Day 12 Friday

My last post had a photo of a hole I excavated and I whined about how undramatic it looked. Today's photo shows you the find discovered about 2 centimeters below the point at which I had stopped.

Anna had resumed the excavation of my hole so it is "Anna's Pot" Once the green eyes of jealousy had subsided, I was able to enjoy this remarkable find. It is significant because it is in the foundation trench of a stone wall and based on it's distinctive style, dates the wall to the Hellenistic (Greek) period. The wall and its foundation trench cut through the floor and the floor does not reach the walls. This indicates a floor dating to an earlier time than the walls.

Photo three is of the team working at our site (minus Jim who took ill yesterday). All the women except myself are German students from Heidelberg, as is Ulrich on the right. Charlotte, beside me, will leave tomorrow.

The last photo is a confession. This is breakfast which we eat at 9:00 AM - after 3 and 1/2 hours of work. And yes, I actually ate all of it.

Day 10 Wednesday: sigh

Photo 1: My hole. With a little initial help from Jim, I emptied and cleaned this waist deep hole. You can all stop applauding now. I know it's incredible and terribly interesting...

Work at my sight has involved clearing rubble and looking for pottery so we can date the construction under the stone pavement we removed. Unfortunately we have found very little at this point and nothing to definitively date the construction.


Photo 2: Jason's pot. He cleaned about 4 inches of dirt from a different square in the courtyard and got to unearth this 7th century BCE cooking pot. Some people get all the work.

Photo 3: Me with two of my team members, Charlotte and Anne, students from Heidelberg University in Germany.

Tuesday after work a bus load of us went to the City of David (not to be confused with the Temple Mount or with the "Old City".) This section of Jerusalem has the oldest stone structures excavated in Jerusalem - dating back to the middle bronze age (1800 BCE). Photos will have to wait since I forgot the camera.

Day 8 Monday Walls and floors

It was another 4:30 AM morning and I ran joyfully up the hill to continued with my assignment of removing rubble and dirt to expose and ancient stone wall. [OK, I didn't run, and the prospect of spending the next 7 hours digging in the dirt on a hot day did not inspire ummm joy.] This is pick-axe, broom and dustpan work and if I'm lucky, I'll get to do to this all over again tomorrow - and even all week. Every muscle aches and on occasion I wonder why I thought archeology is sooooo exciting.

While I was doing that, "Kimmie" an expert on restoration and reconstruction began to prepare the paving stones for moving and by the end of the day 3 of them had been moved aside. (see photo) Only about 8 more to go!

Following are a couple photos from the church (actually a chapel) of the shepherds we visited in Bethlehem yesterday. A really wonderful place for quiet contemplation.

Day 7 Sunday Herod and the Nativity

Today was a visit to Herod's Tomb (only recently excavated and identified) and the church of the Nativity in Bethlehem.

Herod built a large citadel on a hill (which he first made taller). The "Herodian" stands within sight of Jerusalem and the Dead Sea. It was a grand citadel with a palace and gardens below and a theater half way up and the citadel and a more private palace on top. (top photo - Peter, the hat is for you.) He had several round towers on the top including a large one that was 37 meters tall. A water system allowed him to have a garden surrounded by colonnades and a bath with tile floors and a domed roof - the oldest domed roof in Israel (photo 2). Herod's burial site was grand but archeologists found his sarcophagus in a thousand pieces...

5 kilometers away from Herod's grand testimony to his power, the church of the Nativity marks the site of Jesus' birth. Catholic, Greek Orthodox, and Armenian churches share the site. There has been a church on this site since the 4th century CE. The photo shows columns inside the Greek Orthodox church which was standing when the Crusaders visited in the 12th century.

Visiting Bethlehem brings to reality the painful conflict between Israel and the Palestinians. The last photo shows a portion of the wall separating these two peoples. We passed through numerous check points, had to produce passports twice, and we had to leave our Israeli tour guide behind and pick up a Palestinian guide (who was Greek Orthodox) to visit Bethlehem . The highlight for many on this trip was sharing scripture and singing Christmas carols in Jerome's study under the church.

Day 6 Caesarea and Megiddo

Herod the Great was the first to build Caesarea which after 70 AD became the largest city in the region for several centuries. Herod dedicated the city to his illustrious benefactor, Caesar Augustus, even installing a platform (and statue) of/to Augustus that greeted all ships that arrived at this port. This was probably a politically astute idea since Herod had sided with Marc Antony in the civil war between Augustus and Antony. Herod had some making up to do and building an entire city was a good start... The city contains a royal palace with a pool by the sea (see photo 1), an inscription naming Pontius Pilate and Tiberius Caesar, a theater, a hippo drome for horse racing, but lacked water which seemed to be no obstacle - Herod simply had a 14 mile long aquaduct built to bring water south from Carmel. (see photo 2). It also lacked a port so Herod built 2 large sea walls to create a harbor, the remains of which are still visible today.

