Hello, welcome to today's brown bag talk with Dr. Aaron Brody. If you, those viewing on YouTube, if you have any announcements you'd like to share, you can please type them into the chat box and we will announce them when we see them. I'd like to start today by acknowledging that the archeological research facility is located in Huchin, the ancestral and unceded territory of Chicheno speaking online people, successors of the historic and sovereign Bruno Band of Alameda County. We acknowledge that this land remains of great importance to the Alameda people and that the ARF community inherits a history of archeological scholarship that has disturbed Alameda ancestors and erased living Alameda people from the present and future of this land. It is there for our collective responsibility to critically transform our archeological inheritance in support of Alameda sovereignty and to hold the University of California accountable to the needs of all American Indian and indigenous people. Next Wednesday, October 13, we will hear a talk called shaping an anthropological research path in diverse settings, a personal perspective by Dr. Sita Reddy from Reddy Anthropology Consulting. And next week we're also having a workshop that Nico Trivsovich has more information to share. Nico. Hello. Yeah, that's right. So we're having a workshop on the MLID GNSS or GPS units that we recently acquired at the ARF. And these are really versatile mapping devices, high precision like under two centimeters of error. And I'll show you show everyone how to configure them with RTK and with base and rover capability for use in remote places without RTK without cellular. So that's at 1pm on the 12th. It's Tuesday. Let me know if you're interested, right? And also I'd like to invite anybody with skills they'd like to share with the community to to offer another workshop. You don't have to be the world's expert, you just have to know how to use it and be one of the each other. So let me know. Write me at ARF-Labs at birthing.edu. Yeah, you can also find out more information about that on the ARF's website. And this will be in person. So it's taking place outside the ARF building next week. Thanks, Nico. Nico, if there's any, are there any announcements on the YouTube channel? Okay, so we'll proceed with our talk then. I'm happy to introduce Dr. Aaron Brody, who's going to speak to us today about archaeologies of economy and exchange and ancient Judah. Dr. Brody is the Robert and Catherine Vidal professor of the Bible and archaeology and director of the Body Museum at the Pacific School of Religion, which is located just in Dacey Berkeley. Dr. Brody has studied and worked on projects in Israel, Palestine, and Jordan. He's held research posts at both the Albright Institute of Archaeological Research in Jerusalem, the University of Haifa, and the American Center for Oriental Research in Amman. Recently, his research has focused on household archaeology, household religion, metallurgy, ethnicity, identity, and interregional trade at Tala Nasbe, the site that forms the principal holdings of the Body Museum at the Pacific School of Religion, as modes for understanding the complexities of everyday life of ancient biblical peoples. He and his team at the Body Museum have put together a year-long lecture series called Unsilencing the Archives, which is focused on archaeological labor and decolonizing of excavation archives. With lectures taking place on Thursdays at 9am Pacific, and the first of these will take place on November 4th, and you'll receive an announcement from us and on the websites of the ARF and the Body about this lecture series. So without further ado, I'd like to invite Dr. Brody to speak. Thank you, Dr. Kansa, for the wonderful introduction, and what a pleasure to be able to share my research and ideas with an ARF audience. So I'm just going to take a moment to share my screen with my talk. I'm assuming you can all see that fine. The economy of the late Iron Age polity of Judah is an enormous yet understudied topic. As many tech scholars have noted, there is frustratingly little economic evidence in our main textual sources for the lengthy timeframe that spans periods of dynastic monarchies in a region that straddles the modern borders of Israel, the Palestinian Authority, and Jordan. Neither of the limited epigraphic finds from the 10th to early 6th centuries BCE, nor the curated anthology of texts eventually canonized in the Hebrew Bible or Tanakh, are particularly replete with economic data. The corpus preserved in the Hebrew Bible pertaining to the period is rather large, yet tends not to be focused on economic matters, except the occasional passage relating how they impacted or were shaped by the royalty, royal administration, bureaucracy, and other elites. There are also occasional critiques of the excess of this royal system or the wealthy sprinkled throughout the books of prophecy dated to or alluding to the 8th to 6th centuries BCE. The Temple of Solomon in Jerusalem itself played its own roles in the storage and distribution of wealth for the dynastic polity, the Judean Kingdom, known in ancient sources as the House of David. We must acknowledge, however, that the royal and elite portions of ancient Israelite and Judean society likely made up less than 10 to 15% of those populations. Thus, our textual sources on the economies of the vast majority of peoples in these ancient kingdoms provide little information. We must turn to other sources to help fill in this huge information gap. In order to represent the remaining 85 to 90% of the population and their economies, we must rely on archaeology. This shouldn't come as a surprise to an ARF audience, but given my subfield, it's still, I think, tech scholars who are kind of framing a lot of these questions. Derogating the material remains from non-elite contexts will begin to fill this void. Given the fragmentary nature of both the archaeological and textual evidence, we should frame and interpret these data through the use of economic, anthropological, and archaeological theories that allow us to make better sense of varied elements of the economies of the past. And accordingly, in this brief talk, I will offer insights into the economy of Judah based on my archaeological analysis of a prominent village or town site, that of Tel-An-Nazbe, as a case study of an ancient economy. The research focused on inter-regional interactions at Tel-An-Nazbe and the localized mode of economy adds to the recent model put forth by Daniel Master in his article, Economy and Exchange in the Iron Age Kingdoms of the Southern Levant. Master's, quote, unquote, three major overlapping contexts of exchange. The monarchy, the market, and the trade route are further refined when considering evidence from Tel-An-Nazbe, a large fortified village or town in its Iron II phase. Tel-An-Nazbe, excuse me, reveals very little contact with the monarchy or state. There are regional interconnections based on secondary, if not tertiary, trade routes, and a localized marketing system of exchange and barter. The evidence from the excavations at Nazbe nuances and adds to the model that Master develops for his three main contexts of exchange. Reframing and