Last time I checked in, I reported on my incredible winter break and mentioned that I would be going on an archeological dig up in the north of Israel for a week. I got back from the dig on Thursday, and since then, I've either been too tired or too busy to post about the dig. Sorry that it's been so long, but here it is anyways.
On Sunday, a group of 16 Nativers along with one of my staff members hopped on a bus to Tiberius in order to dig. We had a brief orientation about the site that we would be digging on (which I'll talk about more in a bit when I actually describe the digging process), and then we went to find a place for lunch on the Kineret (the Gallalee). We took our sandwiches off the bus and walked down to the shore expecting to plop down right there and eat--but no. Instead, we had an impromptu water hike to our lunch destination. Though people complained about the process of getting their shoes soaking wet and stepping on very sharp rocks in order to get to our final stop, when we got there, we understood: we had arrived at a beautiful waterfall. We all assumed that we would just be eating there, but without warning, our staff member ripped off his non-swimming gear and entered the warm water spring. Though no one other than myself as dumb enough to join him at first (especially since I joined him in jeans and a T-Shirt), eventually, a total of four of us went swimming. Here are some pictures.
After a low key night and a good night's rest, we woke up at the crack of dawn to daven and then dig. Before I talk about the dig itself, I'm just going to show you some pictures I took of the view from just outside of my room (and at breakfast) since it was absolutely beautiful.
Instead of going day to day in this post, I'm just going to explain the general structure of the day and use that framework to explain what we did. On all four of the days that we dug, we dug in the morning and then went on some sort of tour in the afternoon. I'll talk about teh digging first, and then I'll talk about the afternoon trips
The story of the excavation that we got to participate in is pretty interesting. The Vatican bought a large piece of land up near the Kineret near the place where Jesus did all his miraculous stuff in order to build a beautiful hotel for Christian pilgrims. In Israel, in order to get a building permit, archeologists have to go into the site and excavate just to make sure that they aren't building on top of any ancient ruins. When they started the salvage excavation on this land a few years ago, they found an ancient Roman synagogue which was identifiable since there was a stone with a Menorah engraved into it. This discovery was a big deal not only because it showed that Judaism was up in the North of Israel during the Roman period, but also, this menora was the first one ever found outside of Jerusalem. Because of the significance of the discovery, instead of just taking pictures and then building the hotel over it, the Vatican (and the Israeli Antiquities Association) decided to change the plan to include a large hotel directly adjacent to the to-be-excavated ancient Roman city. Our role was to begin the excavation of the area directly next to the synagogue.
When we learned that we would be starting an excavation directly from scratch, we were all really excited, but upon learning what that really meant, we didn't quite think the same way. Excavating isn't what we thought it was going to be. It isn't sitting in a nice quiet little cave picking up ancient ruins and lightly dusting them off; it isn't an instantly gratifying process in which every moment is filled with exciting discoveries; it isn't a fast process that just lifts ancient things magically out of the ground. It is a labor intensive process of moving mud from one place to another. When I say that, I need to be clear: when I say moving mud from one place to another, I truly mean that we spent our hours moving mud from one place to another.
We started with a pick-axe to turn the dirt floor into smaller chunks of mud. We then took a hoe and hoed the newly freed mud into buckets. We then threw the buckets in to a pile that grew significantly over the course of the day. It is painful; it is difficult; it is exhausting; it feels like you get no where. On the first day, I was having a blast, but many of the people around me weren't as thrilled. Here is a picture of what the project looked like at the beginning, what the work looked like, and of the attitudes of some of our participants on the first day.
The funniest moment of the digging itself occurred when we met a group of Chilean boys who were volunteering on this dig for a month. They were as unenthusiastic about it as we were, and so we spent a lot of time talking to them while pretending to work. I started talking to one of them about his travels and he mentioned that he had come from Spain. When he mentioned that he was in Madrid over New Years Eve, we quickly realized that we had both spent New Years in El Sol, the main square that I talked about in my last post. We were trying to figure out if we had seen each other, so I thought of the only activity that night that would have set my night apart from that of any other person in the square: the Macarena in the middle of the street.
When I asked if they had seen a group of people dancing the Macarena in a side street, they laughed hysterically for a while and then told me something that truly blew my mind: THEY HAD STARTED IT! I didn't remember them, and they didn't remember me, but we all had a funny time dancing in the streets of madrid a few weeks before the dig. It's a small world...
After the dig each day, we took a different trip. The first day, we went to Akko, the second day we looked at some still unpublished archeological sites (including a really cool Roman theater) in Tiberius, and the third day we did a hike where we walked down a massive cliff called the Arbel. Though it was all really cool, I'm really tired of writing so in my most normal fashion, I'm just going to show you some pictures. I can't show you pictures of the unpublished stuff since we were explicitly told not to, I can show you a lot of other cool stuff that we got to see and some gorgeous views.
Here are some pictures from Akko:
Here are some from Tiberius
 |
| Yes, these are bats on the top of a cave that we walked into. Apparently, this was the site of the place that we were going to excavate before it started raining. |
Here are some pictures from the Hike:
Becca
No comments:
Post a Comment