COMMUNITY ARCHAEOLOGY RESEARCH AT TELL HISBAN
Brittany Ellis, 2018 P.E. MacAllister Fellowship Recipient
This year marked the 50th anniversary of the start of the Tell Hisban excavations in Hisban, Jordan. A lot has changed since the project’s inception in 1968. The project’s first director, Siegfried Horn,
Taking notes during an interview on the site.
had hoped to find evidence linking the site to the biblical site of Heshbon and the Old Testament story of the Exodus. When it became clear that the evidence was not there, the project shifted to focus on the Roman, Byzantine, and Islamic periods of occupation and today, the site is one of the foremost places for researchers to study Mamluk history and daily life because of its rich collection of Mamluk farmhouses, a garrison, storerooms, and a bath complex. What brought me to Hisban, though, was none of these things. I came for the people of Hisban, who have been living with and working at the site for generations. As a student studying both archaeology and social anthropology, I am most interested in the intersections and interactions of living and past societies in places like archaeological sites or museums. For my undergraduate honors thesis, I am researching the evolution of community-based research practices in the field of archaeology. Hisban is serving as a case study for me because since, 1996, the project has had an explicit community focus. People from the town had always been involved in the project as hired workers or foremen, and there had also been a substantial number of other Jordanian students, professors, administrators, and even royalty who have been involved in the project over time. But starting with the second phase of the project, there have been a series of community-based initiatives to increase interest in and
At the 50th Anniversary Celebration at Tall Hisban with Shahad Mashallah, who helped organize the festival and worked with the field school throughout the field season.
involvement at the site as well as provide other economic and educational opportunities. The project has sponsored English classes, vocational trainings, school trips, field schools and helped to create the Hisban Cultural Association, a locally-run, non-profit organization.
I came to Hisban this year as a student in the field school with the intention of learning more about the relationships between the foreign-run archaeological project and the local people through participation in the excavations, interviews, and archival research. I encountered many different perspectives of the project and its impact on the community as I worked each day with the foreign and Jordanian students and workers and went to the many events and meetings in the town. Some families in the town had been involved at the site for two or three generations and believed that the project created a lot of opportunities in the town for work, practicing English, learning about other cultures, and learning about the history of their land. For others, the site was just a place for a summer job. Some members of the community knew a lot about research at the site, having learned from the archaeologists there about the Roman, Byzantine, and Islamic periods of occupation; others told me the Americans on the site are just looking for gold—a common narrative in the country. Members of the Hisban Cultural Association had big aspirations of building a
Exploring the underground cave system at Tall Hisban.
guesthouse, museum, and other amenities to increase tourism to the area, but they also used their involvement in the project to boost their own standings in local politics. Ultimately, Tell Hisban and the archaeological project there are deeply embedded in a web of different personal relationships and social processes, and at times, working through these has been overwhelming for me, but I am grateful I got to be involved in the project. I forged very close relationships with some of the families during the course of my work which made the experience more special than I could have imagined.
Finally, a lesson I learned at Hisban that I think can and should be applied in almost any context is that the basis of collaboration, engagement, or partnership has to be mutual respect. Respect is built and shown in simple ways—learning people’s names, sharing responsibility and work, making the effort to understand one another, being willing to learn from someone else—but I cannot overemphasize how crucial it is. Without it, all other community-based initiatives can’t take root and have a lasting, positive impact. As I work to synthesize the hundreds of pages of notes I’ve taken and the hours of interviews I’ve recorded, I am looking forward to continue learning about Tell Hisban, its history, and its people. Finally, I want to thank the co-directors of the Hisban Cultural Heritage Project – Dr. Bethany Walker, Dr. Øystein LaBianca, and Maria Elena Ronza – for allowing me to be part of the project. I also want to thank participants in the 2018 field season and members of the Hisban Cultural Association, the Hisban Women’s Association, the Madaba Directorate of the Department of Antiquities, Hazaa Al-Barary, and Dr. Zeidan Kafafi for their time and support. I am grateful to the American Schools of Oriental Research as well as the American Center for Oriental Research—my home base during my time in Amman—for supporting my project, too.
Brittany Ellis is a senior at Harvard University, where she studies archaeology, social anthropology, and Arabic. Her undergraduate honors thesis focuses on the emergence of community-oriented archaeological research, using the Hisban Cultural Heritage Project in Jordan as a case study. Brittany serves as a senior news executive for The Harvard Crimson newspaper, a student member of the Harvard Museums of Science and Culture Advisory Board, and a 2018-2019 Science, Religion, and Culture Research Fellow at the Harvard Divinity School.
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