remodeling the House of David's or the Judean polity's economy from a bottom up perspective, allowing us to reconsider the production and exchanges of the common people who made up the vast majority of the populations of this ancient patrimonial kingdom. So site hierarchies. Before detailing some of my archaeological analysis, it is important to establish Tel-An-Nazbe's location in the site hierarchy of Iron II Judah. Archaeological sites in the polity can be sorted into five main categories. You can see them listed here on the slide. Small villages, large fortified villages or towns like Tel-An-Nazbe, fortress sites, regional administrative cities, and regal ritual capital cities, which of course for Judah was the site of Jerusalem, which you can see on the map. You can also see where Tel-An-Nazbe is located, actually at the very northern part of the boundary of this ancient polity. Tel-An-Nazbe with its small size of three hectares, robust fortifications, agglutinated pillared houses, lack of monumental buildings, and reconstructed population of between 800 to 1,000 residents is categorized as a third tier large fortified village or town. Thus, its analysis provides insights into a non-urban, non-elite set of contexts and furthers our understandings of regionalized economy on the periphery of monarchic purview. This occurred within the small territory of northern Judah in proximity of its capital, Jerusalem, which is located, excuse me, 12 kilometers south of Nazbe along the trunk road through the central hill country. So in this, excuse me, in the site plan, you can see the wall that surrounds this three acre site marked on the top plan. So each one of these squares is 10 by 10 meters. What we need to look at, though, for the Iron II period is the phase that's marked in black. The later phases marked in blue and in yellow, of course, didn't exist at the time that we're considering in this talk. So within that city wall, though, just want you guys to pay attention to all of the architectural features which are a series of three room and four room houses or pillared houses, which are typical throughout the region, but are the only architectural features that we have within this wall that surrounds the subtle. So features and artifacts with probable connections to the Judean monarchy include the wall that surrounded the site in its Iron II phase, a relatively large number of seal impressed storage jar handles of the lamellic type, an inscribed seal whose owner, it says on the seal was a servant of the king or a royal official and cisterns not affiliated with households. I would argue, however, that this is material evidence for punctuated influence or contact with the higher echelons of the polity. The solid wall that guarded Naspe, the neighboring trunk roadway and the northern border of the kingdom suggest a state sponsored building project in the short term. Whether or not some sort of royally supported garrison was maintained within the settlement is not attested. Archaeologically and seems highly unlikely, despite biblical and extra biblical textual attestations to interregional and international warfare with polities further north and east in the iron to be to see periods. So if you look at the left hand side of this image, you can see that wall again that I showed you in the previous slide. As a top plan, you can see, you know, at least the foundations of it here, and those children laborers are are in there for a kind of scale. So really a massive public work. The only high number of lamellic impressions at the site reinforces its importance as a northern boundary of the Judean kingdom in the 8th century BCE. We are unsure of the use of the jars after their initial manufacture use for transport of dried goods or liquids and their distribution. It can also be stressed that the 88 lamellic impressions is the equivalent of a minimum of 21 to 84 jars. Since each jar could have had up to four of its handles stamped, like the example that you can see there in the center top of the slide. All four of those handles were stamped and represents a small percentage of the thousands of contemporary and later iron to storage jars that are unmarked and are found throughout the site. And inscribed seal was discovered in a later Byzantine tomb located outside of the walls of the settlement and you can see both the seal and its impression in the bottom portion of this image. Similarly an iron to see seal based on its paleography, that is the shape of its inscription, the seal names, the owner, jazz and I a as an Evan Hamela, or a servant of the king. This bureaucratic title suggests one royal official lived at and may have been buried at the site out of a reconstructed population work done by Jeff Zorn who is a graduate from UC Berkeley from several decades ago. A reconstructed population of between 800 to 1000 persons during the iron to be to see period. Finally, there are a large number of small stone line pits in an area of the of the southeastern portion of the site, which were constructed in an area of the settlement newly created after the solid wall was built surrounding the settlement. Unlike the remaining pits at Nozbe, these were not associated with a pillar house or a household courtyard, but were located in an open area of the site. Jeff Zorn has recently studied these openly accessible pits in depth and interpreted them as remains of related related to a state sponsored program of taxation by the government centered in Jerusalem. This seems a probable interpretation, although such an enterprise could have been run and maintained through local control with periodic or regular deliveries of sacks or jars of grain, taking place when requested by representatives of the central authorities residing in Jerusalem. Despite this minimal evidence for episodic connections with the Judean monarchy, the site has artifacts that elucidate inter regional interactions with neighboring policies in Phoenicia and transjordan, suggesting foreign exchange and contacts that were not aspects of royal ventures, or part of a centralized political economy. A handful of late Iron Age Phoenician pottery vessels have been identified, two jugs and an incense burner, along with typical Phoenician glass eye beads, and other glass beads, whose likely origins were along the central Levantine coast. And you can see those objects I just mentioned here. The three ceramic vessels, and then it's a comparative IB this one is not from a tell in Noss Bay, but there were several of those found as well. The overall numbers are tiny. The presence of of these Phoenician objects at a tertiary town or village settlement demonstrates the interconnectivity of lower level Judean sites with the Phoenician Mediterranean economy. The minority of these Phoenician objects have ritual significance or use, such as the eye beads, personal apotropaeic qualities or the ceremonial function of the incense burner. While one of the jugs was found in the only ritual context in a five household compound and may be interpreted as a libation vessel. These Phoenician objects may have arrived together with Cypriot artifacts uncovered at the site, which are primarily black on red juglets, valued for their contents of