An Amateur Analysis (What We Discovered)

So I am home from Israel, but I wanted to post one last time to explain what we found.  Of course, the full analysis of the discoveries will take months to assemble and require professional input that I am incapable of.  But here is an amateur’s analysis. 

I am grateful that I spent my whole two weeks on the dig working in the same area.  Each day we exposed more and more of a room in a bathhouse that included a nice archway and a second doorway that was originally another archway.  We weren’t actually exposing the whole room.  Our boundaries were three walls, but the fourth side was just a jumble of densely packed fallen limestone blocks from an earthquake that destroyed the city.  The whole room would have been a longer corridor. 

We were able to take it down to bedrock, which was about twelve feet beneath the upper edges of the extant walls (which would have been a bit higher before the earthquake).  Along the way, questions were raised.  The first was related to the arch itself.  The left hand side was neatly assembled with basalt ashlars, a dark and heavy volcanic rock.  But on the right hand side, the neatly arranged dark basalt stones disappeared as the archway straightened out.  The lower section was full of a jumble of dirt and soft limestone blocks.

Notice the difference between the structurally sound right hand side and the questionable left hand side where the basalt rocks end after the archway.

Closer look at the left hand side where the basalt stones disappear.  Instead, it is just fill similar to what is filling in the middle of the arch (and what we were digging our way through to expose the room.  Where have the basalt stones disappeared to?

As we got deeper into the hole, we reached a level where the basalt stones of the arch were not quite as tidy.  It was only after we stepped back and looked at the fill in the arch that we noticed a line of white that was a few inches thick.  This would have been a floor level of plaster that was not very distinct as we were digging but noticeable in the stratigraphy.  This was likely the floor level of the room when it was used as a bath house.  

Notice the white horizontal stripe in the fill a few feet up from the bottom.  You can see that the three levels of basalt ashlars above this line are very neatly arranged, while the ones below are not as carefully flush.

We continued to dig deeper until we hit a stone and plaster floor a few feet below the plaster floor line in the fill.  This was more distinctly a floor, but it was only in half the room.  The other half of the room continued down as a dirt layer.

A chunk of plaster from the flooring

The stone/plaster floor level in the upper portion of the picture.  The lower portion of the picture has no floor.  The dirt continues and we dig a bit deeper.

Floor on the left side, no floor on the right side.  Why?

As we continued to dig deep on the left side where the floor was absent, we hit an opening under the wall that took us by surprise.

The opening as it was first exposed. 

When we shone a flashlight into the hole, we discovered that it stretched back at least 10 feet and got deeper further back. As we continued to dig a bit more, we discovered that the hole stretched around from the one wall around the corner to the the wall with the arch.  The whole corner of the room was built over a deep hole.  This was a large cavity in the corner of this room.  This helped explain the absent basalt stone from the archway.  The missing blocks were right above this opening.  the foundation of the arch was undermined and at some point, these basalt rocks fell into that hole, probably due to the earthquake.
The suggestion was made that this was possibly  a Hellenistic cistern, used before the bathhouse was built over it.  The open flooring provided access to this cistern.  So that this floor level may have been from the time period before the bathhouse.
Because we were nearing the end of our dig season, and because our area supervisor was concerned about safety and the integrity of the structure as we exposed more of the cistern, we decided not to expose any more this season.  Instead, we covered over the hole and reinforced that corner as best we could with sand bags.
So we reached the bottom, sort of.  And we found answers, sort of.  There is always more to explore.  Each answer opens up two new questions.  This is just one room in the bathhouse (probably a service room, incidentally, for the furnace in the next room over), a complex of many rooms, each with their own surprises to be uncovered and explained.

Ending With A Whimper

After nine days of hard digging, hauling dirt, washing pottery, exposing walls, hitting bedrock, and sweating buckets, the dig ended today with a whimper.  

