Madeleine Butcher
Ph.D Student
Thesis Title: At the Gates of the Great Green Sea: Second Millennium interregional and regional trade and distribution from Tell el - ‘Ajjul and the Coastal Shephelah
Advisors: Prof. Oded Lipschits, Prof. Gunnar Lehmann and Dr. Paula Waiman Barak
Tell el- 'Ajjul, located in the southern Coastal Plain, in modern-day Gaza, was first excavated in the 1920s and 30s by a British expedition led by Flinders Petrie (1932), and again by a Swedish expedition in 1999 and 2000. This relatively small site yielded incredibly rich assemblages, including vast quantities of imported pottery, particularly from Cyprus and Egypt, as well as Egyptian scarabs, gold artefacts and faience. Although these discoveries placed Tell el- 'Ajjul at the core of scholarly attention it is a site barely understood. several attempts having been made to decipher Tell el- ‘Ajjul’s stratigraphy and connect it to regional chronological sequences and the broader historical story.
My research aims to revisit the long-neglected ceramic assemblage from Petrie’s excavations at Tell el-'Ajjul, a key harbour site during the Middle Bronze Age (ca.1900 – 1550 BCE). It appears that towards the end of this period, during the reign of the Asiatic people from the eastern Mediterranean, also known as the 'Hyksos', the site reached its peak as a crucial supply point to Egypt. The ceramic assemblage, stored for the past century in the Rockefeller Museum as part of the British Mandate in Palestine, can now be examined again. Using a multi-disciplinary approach, including typological studies and large-scale petrographic analysis of ceramic vessels and local geological formations as well as complimentary methods, I will offer new insights into its role within a wider regional context.
