Monday, November 23, 2009
Narramore Years Part 22
Israel Dig Part 2
"The next day started with a 4:10 Am knock on the cabin door.
After dressing and having an early morning snack (saved from
the previous night), the volunteers boarded the bus (with
buckets and other dig paraphernalia)for a fifteen minute bus
ride to the dig site. When we arrived at Tel Beth Shemesh we
walked up a dirt road to a base camp where the tools were
kept in a large storage shed. This sled came complete with
its own Arab guard who slept on the roof! Then I was assigned
to a supervisor who had his own "square." Archeology in Israel
is accomplished by squares. Each site is divided up and excavated
by a series of 8 meter by 8 meter squares. Each square is
separated by a meter of earthen wall. The earth is removed very
carefully by towels or more vigorously by a special shovel that
looks like a hoe on steroids. The famous archaeologist "spade"
was nowhere in evidence at this dig. I don't think our archaeologists
believed in them.
The artifacts uncovered were pottery shards, animal bones (very few
pig bones were found indicating it was an Israelite city during
the Iron Age), stone cooking and grinding areas and architectural
structures such as large stone walls. In one of the adjacent
squares a large water cistern (underground water reservoir) had
been discovered. It was hot, sweaty and dirty work. While some
excavated dirt from the squares, others would place the dirt in
wheelbarrows and transport it to a dump site near the dig. Perhaps
the most exciting thing we found during the first week was a live
scorpion under the sand bags that ringed the top of our square.
The scorpion was quite different from the ones I encountered in
Colorado years ago. We captured it and took it far away from the
squares and released it unharmed.
We worked from about 5:30 AM to 8:30 AM and has a half hour
breakfast (bread, milk, cereal, apples, dark chocolate spread,
jam, hard boiled eggs, and the ever present tomatoes and cucumbers)
and then went back to the dig and worked until 12:30 PM. At that
time we returned our tools to the storage shed to be housed until
the next day. Then we boarded the bus and travel back to the
kibbutz. Most of the volunteers went to the major meal of the
day—lunch (which was already half over) and then back to the cabin
for a shower, rest, study or nap until "pottery washing' which
started at 3:30 PM. This lasted for about an hour or more and
was a time when the pottery shards from the dig were washed and
cleaned by the volunteers using hand scrubbers. After the washing
was completed, there came a time of "pottery reading" where the
site archaeologists, Shlomo Bunimovitz and Zvi Lederman, would go
through the sacks of pottery shards from the previous day and
evaluate them in terms of their age and over all quality. Pottery
is one of the ways the excavations in Israel are dated. The pottery
fragments we unearthed dated mostly from the 8th and 9th centuries BC.
This would place them sometime after the beginning of the Divided
Kingdom (after Solomon).
These shards were from the Iron Age II for the most part. The
Iron Age started about 1200 BC and lasted until 586 BC when the
Babylonians under Nebuchadnezzar invaded and destroyed Judah.
Iron Age I is from 1200 BC to 1000 BC and Iron Age II is from
1000 BC to the late date. Beth Shemesh also has an earlier
Bronze Age history going back to 2200 BC or more but the work
i was involved in was Iron Age. Beth Shemesh was probably destroyed
during the time of the Assyrian invasion under Sennacherib in
701 BC and was never fully occupied as a city. The tel at bet Shemesh
has gone through two other extensive archaeological excavations,
one in 1911-13 and another in 1928-1933. The current excavations
under Bunimovitz and Lederman started in 1990 with dig seasons each
summer since then.
After the pottery washing came dinner around 6:30 PM where lectures
from 7:30 PM until about 9:00 PM. These lectures were given by
the site archaeologists and visiting archaeologists. These lectures
involved slides and helped get us better acquainted with the
overall history of the region. Perhaps the most memorable one
was of Ashkelon, a major Philistine city on the Mediterranean
coast of Israel.
"The next day started with a 4:10 Am knock on the cabin door.
After dressing and having an early morning snack (saved from
the previous night), the volunteers boarded the bus (with
buckets and other dig paraphernalia)for a fifteen minute bus
ride to the dig site. When we arrived at Tel Beth Shemesh we
walked up a dirt road to a base camp where the tools were
kept in a large storage shed. This sled came complete with
its own Arab guard who slept on the roof! Then I was assigned
to a supervisor who had his own "square." Archeology in Israel
is accomplished by squares. Each site is divided up and excavated
by a series of 8 meter by 8 meter squares. Each square is
separated by a meter of earthen wall. The earth is removed very
carefully by towels or more vigorously by a special shovel that
looks like a hoe on steroids. The famous archaeologist "spade"
was nowhere in evidence at this dig. I don't think our archaeologists
believed in them.
The artifacts uncovered were pottery shards, animal bones (very few
pig bones were found indicating it was an Israelite city during
the Iron Age), stone cooking and grinding areas and architectural
structures such as large stone walls. In one of the adjacent
squares a large water cistern (underground water reservoir) had
been discovered. It was hot, sweaty and dirty work. While some
excavated dirt from the squares, others would place the dirt in
wheelbarrows and transport it to a dump site near the dig. Perhaps
the most exciting thing we found during the first week was a live
scorpion under the sand bags that ringed the top of our square.
The scorpion was quite different from the ones I encountered in
Colorado years ago. We captured it and took it far away from the
squares and released it unharmed.
We worked from about 5:30 AM to 8:30 AM and has a half hour
breakfast (bread, milk, cereal, apples, dark chocolate spread,
jam, hard boiled eggs, and the ever present tomatoes and cucumbers)
and then went back to the dig and worked until 12:30 PM. At that
time we returned our tools to the storage shed to be housed until
the next day. Then we boarded the bus and travel back to the
kibbutz. Most of the volunteers went to the major meal of the
day—lunch (which was already half over) and then back to the cabin
for a shower, rest, study or nap until "pottery washing' which
started at 3:30 PM. This lasted for about an hour or more and
was a time when the pottery shards from the dig were washed and
cleaned by the volunteers using hand scrubbers. After the washing
was completed, there came a time of "pottery reading" where the
site archaeologists, Shlomo Bunimovitz and Zvi Lederman, would go
through the sacks of pottery shards from the previous day and
evaluate them in terms of their age and over all quality. Pottery
is one of the ways the excavations in Israel are dated. The pottery
fragments we unearthed dated mostly from the 8th and 9th centuries BC.
This would place them sometime after the beginning of the Divided
Kingdom (after Solomon).
These shards were from the Iron Age II for the most part. The
Iron Age started about 1200 BC and lasted until 586 BC when the
Babylonians under Nebuchadnezzar invaded and destroyed Judah.
Iron Age I is from 1200 BC to 1000 BC and Iron Age II is from
1000 BC to the late date. Beth Shemesh also has an earlier
Bronze Age history going back to 2200 BC or more but the work
i was involved in was Iron Age. Beth Shemesh was probably destroyed
during the time of the Assyrian invasion under Sennacherib in
701 BC and was never fully occupied as a city. The tel at bet Shemesh
has gone through two other extensive archaeological excavations,
one in 1911-13 and another in 1928-1933. The current excavations
under Bunimovitz and Lederman started in 1990 with dig seasons each
summer since then.
After the pottery washing came dinner around 6:30 PM where lectures
from 7:30 PM until about 9:00 PM. These lectures were given by
the site archaeologists and visiting archaeologists. These lectures
involved slides and helped get us better acquainted with the
overall history of the region. Perhaps the most memorable one
was of Ashkelon, a major Philistine city on the Mediterranean
coast of Israel.
# posted by Dino Don @ 8:22 AM 