Tools of the trade.  Pick ax and hoe, hand pick ax, trowel, brush and bucket

No pick axes or hoes, the main implements of digging through layers.  And no hand picks or trowels, the tools of finer processing of exploring a level.  Today we used brushes.  Our task was to clean up the site as much as possible to prepare for detailed photos and overhead drone pictures.  We brushed off dust and debris that had accumulated on every surface.  We brushes off dirt, so that they could see layers of changed soil colors.  

Brushing off a wall

More wall brushing

And then we weeded.  Pulled up every scrub brush or thorny weed (and almost all of them are thorny) that had grown up over the last year in cracks and crevices.  And we exposed a whole hillside that was covered with weeds so that fallen rocks and vaguely defined walls could be seen clearly from the overhead drone pictures.  

Weeding a hillside

I know it was important work, but it felt anticlimactic.  There were no finds today - no pottery, or bones, or glass, or coins.  Just weeds and gravel being expunged from the site.  I think we were all feeling a bit sluggish with the bittersweet end in sight, tired from two hard weeks of work, hot because the sun shade we had built to shield us was being removed for the final pictures.  And then we were done. All tools put away, all areas secured, all work finished.  

The bathhouse, cleaned up and ready for pictures

We ended with a tour of the sites we had been working on and an explanation of what we had discovered over the last two weeks.  the bus was waiting on us and we slipped into the air conditioned coach and headed back to the kibbutz for lunch.  Goodbye Hippos Sussita, until next time.

PS - I will write about some of the things we discovered in my section next time and wrap it up with one last post on my second short weekend of touring the Dead Sea area.  

Ground Floor

Over the last week and a half I have been excavating a small room in a bathhouse (maybe 5 feet by 8 feet).  At the start of the dig the very top of an arch was visible.  Since then we have been exposing the arch bit by bit, making our way deeper and deeper into the room.  And deeper and deeper. And deeper.  Our two man team of myself and Stefano, an older Italian workhorse, just kept digging.  Every time we thought we might be close to floor level, we were disappointed, as the walls kept stretching deeper and deeper into the soil.   

Stefano and I measuring the depth of our hole

All the way through we have encountered evidence of destruction, large limestone blocks that have fallen into the room from above, presumably during the major earthquake that destroyed much of the region in 749 AD.  Filling buckets or dirt, hauling out awkward stones – this was back breaking work.  It got even worse as we got deeper and deeper into the hole and had to find creative ways to get out, building up stairs of sand bags and then moving them to excavate under them.  The last couple days we have been required to wear hard hats, due to the depth. 

After all that, I’m glad to report that we have hit floor level.  The level of the room goes down over ten feet from top to bottom.  Considering that the upper portion of the room is not intact (currently the top ends at the keystone of the arch, but surely there were a couple courses higher) the full depth must have been 12 to 13 feet or more.  This is a very deep room.

It's hard to give a sense of sale with one picture, but notice where my head is compared to the top of the arch.  And I am standing on a large block that raises me up 18 inches.

Floor level is the best level for finds, since this is where things that fell into crack and crevices during daily use would have lodged. As you approach floor level you use hand trowels rather than pick axes and go through a couple centimeters at a time.  As we got close to floor level we found a burn layer and many animal bones, suggesting some cooking taking place in the room.  My partner also found a nice glass base for a goblet.  The dig director brought the metal detector and found a coin and two pieces of copper.  And there were lots of pottery pieces. 

A coin and a piece of bronze found by the dig director with a metal detector

Both bins are pieces of pottery found in our square yesterday - lots of pieces

But the highlight (for me), came when I discovered a coin myself, which is pretty surprising without a metal detactor, since this coin is about the size of a corn kernel and mixed with a bunch of dirt it’s hard to  distinguish.  I just thought it looked a little too round to be dirt and when I picked it up it felt heavy.  It’s impossible to tell what kind of coin it is, but it is amazing to hold it in your hand.  I also found a metal implement not much bigger than a large needle.  Someone suggested it may have been a cosmetic instrument.    

The coin I found.  I know it doesn't look like much, but it is pretty amazing

That’s the good news. We reached the floor and found cool stuff.  The bad news is that there are more questions than answers.  We think this may have been a service room for the bathhouse, near the furnace that would have heated the hot rooms of the bath.  But that is a guess based on location and size more than findings. 

