What was once dismissed as refuse — broken pottery, charred seeds, rusted metal, bone fragments — is re-imagined as the most honest archive of everyday life. By treating waste not as leftovers, but as material evidence, the project reveals how ordinary people lived, ate, worked, and discarded — mapping the rhythms of habitation and consumption across centuries. In this way, waste becomes a window into domestic routines, labor practices, and ecological relationships that rarely survive in monumental records.

These discarded materials carry traces of the beliefs, values, and everyday customs of past communities. Whether a child’s terracotta toy, a utilitarian clay cup, or a bundle for storing grain, each fragment speaks to how people organized their homes, raised children, traded goods, and negotiated identity. Through them, What Lies Beneath invites us to reflect on continuity and change: how cultural norms manifested in the mundane, and how those norms shifted over time as different peoples — Canaanite, Israelite, Islamic, Ottoman — inhabited the same land.

Beyond individual lives, the waste-derived archive paints a broader historical narrative of urban development, societal change, and environmental interaction. Layers of refuse from different periods — Early Bronze Age, Biblical Israelite times, Early Islamic era, Ottoman period — reveal how Haifa (and the surrounding region) evolved: how households changed, trade networks expanded, consumption patterns shifted, and the very coastline and urban footprint transformed. As such, What Lies Beneath shows history not only as grand events or conquests, but as the slow accumulation of everyday acts — the rise and fall of neighborhoods, shifts in economy, and long-term changes in human-environment relationships.

Some of the artifacts featured by What Lies Beneath stand out as especially surprising or provocative. For instance: a small terracotta figurine interpreted as a child’s toy for teaching waste-sorting, a clay shard whose residue suggests a form of early Levantine coffee use, or a cluster of fishbone remains implying systematic overfishing in ancient times — possibly signaling ecological stress long before modern environmental crises. These anomalies challenge conventional narratives and invite us to rethink assumptions about the past: about childhood, diet, trade, and environmental impact.