perfumed oil, and Cypriot Iron Age by chrome wares, possibly carried by the same traders traveling upland from the Mediterranean coast. Recent material science testing on several pillar figurines from Noss Bay demonstrate that they were made from the clay sources close to Jerusalem. These marketing connections between Jerusalem and Noss Bay suggests that the Phoenician and Cypriot products found at the site may have been procured in the capital city and not traded directly from the coast up to tell in Noss Bay. Although it is also possible that coastal traders stopped at Noss Bay to exchange their wares prior to arrival in Jerusalem, or that goods did not move directly, but in smaller segments down the lines of exchange. Other material culture from iron to be to see Noss Bay has clarified inter regional interactions to the east with the polities of trans Jordan. The material science testing on bronze bangles has shown them to be made from a leaded copper tin alloy whose copper ore was likely sourced from the mines of Wadi Fenan. You can see some of those bangles and the Wadi Fenan is located southeast of the Dead Sea with initial smelting taking place in workshops in the Highland region of Edom close to the copper sources. The technology conducted on the bangles, not yet sized and altered into jewelry suggests that these objects were created, according to serial Mesopotamian, and or Phoenician shekel weight standards. And you can see the, the numbers in the central part of the slide. That's an international sophistication and intentionality of the manufacturers and consumers of these bangles, which were produced in Edom, according to international measures of mass, exchange throughout the Levant, and then sized into jewelry with economic value in terms of their metal weight and social religious value in terms of their color shine and the sounds made when worn as pairs. And you can actually see in the black and white image in the top part of this of this slide. Two of those bangles in situ from a tomb worn around the forearm of this buried individual. And as a side note, so the bottom two bangles represented here that are C shaped are the ones that showed some kind of consistency in terms of their weights and a relationship to either the Phoenician shekel weights or serial Mesopotamian weights. That was sort of the first stage after manufacturing. The second stage was that after individuals had, you know, bartered for these objects, they were cut in size to fit on arms, upper arms as well, and as ankle it so down on the lower legs. It's not surprising that the O shaped bangles, like the ones that are shown at the top of this slide, don't follow any kind of particular set of weight patterns, because those were all sized, you know, to fit individuals. And recently identified Ammonite painted wears and blackwares from NASBE further clarified the connections between trans Jordan and northern Judah. The Ammonite painted wears are comprised of small and large bowls, or craters and amphorescos or small jar and jugglets. So here you can see on this image, some of the painted wears on the left and some of the blackwares on the right. So just here focuses this image focuses in on the painted wears and you can see the shapes in the pottery drawings on the right hand slide. The small jar and jugglets may have been valued for their contents. The open vessels that is the bowls and the craters must have been prized as decorated utilitarian objects themselves. Since they could not have kept any contents contained in transport. Similarly, the corpus of Ammonite blackwares can see in this image is made up primarily of small bowls and variations on bowls, including chalices and a tripod bowl you can see that tripod bowl. There it's the in the upper images it's the it's the central one you can see the foot there. As open vessels these blackware ceramics were exchanged as products themselves. I have visually identified 42 vessels or vessel fragments from NASBA from the NASBA corpus as trans Jordanian. And it is likely that there are other undecorated ceramics in the collection as well. This statistic far out numbers the contemporary Phoenician ceramics at the site, which I've already showed you. It suggests more frequent or robust connections to the east than to the northwest of the site. So here you can see some of the directions I'm suggesting it also highlights socio economic connections with Ammon and eat them. So those are the polities circled in blue and in red. This is the image while texts in the Hebrew Bible and epigraphic finds highlight conflict and rivalry between Judah and the polities of trans Jordan. Political enmity, however, does not preclude economic relations, as commerce and social contact often continues between peoples, despite antagonism among the ruling elite. The context of the stratified examples of trans Jordanian ceramics in the iron to phase that tell in NASBA may be used to elucidate the local mode of economy. The ammonite painted wears and blackwares show a relatively even distribution throughout the majority of the excavated portions of the site. So you can see that distribution here in this in this image. There are no significant concentrations of these ammonite wares. There are any signs of clustering of these imports in any particular building compound or specific area of the settlement. So patterning, a relatively even distribution of imported finds throughout a site has been highlighted as the prime indicator of marketplace exchange in recent archaeological studies, especially those in the Americas. Similar distribution patterns of the ammonite ceramics at NASBA can be best explained by the type of open access to goods provided by marketplace exchanges. The best to imported ammonite ceramics is not necessarily a function of wealth. Four out of seven or 57% of trans Jordanian wares found in architectural context came from three room houses, while three out of seven or 43% were from larger four room structures. Assume that wealthier families inhabited larger households than the fact that ammonite wares are less abundant in bigger domestic structures is a further indication of market exchange. As this suggests that families of different means had equal access to and bartered for the same types of foreign goods. This interpretation fits well with the scant textual evidence preserved in the Hebrew Bible that details several types of marketplaces and various modes of exchange in regal ritual centers and administrative cities. The patterning of ammonite imported wares at telling NASBA is the first material evidence presented that illustrates the utilization of marketing exchange in ancient Judah. Again, this image you can see the distribution, excuse me, of these both painted wares and black burnish wares, and then the percentages of in situ material is in the lower part of the slide. So discussion and conclusions. Through a focus on economy and exchange in the fortified large village town or site of telling NASBA. I've also offered evidence that expands on Daniel masters tripartite model of the economies of ancient kingdoms in the region. Taking this bottom up approach, focusing on the village and not the city on the common and not the royal