Our second stop today was Megiddo where I completed my sunburn atop a tell that commands an expansive view over the large fertile Jezreel valley. The site is most likely the oldest inhabited site in the region with remains that go back at least to the early bronze age. Photo 3 shows a bronze age altar area and the fourth is the stairway down to the water supply. Megiddo's water source was a deep spring to which the citizens built a tunnel - 183 steps down. On a hot day it was perhaps a welcome chore to get the water - if, of course you survive climbing back out!

Day 5 A Lesson in Archeology

The beautiful capital you see in the first photo is a style of decoration used on pillar tops originally found in northern Israel. With the earliest examples coming from the 9th century BCE. Only here, at Ramat Rahel is this decorative architecture found in Judah.

Another distinctively northern Israel style is found in the building technique in the next photo. These 'headers' are stones turned on end - so they sit on their narrow edges. Notice how neatly they fit together. Again this building style shows up in Judah (southern Israel) in the 7th century - after Assyria had invaded the region, conquered Northern Israel and made Judah a vassal state to this first true empire.

In the third photo you can see neat header's on the top row and the first blocks on the 2nd row on the left. To the right of these, the wall building construction changes to less well cut smaller stones. In fact the white stone in the middle has been taken from elsewhere and reused (it has the remains of a door sill on its top.) Later builders cared less about the look of their stones since they covered them in plaster (that is now gone.)

Today, in the space of 2 hours team members found 7 jar handles with royal stamps we can date to various time periods in the 7th century BCE. The jars contained goods - either taxes in kind or goods grown on royal estates or perhaps stores belonging to the king. The stamps change in style over time - some have winged solar disks, some say "belonging to the king" which sounds like "le-melek" in Hebrew, some have carved concentric circles on jars that were not marked with stamps when they were made.

Day 4

Today was a continuation of yesterday's work so there is little 'new' to tell. However, our removal of retaining stones and concrete makes the site look considerably different. The dirt pile is a portion of the material we removed from our area this week.


Jim and I cleaned the wall and floor of the 'cut' on our hands and knees... if only my kitchen were this clean! Tomorrow morning they will photograph this and our work will make it into the written final report.

A Roman bath used to sit on top of where Jim and I are working in the photo (which explains the small floor tile I found this week.) Aharoni, the original excavator, removed the Roman ruins in order to investigate the earlier strata.

Day 3 Getting to the bottom of things

After Ramat Rahel was excavated in the 50's and 60's, the 'entrance' to the citadel, that is the focus of our site's work, had a retaining wall added to it that included stones and concrete to hold the old flooring together. Yesterday some of us (OK, the men using pick axes) tore down the retaining wall. Today we began to dismantle the retaining stones and concrete around the original stones. [Now I know what being sentenced to hard labor feels like as I used my small pick-axe to break up concrete and pry stones loose.]

The second half of the work day Jim and I were assigned the task of creating a clean, vertical face to the material formerly hidden by the wall. This task greatly increased my bucket count!

In the photo, you can see a dark brown base of soil and then immediately above that a white line formed from limestone. This is an ancient floor - probably from the Iron age (7th century BCE) and it sits several feet below the flooring the earlier excavator believed to be the Iron age floor. Didn't Jim do a good job? The task is made a little difficult by the loose nature of the limestone flooring as even a small disturbance would cause it to cascade down over the brown soil below it.

Day 2 Street Cleaning

Southwest Corner of the Temple Mount with original stones from Herod the Great's construction.




Wailing Wall or Western Wall of Temple Mount, Jerusalem. This is the women's area.


Today we nearly completed removing rubble around the paving stones in our little square. See the results in the photo at the right!

OK, actually we didn't quite get this much done and photos of our progress are not available yet (because someone forgot their camera at 5:00 AM this morning - what was I thinking!)

I did make 2 fun finds today. One was a pottery handle that was in two pieces. I showed it to my site supervisor who looked at it for a split second and stated it was a cooking pot handle and tossed it into the collection of other broken pottery shards we collect each day. Not deterred by the casual dismissal of my find, I later unearthed a diamond shaped piece of floor tile. It was only one piece about 2" x 2" but was a different kind of find from our usual pieces of pottery. Once again it was tossed without ceremony to the 'find' bucket. [Never give up! Never surrender!] The real excitement at our site involved the removal of a reconstructed wall built by the excavators in the 1960's. We realized after looking at the strata behind the wall (and under our flooring) that a much earlier floor was visible about 3 feet below our Byzantine floor. I guess we have a lot more work ahead of us!

