Women versus Wheelbarrows: Labor and British Archaeology in Late Ottoman Palestine

In the summer of 1912, Duncan Mackenzie, director of the Palestine Exploration Fund's (PEF) archaeological excavations, sacked several dozen women who had been working on the dig at Ain Shems, west of Jerusalem. On the large-scale excavations that typified archaeology in Palestine in this period, women were mainly employed to carry the baskets of spoil filled by the men digging and mattocking the earth itself.¹ Occasionally, they also sieved soil for small finds, although not, as far as we know, as Ain Shems. But according to Mackenzie, women complicated labor relations on the site: he claimed that they caused small-scale rifts and feuds and formed work cliques with their male relatives, who were reluctant to push their own wives, daughters, sisters or cousins to work harder.

Mackenzie's solution was to replace his female employees with wheelbarrows. He started to plot the removal of women laborers in May, when he wrote that "I am going to see whether it may not be possible to find some barrows at Jaffa to take their place,"² and reported by July 1912 that:

Barrows were introduced as an innovation to take the place of female labour and it was found that one able bodied youth with barrow was able to accomplish the work of four women. Another advantage was that we could be more independent of local conditions of labour which are often unfavourable in the Valley of Sorek.³

Figure 1.

PEF excavation showing female laborers carrying spoil. Image courtesy of the Palestine Exploration Fund.

Figure 2.

Women workers sieving for small finds at Gezer/Tell Jezar. Image courtesy of the Palestine Exploration Fund.

Figure 3.

PEF excavation, with both women laborers and heavy wooden wheelbarrows. Image courtesy of the Palestine Exploration Fund.

A fortnight later he informed his PEF employers that through the switch from women to wheelbarrows he had cut his workforce at Ain Shems from 90 to 30,⁴ and reiterated the benefits of these measures: namely a cut in the overall wage bill, more efficient labor via reduced social interaction and increased movement of spoil, and—repeated in several letters, which suggests it was of most importance to Mackenzie—independence from fluctuations in the labor supply to which this excavation seems to have been especially prone.

The history of archaeology has been, and to some extent still is, dominated by studies of dead white men, often combined with religious mysticism or tales of adventure. But the records of excavations taking place in late Ottoman Palestine also have the potential to yield valuable insights into a notoriously difficult-to-study subject: the lives of rural village women. As shown by Mackenzie's comments, these archives need to be read against the grain, filtered through an awareness of orientalism, racism and misogyny. But with these caveats in mind, such records can yield material which disrupts both the orientalist imagery of rural scenes straight from the Bible, and the idealized and timeless peasant women of Palestinian nationalist iconography.⁵ The archives concerned vary in nature; sometimes information can be gleaned from published material, when excavation directors such as Mackenzie or his predecessors Frederick Jones Bliss and R.A.S. Macalister describe the environment on their digs prior to detailing the finds. More information is often to be found in letters describing daily life on site: Bliss, born in Lebanon to American missionaries, spoke fluent regional Arabic and took an active, if paternalistic, interest in the lives of his workers, whilst his successors wrote more about problems with their employees and the wages allocated to them (adult men were at the top of the pay scale; women and children often received only half as much). Only Bliss mentions the names of significant numbers of workers. The records from the Harvard Semitic Museum excavation at Sebastia, near Nablus, meanwhile, include less narrative description of life on-site but do...