on peripheral routes instead of the main roads. I'm going to go into the picture of the overall economies of late Iron Age Judah, an approach that can just as well be applied to contemporary neighboring sites or polities. Another third and fourth tier settlements exhibit very little evidence for royal contact, let alone control these village and town sites are projected to have housed over 85 to 90% of Judean agro pastoralist society and generated the majority of the agricultural and pastoral products in the kingdom. Thus masters first context of exchange, the monarchy quote unquote, leaves the vast majority of the ancient population and the main producers out of his model. His market context of exchange is more robust. Appropriately defining a tiered system of local and regional markets, which I would expand to include inter regional and international markets as well, making room for non royal initiative and control even between regions and nations, as is suggested by the Phoenician and trans Jordanian material evidence from iron to NASBA. In master's third context of overlapping exchange, the trade route needs to be further developed to include secondary and tertiary networks, like those by ways that connected telling NASBA to the northwest to Phoenicia and east to amen. Most exchanges were likely local within settlements themselves. There were several surpluses of agricultural and pastoral products and goods gifted and bartered within their kinship group and with neighbors. Regional exchanges of specialized craft products, such as utilitarian ceramics between settlements was quite limited and may have favored the secondary inter sherry routes. Regional and international exchanges typically favored the primary routes, but are represented along secondary routes as well. Expanding and nuancing our modeling of the late Iron Age economy and exchange allows us to bring those less advantage than the ruling elite into the picture and reveals varied tiers of differing exchange systems. The systems were held together and facilitated by a web of trade routes around which local domestic and imported products circulated and were distributed within and between households individual settlements regions and the polities of the late Iron Age Southern Levant. Staple and agricultural products, the staples of every households economy regardless of class, were primarily produced and consumed in a survival subs, subsistence economy, as has been shown by studies on zoo archeological remains from other sites. Regional exchanges may have circulated agro pastoral products and finished goods crafted from regionally available resources, such as ceramic vessels in their contents, which likely included grains, wine or olive oil, iron agricultural tools, brownstone vessels and tools, and chipstone tools as well. The only example of circulation between different regions within Judah itself can be traced through those lamellic jars that I showed you, the ones with the stamped handles, which were manufactured in the Shveila or the rolling hill country, but were filled with products in the Judean settlements of Hebron, Ziff, Soco, and Monsheet labeled on their handles. All four stamps are found at Telenazbe in the northern reaches of the kingdom at a considerable distance from the varied locations of the four sites where those handles were originally packed, excuse me, where those jars were originally packed. Some of these local and regional exchanges would have been conducted with the aid of the Judean weight system found at sites throughout the kingdom. So here in this image you can see some of those weights in the upper part of, it's in black and white, and some of those weights were inscribed as well. So we have a sense for how their metrology mapped on to their ancient names. The local regional subsistence economy coexisted with interregional marketing exchange systems for raw and finished goods, not regionally available. These included imported foreign ceramics exchanged as objects, such as the ones I described earlier coming in from the polity of Ammon, ceramic containers imported for their contents, semi-precious stone beads, you can see some of those in the upper right hand image, bronze bangles and fibula, shells from the Red Sea and Mediterranean, textiles, glass beads, glass weights, and cedar from Lebanon. These local, regional, and interregional systems overlapped with national and imperial tribute economic systems, dependent on taxation, produce from royal estates, tolls, gift exchange, tribute, and financial gains from state-sponsored warfare, all framed by a sophisticated system of silver bullion weight equivalencies and standards, and you can see some of that silver bullion in the upper left hand part of this slide. International goods and products imported into or circulated through Judah included ivory, carved ivories, silver bullion or hack silver, that's actually what you can see in the slide, silver and gold jewelry, wine, olive oil, tree resins, aromatic gums and spices, Buxus wood from Syria or Turkey, incense and spices from South Arabia and further east, semi-precious stones, carved tridac-ness shells, and dyed wool cloth. This reframing of our conceptualization of the ancient economy of Judah allows for a more holistic understanding of goods and products and their exchange and circulation within and between polities in the southern Levant. Our approach needs to be flexible enough to imagine subsistence economies, marketing economies, and tributary economies not only co-existing but intersecting and complementing one another, perhaps even competing with one another, held together by a web of overland and maritime exchange routes. By the end of the late Iron Age, the routes interconnected from the southern Levant through the Mediterranean, sorry I'll back up, you can see that on that map there, to the Atlantic coasts of Iberia and North Africa, to Egypt and Kush, Mesopotamia, Arabia, and further east to South Asia. Re-envisioning how various components of the southern Levantine segmentary agro-pastoral societies function within differing yet overlapping local, regional, inter-regional, and international exchange systems allows us to begin the important work of remodeling and reconstructing various economic foundations of the House of David. Thank you. And I'd like to support, I mean, excuse me, I'd like to thank ARF in particular for the invitation to share my ideas in this ground bag lunch format, and I'd like to thank Sarah who just popped up for continued support and partnership. And of course, thank the Bade Museum. A lot of the data is coming from that museum and Pacific School of Religion, my home institution. So I'll stop sharing my screen now. Thank you so much, Erin. That was fascinating and I'd like to invite people to put their questions into the chat on YouTube if you have any questions you'd like to ask Dr. Brody about his presentation. I wanted to point out that one viewer already mentioned that chapter called standing on a whole, holy ground, the storage pits at Tel Anasvai and the whole of the state, is going to be up here in a fast trip for Ion Sharon, and so we're pretty soon. And we also have a question from somebody asking if camels