Andrea Creel
W.F. Albright Institute of Archaeological Research, Fellows, Educational and Cultural Affairs Fellow 2013-2014
I earned my MA and PhD from the Department of Middle Eastern Languages and Cultures (formerly Near Eastern Studies) at the University of California, Berkeley and my BA in Religious Studies from DePaul University. My research and teaching interests are in archaeology, religion, materiality, identity, and marginality (of people and places) in the ancient Middle East and Mediterranean, with a specific focus on Bronze and Iron Age Israel/Palestine and Jordan. I am also interested in the relationships between the ancient past of Israel/Palestine and Jordan and contemporary notions of religion, identity, and community and the roles that religion and archaeology play in constructing, entrenching, and deconstructing identities and ideologies.
My dissertation, "Connectivity on the Edge of Empire: Movement, Liminality, and Ritual in the Southern Levantine Drylands," explores connectivity and interaction in an ostensibly dis-connected arid and marginal landscape. I analyze ancient roadside ritual sites in the Sinai, the Negev, southern Jordan, and northwestern Arabia within the context of multiple, overlapping, and intersecting senses of liminality embedded in an arid and marginal landscape. In so doing, I consider how ritual sites along roadsides developed and operated as confluences of interaction for multiple communities and religious traditions in this region. The ways in which these communities understood and experienced this landscape often drastically differed, and the intersectioning of these communities generated an even greater variety of ways of seeing. I utilize textual, ethnographic, and archaeological materials to parse out some of these distinctions in the 6th-1st millennia BCE. This analysis explores how notions of liminality may or may not play into these various ways of seeing, and how liminality may be differently understood and experienced by these communities. In the final chapter of this project, I focus on the 8th century BCE site of Kuntillet ʾAjrûd in the Sinai and the 7th century BCE site of Ḥorvat Qitmit in the Negev as case studies that manifest these ancient traditions of movement and interaction and presage their acute intensification in later Hellenistic, Roman, Byzantine, Early Islamic, and Ottoman contexts.
I am a former National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellow and former Educational and Cultural Affairs Fellow at the W.F. Albright Institute for Archaeological Research. I am also a former curator and collections manager at the Badè Museum of Biblical Archaeology in Berkeley, California. I have excavated in Chicago, Illinois, Tel Ashkelon on the southern coast of Israel/Palestine, and Tel Jezreel in the Jezreel Valley of Israel/Palestine.
Supervisors: Benjamin W. Porter, Marian H. Feldman, Aaron Brody, and Rosemary A. Joyce
My dissertation, "Connectivity on the Edge of Empire: Movement, Liminality, and Ritual in the Southern Levantine Drylands," explores connectivity and interaction in an ostensibly dis-connected arid and marginal landscape. I analyze ancient roadside ritual sites in the Sinai, the Negev, southern Jordan, and northwestern Arabia within the context of multiple, overlapping, and intersecting senses of liminality embedded in an arid and marginal landscape. In so doing, I consider how ritual sites along roadsides developed and operated as confluences of interaction for multiple communities and religious traditions in this region. The ways in which these communities understood and experienced this landscape often drastically differed, and the intersectioning of these communities generated an even greater variety of ways of seeing. I utilize textual, ethnographic, and archaeological materials to parse out some of these distinctions in the 6th-1st millennia BCE. This analysis explores how notions of liminality may or may not play into these various ways of seeing, and how liminality may be differently understood and experienced by these communities. In the final chapter of this project, I focus on the 8th century BCE site of Kuntillet ʾAjrûd in the Sinai and the 7th century BCE site of Ḥorvat Qitmit in the Negev as case studies that manifest these ancient traditions of movement and interaction and presage their acute intensification in later Hellenistic, Roman, Byzantine, Early Islamic, and Ottoman contexts.
I am a former National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellow and former Educational and Cultural Affairs Fellow at the W.F. Albright Institute for Archaeological Research. I am also a former curator and collections manager at the Badè Museum of Biblical Archaeology in Berkeley, California. I have excavated in Chicago, Illinois, Tel Ashkelon on the southern coast of Israel/Palestine, and Tel Jezreel in the Jezreel Valley of Israel/Palestine.
