SIFTING THROUGH THE DIRT ARCHIVES OF THE MEGIDDO EXPEDITION AT THE ORIENTAL INSTITUTE
Melissa Cradic, 2018 Study of Collections Fellowship Recipient
Excavating in Area H at Tel Megiddo.
With the generous support of the 2018 ASOR Study of Collections Fellowship, in May 2018 I visited the Oriental Institute Museum of the University of Chicago in order to research archival materials from the 1925-1939 expedition to Tel Megiddo (Israel). My project focused on the Oriental Institute’s excavation of Middle and Late Bronze burials attributed to Strata XIV-VII. The museum’s extensive archival collections encompass a broad scope of material and entailed careful examination of a variety of archival media, such as field and level notebooks, photographs and negatives, locus and registration lists, and letters between staff in the field and Oriental Institute directors back in Chicago.
These original materials provided primary data on burials at the site that are otherwise unavailable through published sources. The presentation of burials in the Expedition’s excavation reports Megiddo II (Loud 1948) and Megiddo Tombs (Guy and Engberg 1938), for example, often lacks key information that is now considered essential for documentation of human burials, such as context and burial type as well as osteological data of age, sex, and minimum number of individuals. The archives provide a wealth written and visual documentation that fills in the gaps of these
Cradic sifting through the archival materials at the Oriental Institute in May 2016.
volumes.
The aim of my research is to integrate these legacy data from the Oriental Institute’s expedition with recent findings from the site that have been uncovered by the renewed Megiddo Expedition. This latter project, conducted under the auspices of Tel Aviv University, uses the latest methods of excavation, documentation, and analysis. Because the published material poses challenges of consistency and reliability, integration of the two corpora is not possible without in-person consultation of the museum archives that improves the quality of the legacy data.
The archival research, conducted in two visits (May 2016 and May 2018), has yielded productive results. Altogether, I have been able to gather and verify information on approximately 120 burial contexts for which I had only sparse evidence, such as registration information. This research project has greatly enriched my dataset in both qualitative and quantitative terms, contributing to the creation of a broader, richer, and more accurate dataset of human burials at Megiddo than is available through the published excavation reports alone. The full results of my study will contribute to my current research project, which aims to contextualize and explain the diversity of funerary practices in the 2nd millennium B.C.E. Levant, with a special focus on commemoration activities and the complex process of becoming an ancestor in the ancient Near East. These findings build on the results of my doctoral dissertation, “Transformations in Death: The Archaeology of Funerary Practices and Personhood in the Bronze Age Levant” (Cradic 2017).
Field diary from January 12th-13th, 1938 from the Megiddo archives of the Oriental Institute Museum of the University of Chicago.
My research was supported by a grant from the Stahl Fund from the University of California-Berkeley Archaeological Research Facility (May 2016) and ASOR’s Study of Collections Fellowship (May 2018). I would like to express my sincere gratitude to the donor whose generous funding made this Collections grant possible and to ASOR for supporting and administering the program. I also wish extend special thanks to Oriental Institute Museum staff, particularly Dr. Anne Flannery, museum archivist, and Dr. Kiersten Neumann, curator, for facilitating my visit and providing access to the archives.
Melissa Cradic earned her Ph.D. in Ancient History and Mediterranean Archaeology at the University of California-Berkeley in 2017. She is Associate Curator at the Badè Museum of Biblical Archaeology in Berkeley, CA and Lecturer in the Department of Anthropology at Sonoma State University. She has excavated in Israel for a decade, serving as senior staff member and area supervisor with the Megiddo Expedition,and as Assistant Director of the excavations at Legio, a Roman military camp in the Jezreel Valley.
References Cited
Cradic, Melissa S.
2017 Transformations in Death: The Archaeology of Funerary Practices and Personhood in the Bronze Age Levant. Ph.D. dissertation, University of California, Berkeley.
Guy, P.L.O. and Robert Engberg
1938 Megiddo Tombs. Oriental Institute Publications 33. The University of Chicago Press.
Loud, Gordon
1948 Megiddo II. Seasons of 1935-1939. Text and Plates. Oriental Institute Publications 62. The University of Chicago Press.
