Knitting History From Cultural and Environmental Debris (Unpublished)

Tazeen Hasan looks into the life and work of Dr. Joseph Greene, Curator and Assistant Director, Harvard Semitic Museum.

A Coincidence led him to the field of archeology

In the year 1972, a young philosophy student from Louisiana volunteering for a Catholic School near West Bank, Palestine was intrigued by an opportunity to work at the newly opened biblical excavation site at Tel Aphek.  This experience changed his life forever.  “It set me on the path to a career in archeology,” recount Dr. Joseph Greene. Today with a massive experience of more than 40 years in the Middle East and the Mediterranean as an archeologist, Dr. Greene is still working tirelessly as the Curator and Assistant Director at the Harvard Semitic Museum.

On further probing into his earlier childhood connection with history or archeology, he recalls, “it was hardly a childhood obsession, just a happy accident.”  After this stimulating experience as a teenager at the ancient site, he ended up at the distinguished Oriental Institute, at the University of Chicago founded by renowned American Egyptologist of the time James Henry Breasted.      

Dressed in a buttoned down casual shirt, blessed with a towering height an impressionable face, he moves about briskly through the calm and serene corridors of the Harvard Semitic Museum.  “He is direct in what he wants to be accomplished,” says Adam Middleton, a co-worker at the Harvard Semitic Museum.

One of his intense intellectual pleasures lies in knitting together the disparate pieces of available archeological data into an intelligible picture of an ancient landscape. His philosophy of ‘context focused reconstruction of the past’ rather than merely displaying random artifacts on glass shelves is revealed in the ‘House of Israel’ exhibition on the ground floor of the Harvard Semitic Museum. Here, life in early agricultural settlements of the Fertile Crescent has been modeled carefully with microscopic details using some original artifacts. “His knowledge of the working of Museums based on his years of experience is second to none,” Dr. Greene’s colleagues rightly say about him.

Recent trends in Museum organization are also visible in “the Nile to the Euphrates” and “Mesopotamia” exhibitions on the second and third floors. Carefully chosen exquisite collections are displayed,  still retaining numerous marvelous gems in the basement mainly because of space deficit and to protect these from continued exposure to bright light. Dr. Greene commented,  “ Contemporary museum practice is to display some small portion of the collection and keep the rest in reserve.”

In the last four decades, he has been involved in extensive excavations at various sites in Tunisia, Jordan, and Cyprus. His research interests focus on the archeology of the first-millennium B.C./A.D., and on museums and the history of museums.

*A hidden and undisplayed treasure from
Islamic periods in storage of
Harvard Semitic Museum

One of his most unforgettable projects was an Urn Burial Cemetery claimed to contain the remains of Phoenician children sacrificed to the principle Phoenician deities, Baal Hammon and his consort, Tanit. “Our excavations verified the accuracy of this claim.”

Working all day in a museum surrounded by relics of the distant past can be very exhausting. No wonder after a busy day at the museum, the workaholic curator can be seen at home cuddling the family pet, Sheba named after the biblical Queen of Sheba from Southern Arabia.  

His wife of 40 years, Eileen, calls herself an “archeologist by marriage”, but she is certainly not fascinated by, “big holes in the ground.” She describes  Dr. Greene as “Conscientious, thoughtful and habitual who eats almost the same thing every day (at least at every evening meal).”  

He has his unique interpretation of his field of work. “Archeological layers contain cultural debris to trace cultural change through very long periods of time. The same layers contain environmental debris; i.e. plant, animals, seeds, charcoal and molecular remains as ancient DNA found in bones as well as long-term evidence for incremental climate change.” He further explains,  “This allows an archeologist to reconstruct the ways humans have affected nature (and vice-versa) over long time scales,” says Dr. Greene. He views archeology as a way to study human interaction with nature.

*Picture Curtesy @Harvard Semitic Museum