were present in the trade network in the region by Iron Age. Yes, definitely. They're found zoo or archaeologically in greater percentage in later periods, but by, especially by the late Iron Age, they're definitely domesticated and in use. So donkeys, of course, continued to serve as important pack animals as well. Yeah, so this time there probably is a mix of different. And Jeff Soren has popped in and answered that camels would be depicted in this Syrian Latvish release as Judahite animals and camel bones are found from the Iron too. I would also like to just highlight that I think this is a fabulous example of ongoing work drawing on existing museum collections and that from excavations from 100 years ago it's awesome to see. You know what well collected material can can lead to over decades and decades of new research and I so I love it if you could comment on that you're very familiar obviously with the collections at your institution. Are there attributes of the original collections that you would say were done especially well that have enabled this this research does ongoing research to happen I mean this is I guess I think kind of unusual to be able to draw on on materials excavated on the dial and so what kind of documentation that they do that that made their collections usable. We're extremely fortunate. And I joke but it's really true that the it it's the documentation that really is the gold mine for our museum. In that it was it really was founded and built around. Excavations you know that that were done. You know legally and then of course we have all of the documentation. No so they were done in the 20s and 30s, which means that you know important concepts like context meant something very different in in that day and age than it does today. But and the things like the the architectural plans as Jeff Zorn I know he's in the audience knows very well because he's worked with them quite closely throughout his career knows are, you know done to an incredible standard. And, you know, some of the issues of course are have to do with, you know, figuring out context within those architectural plans. And for that for the day. It really is. You know, maybe not so unusual but the fact that we still have all these records and can do contextual research is really quite vital. You know, something Sarah that you'd appreciate their their collection of animal bones was quite rudimentary. They probably didn't actually keep a lot of the the human skeletal remains, or if they were kept. We lack documentation about them. They may have stayed in country and we just haven't been able to find them. So it's, it's a bit of a hit or miss. You have to do this kind of research, you have to be willing to paint with a very broad brush. You know, it's not the same kind of fine tuned research that one can do. And then of course there are whole avenues for for instance, material science testing that can be done in in concert with contextual research, etc, etc. So I've I and of course others and so Jeff Zorn is still continuing to work on the collection. He and I brought together a series of studies a couple years back. So we encourage other researchers to to work on the collection. And then what we're finding with this, you know, with our current lecture series to is that the documentation itself, these archives contain important information as archives. Especially the the images and the letters from back in the day that can also give us a rich understanding, you know, of the, the world that, you know, that was around the excavations at the time, and can be reconsidered themselves. So it's, it's been a labor of love, but a real pleasure to work on such a collection. Now that's fantastic and I'm sure our viewers will be looking forward to hearing more about that, that new information coming out of the letters and about these, these topics that are there but haven't been really, really addressed or looked at. That's really a gold mine. So, um, we have a question about pig production has pig production completely dropped out by this time and you may not have a lot of data as mentioned in this archaeology. You know, I think it depends on where. So, you know, at this at the site and of course, again, so the zoo archaeological remains that we do have were, well, we don't know what the collection methods were, but it looks like they just went for sort of, you know, big, and especially intact animal bones and so it, it, you know, I guess presence and absence is possible. It's again tough to figure out the phasing so what phase they actually belong to primarily was discussing one out of five major phases of the site.  But one one interesting find specifically from Nasbe actually were wild boars tusks that were in a ritual context. So that that that's not quite related to to pig production, but it's a little bit of a porcine aside, I guess I could say. This is the wrong site to check, you know, but my understanding is that pork production within the boundaries of Judah in the later iron age is is, you know, minimal to non existent. But if you go outside of the, you know, the quote unquote boundaries of this polity. I'm sure that it would would increase but it just depends on on where you're looking. Yeah, Jeff Storn has commented now again that tell us and now space really gold mine for our kind of a museum based research, just related to that I as I understand it's the collections are housed and three different institutions in the US is that or maybe I got that wrong but if you could comment just about how things are sort of dispersed and obviously different people are doing different research projects on all sorts of aspects of this. One question, how do you have plans for how all of this is sort of shared back and you know if there's new research done, because it's somehow feedback into the databases or the project documentation in some way that other than you track that that's, I know that's a big challenge, I'm not trying to throw you under the bus. So as was typical in the 20s and 30s. You know I don't know how much your audience knows. So, following the, it was, this is the time of mandate of mandate rule in Palestine, and the, the, the objects were were legally split. So this is something called partage that took place I think in all, and actually still takes place in some in some modern policies in the region but. So we received actually more than 50%, but so we have a portion of the objects from the site but the body museum actually has all of the documentation. And that all stayed with the excavators who were based at Pacific School of Religion in Berkeley. But there are important collections that are at the Rockefeller Museum in Jerusalem, and also at the Nelson Atkins Museum in Kansas City that had more to do back in the day with financial support that that the Nelson Atkins Museum was, was giving to help fund the excavations. And so they, they got some artifacts in exchange for that again, that was something that was very typical. You know, you can think about collections at the Met from excavations that they co sponsored back in the 20s and 30s, or at the Penn Museum of anthropology and archeology, for instance from over.  