Meet the Team Mondays: Dorit Gutreich

Dorit Gutreich currently serves in part as an on-site archaeologist, and in part as a researcher in the laboratory of the Temple Mount Sifting Project. Dorit was born in a kibbutz near Beit She’an, but was raised in Jerusalem where she currently lives with her husband and three children. She completed a B.A. at the Hebrew University with a major in archaeology, concentrating on pre-history, as well as Islam and and Middle Eastern Studies. Her degrees come particularly in useful, as she’s one of our archaeologists on site who can actually read and decipher fragments and objects with Arabic writing that we find! She then continued to do an academic certificate in Museology & Curatorial Studies at the Tel Aviv University. She previously worked at the Givati Parking Lot Excavations, and was working with the City of David for seven years,

Dorit Gutreich sorting Crusader pottery

and has been with the TMSP since May of 2016. Dorit’s research interests lie primarily in ancient glass, and she is currently studying pottery and ceramics of the Crusader period. The TMSP has uncovered a wide array of ancient glass, ranging from shards of dark blue windows from antiquity, to handles and rims of delicate and beautifully crafted vessels, which shimmer in various shades of green, and on rare occasion blue (typical of ancient glass making techniques).

In terms of what she finds particularly meaningful about working with the TMSP, she says that “As an archaeologist and a researcher, I find this work fascinating because we don’t have the provenance from which the finds came, meaning we don’t have anything to ‘lean on’ in terms of dating. We have a mixture of finds from various periods, which demands us to make order and sense out of this ‘mess’.” When asked why she sees this as a positive, Dorit said that “This makes it much more challenging in terms of archaeological research- and I like a good challenge.” Dorit also feels that while the discovery may seem like mere fragments and pieces, part of a conglomerate of artifacts, she’s proud and amazed that we “Extract real, important archaeological knowledge from these discoveries, one incredible example being the work of Frankie Snyder on reconstructing the colorful Herodian floor tiles, which we’d never before knew they existed at the Herodian Temple Mount.” When she’s not busy with ancient windows, she likes to read, and go on tiyulim to explore the nature of Israel.