Excavations Archives - Page 74 of 97

Weekend Roundup

Well preserved remains of an ancient ship possibly from the first century has been found in the port that served ancient Rome.

Roman and Byzantine buildings have been discovered in Jiftlik, a Palestinian town near Alexandrium-Sartaba in the Jordan Valley.

“Geography and culture are important.” Jim Elliff explains why in this bulletin insert that you can download and reproduce for your church.

Infanticide was apparently common in the Roman Empire.

The first phase of the National Museum of Egyptian Civilisation is scheduled to open next month.

The country of Turkey is starting to recognize the value of its Christian sites for bringing in tourists (NY Times).

The Alphabetical list of Open Access Journals in Ancient Studies surpassed 900 titles this week.

Wayne Stiles shares his thoughts (and video) on Mount Arbel and the Sea of Galilee (JPost).

Tour guide Joe Yudin describes his jeep tour of the Judean Desert in a new column at the Jerusalem Post.

As a follow-up to the list of finalists for the 2011 Christian Book Award, it may be noted that the winner in the Bible Reference Category is the Zondervan Illustrated Bible Backgrounds
Commentary, edited by John H. Walton.

Accordance is giving away a Bible a day (to one winner) and offering a big discount for all users, through the month of May.

ICEJ News reports on Israel’s plans to invest in Nazareth: On Wednesday, Israeli tourism minister Stas Meseznikov announced that the government is planning to invest more than NIS 12 million over the next four years in Israel’s largest Arab city, Nazareth, which is also a major tourist attraction due to its status as the town where Jesus grew up, being visited by over 40% of the tourists who arrive in Israel every year. One of the strategies used in order to develop the city is to encourage local residents to open their own businesses, and grants of up to 30% of their start up investments are therefore offered. “The program to boost development of the tourism industry in Nazareth is part of a 2010 government initiative to encourage development in the Arab sector,” Meseznikov said.

HT: Paleojudaica, Jack Sasson

Tagged Egypt, Excavations, Galilee, Italy, Judah, Museums, Resources, Tourism, Turkey, Weekend Roundup

Underground Jerusalem

The weekend magazine of Haaretz has a lengthy article on the excavations below ground in Jerusalem. While the majority of the information is not new, the article brings matters together in a helpful survey. The second half of the article focuses on the excavations of the road and drainage channel that runs from the Western Wall to the Pool of Siloam.

The excavation of the sewage canal that links the City of David with the Western Wall began in 2003. In many respects, this tunnel became Elad’s flagship project. If, as Elad officials hope, the public can walk the length of the tunnel, it would give the national park a major boost, connecting it directly to the Western Wall plaza. The excavators say this is not an excavation in the ordinary sense, but rather a matter of “clearing” sewage from a Herodian tunnel that was largely exposed by Warren and his successors.

The excavation is criticized on political grounds as well as on archaeological ones.

The scholarly objection to digging laterally through the tunnels is that this is a faulty, unscientific way of excavating, one that typified archaeology a century or more ago; it makes it impossible to find, date and document all the archaeological findings. Another objection concerns the fact that most of the excavations are cautiously retracing the steps of Warren and his successors, meaning they are providing only marginal added value. Critics also say the tunnels conceal the excavation from the public.

Archaeologist Ronny Reich is given a chance to respond:

Reich himself wrote in an introductory archaeology textbook that the tunnel excavation method is outdated. Nevertheless, he rejects the criticism of his work in the City of David. One must differentiate between genuine archaeological excavations and clearing out debris from an ancient sewer, he says. This is not a vertical excavation, but rather the uncovering of an ancient structure. As for vertical excavations, such as the stepped street – the street that was built above the sewer system, now cleared and part of the City of David national park – Reich explains that given the choice between what he gave up by adopting this type of excavation style, and what he discovered by virtue of employing the method, he has no doubt that the excavation was highly valuable.
[…]
“I’m not motivated by politics; I myself am on the left. I’m motivated by the archaeological understanding of Jerusalem. The excavation is sponsored by the State of Israel. What can I do if it is easy to raise funds for excavations in Jerusalem?”
Reich is also proud of his part in encouraging tourism in the area. “When we started, 15 years ago, there may have been a thousand tourists a year. Now there are 450,000 and that is solely because of the archaeology. There is nothing else. So what am I being accused of, helping develop tourism in Jerusalem?”

It’s worth noting that Reich is a political leftist. This contradicts the earlier statement in the article by Meretz city council member Meir Margalit.

I have no problem with excavating per se; I myself am an archaeology buff, and I always get a thrill from these tunnels. The problem is the excavators’ messianic political agenda.

Margalit’s statement should not go unchallenged. The fact is that Elad, who is supporting the excavations financially, is ideologically driven, but the archaeologists are not. There have been many pieces criticizing the excavations, but not once have I heard any hint that Reich or his partner Shukron distort their findings or interpretation because of personal or institutional bias.

The article concludes with a statement from Elad, financial backer of the City of David excavations.