But again, extremely fortunate to have all of the documentation with us in Berkeley and we're trying our best to digitize and of course, you know, one way to unite all of these collections is virtually. And so, you know, if I, I'm touching what if I live long enough, hopefully that will be accomplished before I, before I retire from the directorship, but you know, we shall see. And, you know, I think we're all we're all sort of learning from shelter in place days that sometimes you know a sort of virtual connection between databases or collections, you know, might be as useful as a as a physical kind of connection, if that makes sense. Yeah, and these talks provide some good exposure for the archives that you that you have there and so hopefully that will encourage us to draw on them. I just want to mention that a viewer has mentioned that there's a good article in pigs in Israel by lead our stuff your hand and your Eastern archaeology published in 2019. And then make Conky has said thank you for the wonderful wonderfully anthropological approach to these data. It's very different in some ways from more traditional approaches to this time period and so I think that sums up nicely. I may be, you know, preaching to the choir here. But yeah, I, and again I think there are incredibly rich data sets. And I've been I mean that I really focused in of course on on the site over which I have her view and, and I am encouraged I should say and of course you know in a short there are some very fine studies on the zoo archaeology of this period of little less so but it's it's becoming more prevalent on on agricultural remains. So as those kinds of data become more of a focus and of course are collected and interpreted better. They, they answer some, you know, very important foundational questions. But I find, you know, sort of, it's not quite universal but you know specialist dealing with ceramics and with architecture which seem to be, at least in our, you know, sort of narrow subset, still very kind of traditionally done. You know, might not be posing the same kinds of questions. And so very rich data sets, but we need to start both collecting things, you know, properly, and, you know, thinking to, to research them and ask these kinds of questions, because that and I, you know, I felt encouraged actually, you know, finding this has been happening also, you know, in Mesoamerica and other parts of the globe, where kind of traditional framings of questions of the economy are finally just beginning to be inverted in many ways so there may have been you know individual studies on aspects that kind of push back against a very kind of top down view of the ancient economy but I think it's still incredibly prevalent for studies on the ancient Middle East, and I think begs reconsideration. Here, here. Thank you. That's a great place to end we run out of time and I want to thank you again so much for joining us today for giving this fascinating talk, and we'll see everyone next week. Thanks Aaron.


Well, good morning, ladies and gentlemen. Thanks for joining us here today on day two of the annual meeting 2014, a 44th annual meeting, and a meeting with a theme which is very much dominated by dialogue and action around increasing entrepreneurship and tackling youth unemployment. Professor Clyde Schwab of the World Economic Forum indeed himself said that intergenerational crisis was the biggest challenge we face today. So on that note, I'm delighted here to be with my esteemed colleagues who will be talking about and launching a scheme to encourage entrepreneurism in Europe. This is the launch of startup Europe. Before I ask my colleagues to say a few words and explain the scheming in more detail, I just introduced them. So, in my immediate left here is Jose Maria Alvarez-Peite, Chief Operating Officer, Telefonica, needs an introduction, Needy Cruz, Vice President, Commissioner for the Digital Agenda European Commission in Brussels, and the Co-Chair of the Governors for Information and Communication Technologies Industries 2013. And I'm joined on my far right by Natalie Boulanger, Senior Vice President, Orange Startup Ecosystem, and also Mr Verna Hoyer has also joined us. I'm very, very welcome to you too, sir. I would just like to encourage first of all to invite Ms Cruz to say a few words and talk about the importance of this scheme and how you intend to reinvigorate startup culture in Europe. It is a fascinating issue that we are sitting together, and I'm delighted that main players in the business world and in the banking sector are joining and giving a little bit more explicit information. What is at stake that we really need a startup mindset and that it is talking about an opportunity and an instrument for making a difference and talking about Europe, being responsible for the European agenda, giving an instrument for just changing it. Europe needs thriving startups, no doubt about that. Politicians, governments, commissions are not creating jobs. It is the business world, it is everyone who is active in the outside world, but we, of course, have a responsibility. We pretend not to be bureaucrats. Anyhow, if you think we are bureaucrats, we don't create jobs, but we have to give comfort to a climate in which it is possible and in which it is giving a push. The right policy supports, so to say, and that means also removing obstacles. We are aware that there are obstacles, still obstacles, so to say. Being aware of that, we have to act. I'm committed to support startup and investor communities to improve their own conditions where they can, and that is how we came to be together. And together in this room doesn't mean that it's only for this press conference, but it is because the intention and the goal is combining us. We are on the same page. And what I'm mentioning, and I've mentioned it before, and certainly after my recent visit to Athens, taking over the Greek presidency, was an event where the commission was attending, and I took the opportunity to just push another activity and giving a hand for that. The Dutch ambassador in Athens just cleaned up the fitness room in the embassy. It is, by the way, a huge fitness room. It's a basement and so on. Get rid of all those, and he was mentioning to his people, do it at home or elsewhere. And he gives just opportunities for startups. He organized mentors, researchers, bankers, and so on. And he just opened the door, and so far there are 20 startups. There is a long waiting list, and I am absolutely certain that type of giving opportunities and possibilities is at stake. So tech entrepreneurs in Europe, males and females, by the way, and that is extremely important. We can't afford to neglect 50% of our population, so to say. What is at stake now? We are starting early stage investors are getting organized, adding their own specific manifestos to give one example. But those entrepreneur demands is the need for a new mindset. And therefore the new think tank we launched today is extremely important. And I am very delighted, very much delighted that Telefonica Orange and the European Investment Bank are attending this press conference and will give you far more information. But thanks heaven, they are not the only ones. We have a long list, and we can, in