, critical multiplicity for heritage can avoid the racism and chauvinism recognized for heritage as a nationalistic homogeneous singularity. The public archaeology programme started slowly. Like many assistant professors with expertise in archaeology, when I started a tenure-track position in Anthropology at New College of the University of South Florida (now New College of Florida), I was encouraged to provide undergraduates with local excavation opportunities to augment my then ongoing research in the eastern Mediterranean. I was new to the west coast of Florida but, as I had done since childhood, I explored historic sites and tried to learn about the past of my surroundings. It was challenging. New College, a residential liberal arts college of about 800 undergraduates, sits at the border between two counties: Sarasota, which is best known for its namesake city, and Manatee, with Bradenton as

Entangled Objects from the Palestinian Past

Lewis presents all this material culture—the radio, the chairs, the tobacco, the coffee, the clothes the men are wearing—as symbols of the ‘immense and devastating changes’ which came out of the West over the last five centuries to change the Middle East in modern times (1995:3). This analysis marks a dominant interpretation of the recent Middle Eastern past. The recent past encompasses the era of Ottoman imperial rule, roughly the fourteenth through early twentieth centuries. According to the dominant paradigm, after the rule of Suleyman the Magnificent, the Ottoman Empire falls into decay and decline, becoming the ‘sick man’ of Europe. This image is one of stasis with the only source of change being Western European penetration of the empire. This story line implies that ‘reaction, rejection, and response’

A Historical Archaeology of the Ottoman Empire: Breaking New Ground

Community is known solely from survey. Nevertheless, both chapters argue for periods of only seasonal occupation of the communities, which further confounds estimating regional population. In both cases, ceramics and lithics suggest little dependence on the larger Chaco region. Part 2 consists of chapters by Winston B. Hurst (Edge of Cedars); Joseph Peter Jalbert and Catherine Cameron (Bluff Great House, Chimney Rock, Far View); Ruth M. Van Dyke (Red Mesa Valley sites), and Stephen R. Durand and Kathy Roler Durand (Guadalupe) that examine relationships between outlying communities and Chaco Canyon. The key question is whether or not the great house and its community were founded by emissaries from Chaco Canyon or by locals emulating Chaco style. There is no reason to expect uniform conclusions nor are any given. A principal criterion used to infer emissaries is the incorporation of otherwise hidden architectural details, such as banded masonry in plaster-covered walls. While this seems useful, it is troubling because observing such features depends on excavation and few great houses have been excavated.

Localised Capitalism in Global Historical Archaeology: A Discussion of the Archaeology of Improvement in Scotland

Dalglish is correct, historical archaeology is the archaeology of capitalism. Now the association seems obvious, capitalism is too important in the temporal responsibility of historical archaeology for it to be ignored or marginalised. Archaeologists, as Paynter (1988) pointed out, have always excavated, recorded, analysed, and interpreted evidence of capitalism. They were just rarely explicit about it. As historical archaeology becomes clearer regarding its subject matter, there needs to be more precise understandings of the complexity of capitalism, its uneven developments, and the variation in its expansion around the world.