The arch is perplexing.  The upper portion of the arch is built solidly of basalt stone (a dark, heavy volcanic rock), but as we got deeper the tidy structure gets sloppier.  Confusingly, some stones are missing, or replaced with soft limestone blocks (we may dig into this a bit more in the next couple days to see if we can figure out more).  The abutting wall also gets really sloppy at the lower level, no longer neatly flush, some stones are inset.  And the soil changes color about four feet from the floor, as if the lower portion was filled in before the upper portion and the shortened room (still 7+ feet high) was used secondarily, after the bathhouse was no longer in use, possibly as a residential space (explaining the animal bones we found mixed into this middle layer). 

There are also springers (the first stones just starting to form an arch) for another arch (that is not intact) at the other entryway of the room.  But these two archs are offset from each other.  This doesn’t seem to fit with the Romans interest in symmetry. 

There is stone flooring on about half the floor but the other half is just more soil.  So why is part paved and part not?  At the end of the day a giant hole was exposed under a wall at floor level that led into a cavity that opens up and goes back 10-15 feet.  After all these layers of fill it’s odd to have this open space.  The dig directors wonders if this is an earlier (Hellenistic) cistern for holding water.  It’s not clear whether this is manmade or natural, so we may look into this in the next couple days. 

The upper portion of the photo is the stone flooring.  The lower portion of the photo is where the flooring just turns to dirt.  We're not sure why.

A hole that was exposed under one of the walls that opens into a large cavity.  Maybe a Hellenistic cistern.

So we hit the floor level, but we still have a lot of questions about this space.  We’re running out of time to find answers, but we’ll see what the next couple days reveal.  Regardless, it has been an exciting process to be involved in firsthand.  I can’t believe how many pictures I have taken of this one room.

Weekends are for touring

With Friday and Saturday off from the dig, I decided to rent a car (a whole ordeal that I won’t get into on the blog, but ask me sometime) and explore some of the sites in and around Galilee.  I had determined not to rush through these sites, like they do when you are in a tour group, but to linger and take my time exploring.  I love a site where I can walk through the ruins slowly and try to make sense of them. 

So Friday was gobbled up by two stops.  The first was Bet Shean, one of the sister cities of Hippos, another city of the Decapolis.  This one larger and more developed, both as an ancient city and as a modern day site.  The site has been thoroughly excavated and prepared for visitors with partial reconstructions and interpretive signage, which was extremely helpful.  It was extraordinary to walk upon ancient mosaics and alongside colonnaded streets.  Massive architectural remains allow for imagining these buildings in their full glory.    Plus, the site has two bathhouses, one of them the largest that has been found in Israel.  Excavating a bathhouse in Hippos gave me a deeper appreciation of these incredible complexes and I was encouraged by my ability to recognize different components of the structures.

Bet Shean from the hillside above.  Giving a sense of the scope of the ruins. 

A busy street corner in the city of Bet Shean.  The colonnaded street is impressive 

The 7,000 seat theater in Bet Shean overlooking the city.

The second site was Megiddo, or maybe more familiarly Armageddon (which means hill of Megiddo).  The plain beneath this ancient city is the site of the final battle in Revelation.  But the ancient city remains are quite impressive to see.  This site is from a much earlier time period with remains from Canaanite occupation (2000BC – 1250 BC) and early Israelite (1250 BC – 800 BC).  The site is not as fully developed, but it is still worth seeing, especially the city gate built by Solomon, the stables for chariot horses, the silo, the water system, and the massive Canaanite altar. 

