After reading Homer’s “Iliad,” Joy McCorriston started her own odyssey.
McCorriston, an archaeologist and associate professor in Ohio State’s Department of Anthropology, sat in her office in Smith Laboratory surrounded by books written in French, Arabic and English.
When she began to talk about her work in the Middle East, her eyes lit up.
Welcoming might not be a word people immediately associate with
the Middle East. However, the people of Yemen and Oman, countries on the southern tip of the Arabian Peninsula, and the Arabic people as a whole, were welcoming, friendly and lovely, she said.
“In a post-9/11 world … that’s a message I want to convey. It’s a safe place. It’s a wonderful place. It’s a place people should visit,” she said.
She has been working in the Middle East since 1980 and knew she wanted to work there since she was in high school.
“I always assumed I would,” she said.
She was born in Honolulu, Hawaii, and moved to Bermuda. Rote memorization was the technique used at the all-girl school she attended, and it was there that she read “the Iliad.”
She heard about Heinrich Schliemann, a German archaeologist known for discovering the site of the Trojan War, and she knew she wanted to be an archaeologist.
McCorriston moved around a lot, which contributed to her interest in other cultures. When she heard stories of cowboys and Native Americans, she was always more interested in the Native Americans, she said.
McCorriston went to France to learn French by immersing herself in the country and culture. She emerged fluent and with a certificate of language and culture from the University of Paris.
“I finally got tired of being poor at French,” she said.
She also speaks Arabic, which she had to learn to speak with associates in Southern Arabia.
Just like McCorriston’s fieldwork, her education spread across multiple continents.
In 1980, she attended the University of Chicago with the intent to proceed to the University of London’s Institute of Archaeology, which she did in 1983, she said.
She earned her bachelor’s degree in archaeology from the University of London.
In 1985, she transitioned from London to Yale University in New Haven, Conn. by “networking and stray encounters … it sounds very romantic in the telling,” she said.
She earned her master’s and doctorate degrees in anthropology from Yale University.
In the late 1970s, England was still rebuilding after World War II. Her first taste of fieldwork was in Canterbury, England, where they were using revolutionary technology of the time to analyze what ancient people ate.
It was her first trip to the Middle East that would spark her love for it and the Arabic people.
She has since made multiple trips to Jordan, Syria, Yemen and Oman.
Her most recent work has focused on Hadramawt, Yemen and Dhofar, Oman. She was the project director.
She began her work with the Roots of Agriculture in Southern Arabia in 1996, a project that would last 12 years. The project was one of the first times western archaeologists had worked in Yemen.
“I wouldn’t want to misrepresent or suggest that Yemen was unexplored. The Yemenis know their country well,” she said.
The project was to explore Yemen and look at the spread of agriculture.
The Roots of Agriculture in Southern Arabia had its share of first and only discoveries. McCorriston’s group found remnants of the earliest cattle, sheep and irrigation systems in Arabia.
Few crops were found.
A new project began, which focused on the mobile people and their social dynamics. While working on the Roots of Agriculture in Southern Arabia, the researchers noticed small stone monuments, such as tombs or sacrificial circles.
Initially, the area of Yemen where McCorriston’s group worked was unknown to western society. It made work difficult, said Rick Oches, an associate professor of geology and environmental sciences at Bentley University in Waltham, Mass.’s Natural and Applied Science Department, who worked with her on the project.
The task could have been very difficult if it were not for McCorriston.
“Joy is a very ambitious, motivated, and creative scientist, and she has incredible skills at organizing and outfitting a field team in an extremely challenging environment,” Oches said in an e-mail.
The group grew each season and McCorriston helped keep it going.
“Without Joy, I would have walked away in frustration from the seemingly unsolvable bureaucratic, logistic and personnel challenges that we faced at the beginning of each field season,” Oches said.
The group continued to grow and McCorriston helped hold it together.
2005 was the last year Oches returned to Yemen with McCorriston. Anti-western sentiment made the trip seem more dangerous, he said.
2008 was the last year McCorriston did fieldwork in Yemen.
Heightened security in a post-9/11 world made working in Yemen difficult. Dhofar, Oman, was similar to Hadramawt, which is why it was a good alternative, McCorriston said.
McCorriston’s group began focusing on the small stone monuments in Dhofar. The monuments were part of a signaling system that marked territories and gathering spots.
Her research led to a book idea.
In 2006, she began writing “Pilgrimage and Household in the Ancient Near East,” a comparison between the early cultures of Southern Arabia, Yemen and Oman, and Mesopotamia, the area now known as
Turkey, Syria, Iraq and Iran.
Southern Arabians focused more on gathering as a larger group. Mesopotamians lived in households and had the first nuclear families, she said.
The idea came to McCorriston while she was on a bus to Syria’s capital with her family.
“I like to say it was a road to Damascus conversion. I realize that’s a biblical reference,” she said. The reference was to St. Paul, a persecutor of early Christians who converted to Christianity after hearing God’s voice on the road to Damascus.
Cambridge University Press plans to release the book by the end of the year.
McCorriston teaches graduate and undergraduate classes in
anthropology and archaeology at OSU.
She is currently teaching Contemporary Views of the Ancient Near East.
“I’m teaching my favorite course right now,” she said with a smile.
She said she likes it because it pushes her and her students to think critically.