the meantime, prove for Telefonica was sitting here last year, and they filled in. And we badly need those examples to have that change of mindset. And it's not talking about a generation that starts 23 or whatever, it starts much earlier on. And that is fascinating in, for example, the campus party that is backed and organized by Telefonica, but there are a couple of other similar events. There the youngest are 13, 14 years old, and then we are talking. And if that mindset is just coming up, so I'm delighted to listen to all the examples of Telefonica of Orange of the European Investment Bank. It is just role models and we badly need them. Thank you, Commissioner Cruz. Jose Maria of Ares Pelete from Telefonica, but perhaps you could talk about the commitment and the role of the Telefonica in a large corporate such as your own complain in this agenda setting initiative. Thank you very much, and thank you very much, Commissioner Cruz, once again for having us here, jointly with the Commission. This is not something new. We were discussing this with the Commission for a long while, and in fact we have been very active since then. Europe needs successful stories of entrepreneurs because innovation was flying away from Europe. If you wanted to be successful in a startup in a very innovative project, it looks like Europe was not the place to be. And this is starting to change, and I think this is the kind of mindset that we need to have that you can be very successful because Europe has always been a place, very innovative place, and a place where standards of technology, standards of innovation have been created. So that's where our concern, that we wanted innovation to stay in Europe, to be very active in Europe, and therefore to be a crucial part of our strategy in Europe. And we agree politicians do not create jobs. This is not the role. The role is to create the framework and to create the infrastructure and the policy to make sure that this framework, this mindset can be positive and can be expanded. And this has been the case for a little while. So therefore we cannot blame the lack of a legal framework. It can always be improved, but we are in the right direction. That's why we joined last year the initiative of Commissioner Cruz. We committed. We did not just join. We committed as well to some specific targets. We have overperformed those targets. And I think this is good for Europe, for what we are trying to do jointly, but on top of that for our own company, because those entrepreneurs getting close to this kind of innovation, getting closer to this kind of disruptive ideas is helping us to change Telefonica, to do a better company, to change and to create what is called efficient innovation, to change the way we do things and to do it better, to do it in a much more innovative and productive way, and therefore to be better as a company. We have created several programs. Those programs have a scale, and therefore we have track record, and we have specific figures that we can share. You can visit physical spaces where we are creating innovation, where we are fostering startups, where we are fostering and partnering with young people that are creating their own business. So therefore we are not talking about projects, we are talking about realities. We have filtered more than 23,000 projects in the last three years, and we have created more than 300 startups just in the last three years. We are also teaching code at schools, through theme big schools, we are creating apprenticeships on the startups, therefore it can be done. We cannot blame it on the framework, we cannot blame it on the regulation, it can be done, and it has a very positive impact on your business. In September we supported the startup manifesto, issued by the commission, because we think it is the right time, because now on top of everything that we have been telling so far, we have another problem in Europe which is youth unemployment, and we need to find ways to solve that problem as well. I deeply think that fostering entrepreneurship is part of that solution. Therefore we are committed, we have delivered, we are committed to deliver even more. We are fully aligned, but we also think it is very positive for a company like us to get close to this kind of mindset because it helps to build a better company as well. Thank you, so very welcome remarks, and of course the forum as well is very active in fostering entrepreneurship. It is one of our flagship schemes in Europe, and we continue to enjoy working productively with all the stakeholders at this meeting to foster that. I would just like to now ask Natalie Boulanger, Senior Vice President of the Orange Starter Ecosystem, to maybe tell a bit about how you are involved in driving entrepreneurship in your organisation. European Union was first built through the melting pot of the coal and steel community, transforming tools of wars into resources for economic development. Today's coal and steel is the startup ecosystem. The digital economy is both driving economic growth and improving dramatically our daily lives, e-health, e-education, smart cities, smart homes. In a nutshell, smart and sustainable civilisation. That's why, at Orange, we are very proud to be associated with those two initiatives, with the two bright programmes which reflect our approach to open innovation and our commitment to support start-ups, scale-ups and become European leaders. Therefore, we also seek to contribute to economic growth in Europe and courage job creation and help future talents. Open innovation is part of our DNA, and we already launched several initiatives to support start-up scale-ups, and especially we created Orange Publicist Fund because start-ups need money. Also, we launched Orange FAB, our Worldwide Acceleration Program, dedicated to start-ups which already have a product or service developed to help them to reach the market and go international. Why accelerating innovation for our customers? Our start-ups also first need customers and revenues, so it is a win-win programme for both Orange and the startup ecosystem. We also created, in partnership with Girls in Tech, a pan-European challenge to promote start-ups founded or co-founded by women. Of course, we are willing to go further together thanks to SEP and DEF initiative to help start-ups to scale-ups. Thank you so much. And last but not least, Mr Werner Heuer, President of the European Investment Bank. Thank you very much. Let me first of all thank Commissioner Cruz for inviting me when she calls I'm there, as always, because we are cooperating very well between the Commission and the European Investment Bank Group on the digital agenda. Normaly, we are talking about big tickets on broadband coverage and things like that. Now, we are talking about the complement to this, and this is SMEs. SMEs are very innovative and which are absolutely needed. When it comes to SMEs in Europe, we have one major problem that we need to address aggressively, and that is the lack of equity culture in Europe, which makes it easier for SMEs to get started and get going and to get continuing. So the subsidiary of the bank, of the EU bank, the European Investment Fund is strongly concentrating on both