The Jezreel Valley, where the Battle of Armegeddon is to take place

A massive Canaanite altar

On Saturday I decided to stay closer to the Sea of Galilee.  Israel is a combination of rich archaeological sites that root our faith to real history and highly developed ecclesiastical shamanism, where pilgrims go for a mystical encounter.  That may be a bit of a harsh description, but I think accurate.  I love the former and hate the latter.  The latter is reflected in churches that are built up over “holy sites” where pilgrims go to touch a rock and pray (as if that rock that Jesus  supposedly sweat drops of blood on will make your prayers more efficacious).  There are countless churches, most of them very liturgical, that are built over sites where Jesus, or one of the disciples, or Mary, or some other figure from Scripture supposedly did something.  The churches are tourist hubs where pilgrims come to say they saw the very place where Jesus did x,y, or z.  The problem is first, that most of these places have very flimsy claims for authenticity and, second, that the nature of the site has been destroyed by the shrine that has been built up around it.    

I try to avoid these sites, but I fell into the trap on Saturday by visiting the Mount of Beatitudes.  I went hoping to get a sense of the context where Jesus preached the Sermon on the Mount.  Instead, all I saw was a church with gardens around it.  Even the view of the Sea of Galilee is impeded by the gardens that they have planted.  It is impossible to imagine crowds gathering around Jesus to hear him teach at a site like this.  This was a waste of time. 

Church of the Beatitudes.  Disappointing.

Capernaum, which I also visited on Saturday, has a blend of both.  The rich archaeology is seen in the remains of the synagogue, which is built later than Jesus time, but probably over the remains of the first century synagogue, where Jesus would have taught.  It gives a good sense of what a synagogue was like and how it functioned.  And it is accessible, so that you can walk through the remains and explore for yourself.  The residential quarter was also fascinating, but not as freely available to walk through.  The main attraction is Peter’s house, based on tradition.  This tradition actually has ancient roots and may be credible, but a large church has been built over it so that it is nearly impossible to see well or appreciate fully. The interpretive signage was helpful, but it was still very difficult to perceive what they were talking about.

The synagogue in Capernaum

Remains of a frieze from the synagogue in Capernaum depicting the arc of the covenant on the right.

I also visited Hazor, which is an very nice Canaanite/Ancient Israelite site with a large Canannite palace, another city gate built by Solomon along with section of the  city wall, a four room house (which is a distinctively Israelite house design) and a pillared house that served as a storeroom. 

Israelite city walls at Hazor, a double wall filled in with debris.

Any guesses?  It's an olive press.  Press the stone down on the basket full of crushed olive, oil gathers in the circular trough and spills out the break into the basin in the floor.

I had a little extra time, so I stopped in at Korazim, famously cursed by Jesus.  It was a smaller site, but worth the visit to see the synagogue remains and to see the residential area, which was open to walk through, in contrast to Capernaum and gave me the opportunity to try to imagine floor plans and discern alleyways of this congested little neighborhood.  It gives a sense of the small dwellings that were common in the first century. 

Synagogue remains in Korazim

Finally I stopped to see the Galilee boat, the remains of a fishing boat dating to the first century found buried in the mud in the Sea of Galilee.  This is the style of boat that Jesus would have sailed in as he crossed the Sea of Galilee.  It was a short visit, since this is all they have on display, but worthwhile.

The Galilee Boat

So these were full days.  I have limited time for “site-seeing” so I’m glad I made the most of these two days.  I’ll have one more chance to see some sites in the south at the end of the dig.  I am rooming with a fellow pastor and he has invited me to join him to go to Masada, Ein Gedi, Qumran (if time allows), and possibly Beer Sheba.  We’ll see what we can squeeze in.

Dishwashing

One of the surprises of this experience is the volume of pottery that is found in these archaeological digs.  Hundreds of pieces of pottery are collected each day - thousands over the course of the dig season.  We are told to only keep it if a) it is a handle or a rim, b) if it is a piece larger than one inch square, or c) if it is unlike the rest of the pottery in the area.  Which means that there are countless pieces that just get tossed into the dump pile.  But every day you find a bunch of pieces that meet the criteria, which you put into a "find bucket" that is labeled with a locus number identifying the area and the depth of the square you are digging.  Each day I find dozens of pottery pieces that get tossed into my bucket.  