This afternoon about 40 of us took a trip into Jerusalem and explored some of the archeology of the city. The street photo above is REALLY the main street of ancient Jerusalem (Roman era) that runs beside the western wall of Herod's temple mount retaining wall. (The wall is not visible in the photo but is to the right.) The boulders you see fell from the ancient top of the retaining wall when the Romans destroyed the temple in 70 CE.

July 20 Monday the first day of digging

Ramat Rahel is about 812 meters above sea level. Bethlehem and Judah are both about 750 meters high. Ramat Rahel sits half way between them with a commanding view of both sites as well as the major north-south roadway and the western approach to Jerusalem. Nice place for the eyes of the empire....

I saw the moon set and the sun rise over our site this morning. Work at the site began at 5:30 am following our 10 minute walk up the hill from the Hotel. It was a delightful day although my own work could best be described as cleaning floors. Thank God for knee pads! [see photo]

My particular little corner of the dig involves cleaning and defining a 5th-7th century CE flooring that was set against a Iron age wall (that dates to time of Hezekiah or Manasseh). Once we've done that, the flooring will be removed - carefully - and we'll begin excavating beneath it. After the end of the dig, the flooring will be replaced and my work will never again see the light of day.

Why Ramat Rahel and why Archeology?

Tomorrow I leave for Ramat Rahel so I thought it was time to explain a bit about why I'm doing this.

I am interested in investigating the social context of Judah (Yehud) during the late Persian period (that is, around 400 -333 BCE). The primary way to do this is through an analysis of the books, Ezra and Nehemiah, which were written during these years. These books record the stories of Ezra and Nehemiah (who probably led missions to Yehud in the mid 400's BCE) in order to convince the original readers that the local community should have distinct characteristics, organization, and values. Using a historical account to make a point, however, can skew the presentation of events and characters. (So, for example, an account of the recent events surrounding the nomination of Sonya Sotomayor to the supreme court might differ markedly when told by a democrat or a republican or a man and a woman.) At the same time even markedly ideological accounts reflect the world around the author and the issues at stake for him or her. In addition, the more one must argue for something, the more it suggests that alternative and competing social arrangements exist or have great appeal and may even be winning the day at the time of writing. Thus the beautiful and compelling description of the solidarity of the community in Ezra 6 may not accurately reflect reality.
The study of these texts in conversation with sociological theories developed by Pierre Bourdieu are my primary avenues of investigation. But it helps to have other sources of information regarding the political and social context of the author - especially given the tendency of Ezra/Nehemiah to paint a decidedly idealogical picture of the past. This is where Ramat Rahel comes in.

Why I'm going to Ramat Rahel:

• Ramat Rahel was an administrative center during the Persian era that sits a couple miles outside of Jerusalem (even though never mentioned in Ezra/Nehemiah).
• Ramat Rahel has so far produced 250 "Yehud" stamp seals which provide a window into the administration of this region by Persia.
• The social context of any community is shaped in part by the geography and financial resources of the land and by the impact of the wider world on that region. Study here will provide a clearer picture for me of the physical character of the province of Yehud.
  
• The field directors, Oded Lipschitts and Manfred Oeming have together edited several volumes of research dedicated to Persian era Yehud (e.g. Judah and the Judeans in the Persian Era, Judah and the Judeans in the 4th century BCE, etc.) So, learning from them will be a great opportunity for someone like me just starting out in the field.
• The directors are inviting several other scholars - all experts on the Persian era or biblical texts of that time to provide visiting lectures during the 4 weeks of the dig.
  
• I will learn a great deal about the practice of archeology while I'm here which will aide my ability to read and analyze archaeological reports and articles and incorporate those findings in my own analysis of the biblical text.
  

OK, here are the fun reasons:

• It will enhance my classroom teaching [insert pretty picture here.]
• I get to take afternoon naps (OK, so I also have to get up at4:30 AM)
• I get to walk through Hezekiah's tunnel, visit the Dead Sea and Masada and that other sea up north... ;-)
• I don't have to cook for a month.
• I get to drag my husband to one more distant place 'for fun.' Hopefully his luggage will make the trip this time.
  
• If you're interested in learning a bit more about the site, visit their web site which has a nice one page summary of its history [and pretty pictures]. http://www.tau.ac.il/~rmtrachl/the_site.html