these pillars, SMEs on the one hand and innovative technologies on the other hand. So it goes without saying that we observe and support this initiative very strongly. I think in view of the fact that we have already an investment in 3,800 technology-oriented SMEs in the portfolio, and that we will be able in the next years until 2020 to invest around a billion per year euros into SMEs. There will be a high concentration towards innovation-oriented companies. By the way, when I say SMEs, I would like to complement what has been said about the issue of youth unemployment. I think the solution or the mitigation of the huge problem of youth unemployment must come from SMEs mainly and therefore innovation-oriented support for SMEs via equity on the one hand and strengthening of the mismatch overcoming in the preparation of young people for jobs in innovation and technology-oriented spheres is essential. So on behalf of or upon the request of the European Council, we are heavily investing in the field of youth unemployment or fight against youth unemployment, and these things go very well together because it is the most promising field in which you can invest. If you invest in young people and in your technologies last word, Europe is in a deep crisis and we are so stuck in the crisis that we are sometimes overlooking the fact that there is a life after the crisis. And for the life after the crisis, the global competition, we need to be better prepared. This is why I particularly welcome this initiative towards startups in the field of your technologies. Thank you very much. Thank you, sir. Would you mind if I add again, and I'm repeating myself, so the launching today of the Think Tank is combining all those activities of the banking world, the companies that are active in this field, but also the universities and research institutes, and that combination is the type of a broad church, if you allow me to say it. So it helps translating the startup manifesto and the startup manifesto was a product and is a product of startups, but in the meantime very successful eight startups who were confronting the commission, who were confronting the council with the leaders of the European member states with, please, there is talent, and rightly said by Werner, please come out of your comfort zone and comfort in this case, not completely comfort, but come out of your way of thinking as you did, there are opportunities and people are waiting, the younger generation, but by the way startup can also be an older one. Thank you very much. Indeed, I'm reminded of a lot of the talk before this meeting, which was indeed about moving away from the crisis mindset and actually taking some time and finding the intellectual space to start planning long term and thinking about moving forward. Before we hand over to questions, I'd just like to ask one of my own, if I may, maybe it's the old journalist in me. We talk a lot about competitiveness at the World Economic Forum and we see in Europe a competitiveness divide. Can you perhaps talk about how you see startup culture helping narrow this divide and what role startups can have in creating a more unified level of competitiveness across Europe? They are, per definition, out of the box thinkers. They are not accepting what we are used to, so there it starts. They, in most cases, are in a situation where they are thinking of new economic models and where in the way that both, or that the three other members of the panel are describing, are taking opportunities and backing them. So competitiveness is at stake and I am absolutely certain that we have to just narrow the gap. Also talking about a global scene and it's not anymore for sometimes people are saying, why not a Silicon Valley in Europe? And I'm always saying, come on, not copying Silicon Valley. We have a culture, we have our own opportunity and our own business models and make with our values the best out of that and then it seems to be that there is a two-way traffic. Youngsters, startups are coming over from other parts of the globe and I think you have an excellent example, Jose Marie, with the founder of 20. Yes, we are finding examples, we are finding specific examples of people that is coming from the US and from other parts of the world. But in this case it's an example of a person coming from California to find their startup in Europe. And when we ask him why, why is he doing that while he has another ecosystem, probably more favorable ecosystem down there, he says that he is finding in Europe things that he is not able to find elsewhere, which is namely a different culture, a more environmental and more social oriented culture. And on top of that he finds that education is probably as good here that it is there. And there is a brighter perspective here because competition is just starting here. So do we have some pillars that we can build? We have the education, we have the framework, we have a tradition of innovation in Europe as well and we are starting from a new stage. So I think that we have very positive things to offer to people that would like to come to Europe to create their own startups here. And I think that by doing that we can shift a little bit because it looks like everything has been globalized but innovation that is supposed to happen in very specific places. Olivier, what we were discussing, it's not only the northern part of Europe or whatever part, it is all over Europe. A very good point, thank you. I'll see if there are any questions. You mentioned in the pre-briefing this is also about the startup Europe partnership. What's different about this partnership as opposed to other initiatives in the European Union and sponsored by the Commission? How is this, besides the partners who are involved, how is this going to really seek to make a big difference in Europe in the culture and the opportunities for this ecosystem to improve? Thank you. I'm not saying that we are replacing other initiatives and we should learn from each other and this one is really the answer on the manifesto that was at the table. And the manifesto for me was a global manifesto in a way for talking again about those founders, successful founders, the eight successful founders. Four of them with US passport but acting in Europe, it was their plea for you have to change your climate in Europe if you are interested in attracting more startups. And then you need a body and that is the bro church so to say, the think tank and that is also the answer to the council of presidents and prime ministers. That we are aware that within a combination of universities, researchers, bankers and the business world, we can give an answer. And if you are listening to Jose Marie but also to the orange examples, you are talking about numbers and we need role models. We need to make it clear close to ourselves that sitting at home is no alternative only in the app developing world. The last two years in Europe 800,000 jobs are created so or were created so then you are talking and not every startup initiative is a success but then we are coming back to the failure too. We have to change our mindset and we have to prove that you need to have failures too. For otherwise, you didn't do Europe most.