Pottery is so prevalent because once clay is fired in a kiln, it is amazingly durable and will not decompose.  It may break into pieces (all the pottery we find are broken pieces), but it won't disintegrate.  And because clay vessels were so common and could easily be replaced, they were often disposed of carelessly.  

Pottery is so useful to archaeologist because it is so distinctive.  Pottery styles and materials changed over time.  The color of the glaze, the makeup of the clay, the designs used, the thickness of the pot, and especially the shape of the lip and handle (which is why these pieces are so valuable) all changed over time.  

So because pottery is so plentiful, we have a large catalog of the different types.  And because pottery is so distinctive, we can use it to date the level we are excavating.  Our pottery expert was able to look at our bucket of pottery n the first day and tell us right away that it was almost all Byzantine (4th - 8th century).  She took the time to explain it to us - pointing out the patterns on the pottery, the color of the clay, and a couple of stylistic features.  Some of the pieces she was able to tell us the kind of vessel the fragment came from.  

So what do we do with all this pottery?  Each afternoon we have a pottery workshop.  At least that's what is says on our schedule.  Workshop is a bit of a stretch.  Truth is, we wash the dishes.  We grab a bucket of shards that has been filled with water and a scrub brush, along with a drying bin for the clean pieeces and we start to scrub.  We try to get all the dirt off the pieces so our pottery expert can get a better look at them.  She floats from bucket to bucket, looking over what we are cleaning up. This is the workshop aspect, since she is a wonderful teacher and she will take a pile of pottery and make it come to life.  She quickly highlights a few things that she notices and points our some features that could easily be overlooked. She has piles of books that she consults and is able to show us pictures of some of the vessels that we just have a little piece of.  One night she was looking over the pieces I had cleaned and got excited by a fragment that was the base of a bowl.  Right in the middle was a clearly defined fingerprint.  she said it's a small thing, but whenever she sees that she is reminded that this pot was made by a real person who stuck their finger in wet clay and left us a record for thousands of years later.

After cleaning, the pieces are set out to dry.  From there is it out of our hands.  The pottery specialist will determine which pieces to keep.  Each will be labeled, measured, and tentatively identified.  If there are pieces that obviously fit together, then she may do some conservation and try gluing them together.  The finds get entered into a database and placed in storage.  More research will be done to determine how this pots relate to other pottery finds in other excavations in the area. Conclusions will be drawn.  Dates for levels will be assigned. All this from broke pieces of pottery.

My two roommates and me cleaning pots

Another group working on cleaning their potsherds

When you have some pieces that you know fit together, you put them in that little basket inside the bigger basket (in the center left of the picture).  Sometimes we find enough to fully reassemble a pot.

More pottery drying.  

A large section of an oil lamp.

Exposing a Bathhouse

My assignment, at least for the first part of this dig, is on a section of room in a Roman bath house.  Roman bath houses are fascinating to me, both because of their creative engineering (plumbing and heating) and because of the cultural centrality during the Roman Empire - this was a key social gathering place and every Roman polis (city) had to have one or more.  So I was delighted to discover that this was where I would be working.  And the particular section I am working in (with two others) is clearly defined by two walls, the tops of which had been exposed in the previous season.  Essentially, we are exposing a room, from top to bottom.  When we arrived, the top portion of an arched doorway was just beginning to show.  There were also two large blocks sticking out of the ground, a foreshadowing of what was to come. The city was destroyed by a major earthquake in 749 AD, which caused massive destruction.  These blocks, and many we found beneath, were all from construction above that toppled into this room.  Much of our digging was spent extracting these large blocks and tossing them aside.  

The "Before" picture.  Our site as we found it, before we began to dig.  Notice two large blocks sticking out from surface.  These blocks fell in from construction above during an earthquake.

Second "Before" picture.  This The opposite wall of our section.  Notice the fill in the opening, another doorway that will be exposed.