Supervisors: Benjamin W. Porter, Marian H. Feldman, Aaron Brody, and Rosemary A. Joyce
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Talks by Andrea Creel
As such, I also interpret these sites within their particular contexts as sites of roadside ritual at specific points in the landscape with differing temporalities and relationships to their surroundings. Drawing on the works of Edward Casey, I characterize roads as “intra-places” and “inter-places,” places within places and the places between places. Roads merge the liminalities of spatial betweenness and movement. Desert roads, layered with another sense of liminality through their marginal and arid setting, thus generate a tension between connectivity, movement, rurality, and place. I suggest that the ritual practices at Ḥorvat Qitmit and Kuntillet ʾAjrûd derived much of their potency from these senses of liminality, each in their own distinct way.
I develop McCorriston’s analysis within the context of the Southern Levantine Drylands – the Sinai, the Negev, Southern Jordan, and Northwestern Arabia – in the 6th-1st millennia BCE. However, I also employ the works of Arnold Van Gennep, Catherine Bell, and Thomas Tweed to characterize this landscape as imbued with overlapping and intersecting senses of liminality – powers of transitioning and ambiguity – born out of movement and mobility, aridity, marginality, and betweenness. These senses of liminality are further (re)produced through a landscape increasingly littered with the visible remains of indigenous ritual sites, Egyptian mining expeditions, and roads.
Drawing on Edward Casey’s analysis of the interrelationship between the body and the landscape, I characterize roads as “intra-places” and “inter-places,” places within places and the places between places. Roads merge the liminalities of spatial betweenness and movement. Desert roads, also layered with senses of liminality through their marginal and arid setting, thus engender tensions between connectivity, movement, rurality, and place. I suggest that the entangled interaction between these senses of liminality generated a distinct potency to this landscape for multiple communities.
My case study focuses on the 8th century BCE site of Kuntillet ‘Ajrûd. After examining recovered artifacts in their architectural contexts, I argue that the amalgamation of location in a liminal zone, fortress like architecture and evocative art and inscriptions with the preponderance of small vessels suggests that votive deposition at Kuntillet ‘Ajrûd was intentionally restricted to vessels and, presumably, their contents. This both highlights the Near Eastern tendency to ritualize quotidian objects and demonstrates the highly localized character of ritual, which may be useful in analyzing other ritual spaces in the Near East."""
Thesis Chapters by Andrea Creel
Papers by Andrea Creel
As such, I also interpret these sites within their particular contexts as sites of roadside ritual at specific points in the landscape with differing temporalities and relationships to their surroundings. Drawing on the works of Edward Casey, I characterize roads as “intra-places” and “inter-places,” places within places and the places between places. Roads merge the liminalities of spatial betweenness and movement. Desert roads, layered with another sense of liminality through their marginal and arid setting, thus generate a tension between connectivity, movement, rurality, and place. I suggest that the ritual practices at Ḥorvat Qitmit and Kuntillet ʾAjrûd derived much of their potency from these senses of liminality, each in their own distinct way.
I develop McCorriston’s analysis within the context of the Southern Levantine Drylands – the Sinai, the Negev, Southern Jordan, and Northwestern Arabia – in the 6th-1st millennia BCE. However, I also employ the works of Arnold Van Gennep, Catherine Bell, and Thomas Tweed to characterize this landscape as imbued with overlapping and intersecting senses of liminality – powers of transitioning and ambiguity – born out of movement and mobility, aridity, marginality, and betweenness. These senses of liminality are further (re)produced through a landscape increasingly littered with the visible remains of indigenous ritual sites, Egyptian mining expeditions, and roads.
Drawing on Edward Casey’s analysis of the interrelationship between the body and the landscape, I characterize roads as “intra-places” and “inter-places,” places within places and the places between places. Roads merge the liminalities of spatial betweenness and movement. Desert roads, also layered with senses of liminality through their marginal and arid setting, thus engender tensions between connectivity, movement, rurality, and place. I suggest that the entangled interaction between these senses of liminality generated a distinct potency to this landscape for multiple communities.
My case study focuses on the 8th century BCE site of Kuntillet ‘Ajrûd. After examining recovered artifacts in their architectural contexts, I argue that the amalgamation of location in a liminal zone, fortress like architecture and evocative art and inscriptions with the preponderance of small vessels suggests that votive deposition at Kuntillet ‘Ajrûd was intentionally restricted to vessels and, presumably, their contents. This both highlights the Near Eastern tendency to ritualize quotidian objects and demonstrates the highly localized character of ritual, which may be useful in analyzing other ritual spaces in the Near East."""