December 9, 2024
Congratulations to the individuals, projects, and publications that received AIA Awards. They will be formally recognized at the 2025 AIA Awards Ceremony, which will take place during the 126th Annual Meeting. We have contacted this year’s winners to gather insights about their projects, experiences, and what inspired them to pursue a career in archaeology.
Andrea Berlin (Boston University)
Award: Gold Medal Award for Distinguished Archaeological Achievement
What drew you to archaeology?
I am an archaeologist specializing in daily life in the Classical Near East, meaning the Hellenistic and Roman eras. The subject and region captured me on when, at 17 years old, I went on a dig in Israel. The year was 1973; the site was Tel Sheva, ancient Beer Sheva. I excavated a small house, filled with objects: store jars, cooking pots, drinking cups, spindle whorls – you name it. All these goods made me wonder about the people who had lived there, about their day to day lives. Right after the dig ended, I entered college and declared an archaeology major. But in classes I learned only “high culture” — sculpture, architecture, and painting. I wanted to see regular people, to think about their lives as we do our own — filled with the mundane and momentous, sometimes affected by wars and political programs but usually bypassed by “history.” When I eventually got to graduate school, I chose to write a dissertation on household pottery, the most abundant yet least well studied of archaeological remains. I wanted to write the kind of history that ordinary people lived, and made.
Tell us about your history with the AIA:
I’ve been an AIA member since college days, which were 50 years ago! I was an AIA Trustee for two stints (2005-6 and 2012-17). I traveled the country as a national lecturer from some 20 years, including the honor of being both the Joukowsky and the Norton lecturer (2008-09, 2018-19). Finally, in 2009 I was awarded the Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching Award.
What’s next for you professionally?
I am working on completing writing for two large long-term projects – and also launching a big new project. The large ones to finish are: 1) the final excavation reports for my excavations at Tel Kedesh, in northern Israel (along with my co-director, Sharon Herbert); and 2) a book called Beyond The Temple, about daily life in Palestine during the later Second Temple period.
The big new project is a series of ceramic handbooks based on material on the Levantine Ceramics Project, an online enterprise that I launched in 2011. These will be user-friendly resources for excavators and students, hopefully providing essential guides on Mediterranean and Near Eastern field projects, where it is common to recover pottery that falls outside the expertise of available staff. They will focus on a class of pottery, a specific region and/or era, or a particular ceramic phenomenon (e.g., handmade wares). They will be published as both open access downloads and hard copies. The first one, devoted to the LRA 1 amphora, should be out by Spring 2025. The second, devoted to Eastern Sigillata A, should be out by next fall.
Do you have any advice for aspiring archaeologists?
I do! It appears in the form of an essay on the AIA website, called “A Career in Archaeology”: https://www.archaeological.org/programs/educators/introduction-to-archaeology/a-career-in-archaeology/
What achievement are you most proud of?
I think I am most proud that archaeologists now regard pottery as a valuable category of historical evidence. From my first days working at Tel Sheva, when I picked up a whole cooking pot and wondered what someone had made for dinner, I have been convinced that ceramics are a key to the lockbox of history – because pottery helps us see people, and what they are up to. I have spent my career studying, interpreting, and publishing pottery in such a way as to encourage others to see it that way too – and I hope and think those efforts have borne fruit.
When it comes to pottery, it’s not just about study – it’s also about how we get the information out there. So the other achievement I am proud of is the Levantine Ceramics Project (https://www.levantineceramics.org), a truly open-access resource for sharing and using information about ceramics that I founded in 2011. Since then, almost 700 contributors from around the world have added almost 20,000 vessels and other data, making it the world’s biggest repository for archaeological ceramics. The LCP helps scholars use pottery to study people – who, after all, are our real subject. It’s a way to bring scholars and students together across time and space, to pool our knowledge and speed our way towards future discovery, insight, and understanding.
Questions? Learn more about AIA Awards here or reach out to awards@archaeological.org
