Adventures in Israel!

Camel rides at the Dead Sea

 

I spent the month of June digging at an archaeological site in Israel, which was great fun.   I was digging in the Judean desert in sight of Jericho, so we were in the West Bank.  The West Bank is pretty economically depressed... the modern town of Jericho is full of half-built businesses, including a theme park that never seems to have opened.  The area where we were digging is inhabited only by Bedouin, who herd goats all over those mountains.  (We had to chase goats out of the road every day!)  It is definitely not an agricultural area.  Even the weeds on the mountain we climbed every morning hug the ground and look dry and unhappy by this time of year.  The little boys who herd goats around our site thought we were very interesting.  They would come and share our food and grin at us.  The littlest boy had a donkey that he would ride around as he followed the goats.

 

Up the long long hill to our site!

Our dig site was a fortress town from the middle of the monarchic period (after Israel and Judah parted ways).  Being on a mountain top near the Auja spring, it has both a strategic location (watching for trouble coming across the Jordan from Moab) and access to enough water to sustain a group, although the spring is not terribly close to the fort.  And the mountain is very steep on that side; I climbed down it one day looking for caves.  (I found lots of caves, but no burials.) 

Most of the time on the dig I was working in an ancient cooking area.  We found a tabun (a mud-brick cooking pot) as well as several hearths and mysterious installations that probably had to do with cooking.  I also worked in an area just outside the corner of the monumental building we found--a building with very thick walls that may have originally stood 2-3 stories high.  Clearly an administrative building of some kind.  Unfortunately, the Ottomans had built a stone structure right on top of it that we didn't have time to disassemble.

 

Tabun.

 

People always ask, "What did you find?" Personally... I found lots of dirt.  Also the bedrock in several places (limestone with outcroppings of flint).  Some broken pottery.  Which is very interesting from an archaeological perspective but not so much from a telling-people-about-it perspective.  "So where's the golden treasure?" one person asked me.  Alas, not all sites have golden treasure. 

Herod's palace at Masada, from before the rebels lived there.

Our group did a good bit of touring on the weekends.  The first week we made it down to the Dead Sea, the fortress of Masada, the "commune" and caves at Qumran, and (according to a 2nd century AD tradition) Jesus' baptism site on the Jordan.  The second week we went to Lachish, a massive fortress city with a monumental gate and palace, and to Khirbet Qeiyafa in the Elah Valley (ancient Shaaraim).  The third week we stopped briefly at Tel Ashkelon to see the Canaanite gate and then went to the beach, where I proceeded to get horribly sunburned.  (I thought I was in the shade...  This will teach me to sit and read books instead of swimming in the ocean.)

 

At Khirbet Qeiyafa, looking toward the Elah Valley.

 

We were staying in Jerusalem near Herod's Gate, so we had a lot of time to wander around the Old City and the museums.  I made it to the Rockefeller Museum and the Israel Museum, as well as the Biblical Zoo, the City of David, the Dome of the Rock, the Archaeological Park, the Lithostratos, the Mount of Olives (nothing to see there except views of the rest of the city), and so on.  Having been in Jerusalem, I can no longer say that traffic in New York is the worst I've ever seen.  Although the fact that they use roundabouts instead of stop lights may be a large part of that.

 

View from the Mt of Olives toward the Dome of the Rock.  Note Old City wall.

 

The most beautiful place I went: Shiloh.  Lots of vineyards and olive trees around there.

 

 

 

The most interesting place: Khirbet Qeiyafa.  I may write a whole blog post about this in future.

My favorite museum: actually the Rockefeller, not the Israel Museum.  The Rockefeller has a lot of the smaller, less glamorous finds all in a very compact area so that you can easily compare pottery across the centuries.

 

 

My favorite place in Jerusalem: the Archaeological Park.  The stuff at the front which they list in the brochure is all pretty modern (... early Islamic period ...) but if you go back to Hulda's Gate there are a TON of poorly labeled buildings from the Second Temple and even First Temple periods.  Really amazing stuff.

Looking across archaeological park toward Mt of Olives.

The place I most want to set a story: our own archaeological site in the Judean desert.  Those barren hills are stuck in my brain now!

View from our site toward Jericho, the Jordan, and Moab!