After the first day, we had leveled the surface and begun to slowly work our way down.  Mostly, we were learning technique of how to break up the ground, how best to extract the stones, where to dispose of the dirt and stone, and what kinds of things we were looking for.  Pottery was evident on this level, but not very helpful.  On the surface layers after destruction, there is usually a jumble of late pottery that is in terrible shape because it has not been protected well.  It's mostly junk pottery, but we are still looking to lips and handles, because these are most useful in dating the pottery.

End of day one.  Those two large stones removed, the surface of our area mostly leveled, a little more of the arch showing

The next two days, significant progress was made.  We started to work more smoothly and were able to get much deeper into the room.  It is still full of destruction and most of the finds are broken pottery pieces that are indistinct.  The best finds will be closer to the floor level, so we keep pulling out dirt and making our way down.  Large stones continue to be exposed and extracted.  The arch and doorway are opening up significantly.  Slolwy a room that has been hidden for over a thousand years is being exposed.

Two large stones that need to be pulled out.

Progress at end of day three.  Large stone in the archway is one we are leaving because the keystone in the arch is askew from the earthquake and we don't want to destabilize the arch.

The opposite doorway starting to open up.

So that is where we are at.  Continuing to dig and hoping that in the next couple days we will get close to floor level.  We have found a handful of decent pottery pieces that were worth keeping.  Below are some of the things I found, mostly pot handles

First Day on the Dig

Today was our first day on site and my first opportunity to see Hippos in person.  Over the previous months I have spent many hours scouring the internet for pictures and videos of the excavations at Hippos, so in many ways the site seems familiar to me.  Still, it is altogether different to see this place for oneself in three dimensions.  This gives the opportunity for close inspection, finer details, a better appreciation of scale, and a more comprehensive view of the site as a whole rather than just a compilation of images.

The day begins early, on the bus at 5:15 am, on the trail up the mountain five minutes later, still dark but just enough dawn breaking to allow for navigating up a winding, rocky road with frequent spots of loose gravel.  By 5:30 we are gathering tools that will be needed and heading to our assigned work site.  I am part of a crew excavating a roman bath house.  It is the precise area I was most interested in.  I debated requesting this assignment, but decided to leave it in the hands of God to place me where he wanted me, I was delighted to find that this is where I will spend the next two weeks.  

Our first task was to build shade out of a large tarp, a bunch of sting and a bunch of PVC pipes serving as poles.   Shade is essential because of the extreme heat.  It was over 100 degrees (I heard people with readings of 104-108 on their phones) and it sounds like this intense heat will continue the rest of this week at least.  

Erecting the shelter - a work in progress

Overview of the site where I am working.  The large black tarp is the shade we erected

My specific assignment is to work on a small section between two walls that are just starting to be revealed.  We will dig out the fill between these walls, exposing the contours of this room and looking for evidence of what purpose this room served.  It is on the edges of the bath house so there is some question as to whether this is part of the bathhouse or separate.  I am working with a woman named Sue who has been on the dig a number of times before.  She is a wealth of information about the site.  

My partner Sue and the top edge of one of the walls we are exposing.  You can see the top of a doorway arch that will be exposed in days to come.

The second wall that we are digging between.  We will be exposing the space between this wall and the wall with the arched doorway in the rear of the picture (and in the above picture).

That is the project.  The process is really quite simple.  We break up the dirt with a pick axe, then use a hoe to fill buckets.  When all the buckets are full we form a bucket line among the whole team and pass the buckets down the line to be disposed of away from the site.  In these first few levels we are not really looking for artifacts.  Pieces of pottery are found in almost every bucket, but it is of little value to the excavation. This is a destruction layer (from an earthquake) and pottery found here does not have much to tell us about the room.  The pieces are small fragments and indistinct - not much help in dating or developing a chronology.  So we just toss them away.  I kept a few pieces as keepsakes, since they are just garbage.  As we get deeper, we will be more concerned with the pieces that are uncovered.  Probably starting tomorrow we will begin to collect small finds in a seperate bucket for the area director to determine whether to keep or not.

That's about it.  Over the week I hope to show you the room being exposed little by little each day.

We also took the first part of a tour of the site and I have a bunch of pictures from that, but that would probably be information overload for this blog.