The final paragraph makes an important point:

“Recently a drainage canal from the Second Temple period was exposed. This is one of the most important and exciting archaeological discoveries of recent years, not only for the Jewish people but for all of human civilization. It is clear to every thinking person that the route of the canal was determined 2,000 years ago, and there is no connection between its discovery and attempts to connect it, indecently, to political viewpoints.”

The entire article contains much more. Previous posts on this blog about the excavations of this street were written in Jan 2011, Sept 2009, Mar 2008, and Sept 2007.

Drainage channel below Siloam Street

Tagged Excavations, Jerusalem

Carchemish Excavations – Further Details

The site of Carchemish is located on the Euphrates River, straddling the Turkey-Syria border. The first excavations in 1878-1881 were conducted by the British consul in Aleppo, Patrick Henderson.

The main excavations at the site, however, took place in 1911-1914 and 1920. The first season was directed by D. G. Hogarth and R. Campbell Thompson. Subsequent seasons were directed by Sir C. Leonard Woolley with the assistance of T. E. Lawrence (aka Lawrence of Arabia) and, in the final year, with the assistance of P. L. O. Guy. The work was interrupted both by World War I (1914-1918) and by the Turkish War of Independence (1919-1923). After the Turkish War of Independence, the modern borders were established, and it became impossible to excavate Carchemish any further.

Carchemish, orthostat in the British Museum with relief of the Storm-god.

Now, 91 years later, work is underway to resume excavations at the ancient site. We remarked on this before, but an online news article now gives additional details. According to a piece in Hurriyet Daily News, the renewed excavations will be conducted by Italian and Japanese archaeologists and are set to begin sometime this year. In preparation for excavations, a contractor had to clear 1,200 landmines from the site. During the mine-clearing, some coins and other objects were retrieved from the site and turned over to the Ministry of Culture and Tourism.

Tagged Excavations, Turkey

NY Times: Excavating in Ashkelon

The Travel section of the New York Times features an article by a volunteer to last summer’s excavations of the Philistine city of Ashkelon. Sam Roberts writes:

The expedition is a mix of Outward Bound and summer school. The classes are all outdoors — below ground, mostly — in deep pits excavated in grids marked on a 130-acre bowl atop an eroding cliff that overlooks the beach below. The site is part of a national park, populated by picnickers and jackals and mongoose, with guest appearances by the pink, black and white-crested hoopoe, Israel’s national bird. The accommodations are vastly improved from the first year when, with the group camping out near the dig, the director stumbled into a cesspool and had his pants stolen. These days, the accommodations compare very favorably with sleepaway camp and the hotel food is tolerable (it’s served at a buffet, so at least there’s plenty of it). […] What is striking, too, is the juxtaposition of ancient ruins and modern technology. Each artifact and the daily changing dimensions of the dig are meticulously digitized. “Every field book is typed onto a laptop, every bucket is assigned a bar code to enable us to communicate the results to the archaeological community faster,” said Dr. Daniel M. Master, an archaeology professor at Wheaton College and the expedition’s new co-director with Dr. Lawrence E. Stager, a Harvard archaeology professor and director of the Harvard Semitic Museum, who has overseen the dig for 25 years.

The article includes information about qualifications to volunteer at Ashkelon as well as the cost and deadline. (The cost doubles for those getting academic credit from Harvard.) The writer includes the Israelites as among the ancient groups that lived in the city, but I’m having difficulty recalling when that could have been.

Tagged Excavations, Philistines

Archaeological Remains from the Temple Mount

The April issue of the Smithsonian magazine features a well-researched article by Joshua Hammer on the Temple Mount Sifting Project. The article weaves the history of the Temple Mount with an account of the archaeological project headed by Gabriel Barkay and Zachi Zweig. The report has much of interest, and I recommend reading the whole. Even those very familiar with the issues will likely learn something new. A few brief quotes may stir your interest:

“That earth was saturated with the history of Jerusalem,” says Eyal Meiron, a historian at the Ben-Zvi Institute for the Study of Eretz Israel. “A toothbrush would be too large for brushing that soil, and they did it with bulldozers.” Yusuf Natsheh, the Waqf’s chief archaeologist, was not present during the operation. But he told the Jerusalem Post that archaeological colleagues had examined the excavated material and had found nothing of significance. The Israelis, he told me, were “exaggerating” the value of the found artifacts. And he bristled at the suggestion the Waqf sought to destroy Jewish history. “Every stone is a Muslim development,” he says. “If anything was destroyed, it was Muslim heritage.” […] Barkay says some discoveries provide tangible evidence of biblical accounts. Fragments of terra-cotta figurines, from between the eighth and sixth centuries B.C., may support the passage in which King Josiah, who ruled during the seventh century, initiated reforms that included a campaign against idolatry. Other finds challenge long-held beliefs. For example, it is widely accepted that early Christians used the Mount as a garbage dump on the ruins of the Jewish temples. But the abundance of coins, ornamental crucifixes and fragments of columns found from Jerusalem’s Byzantine era (A.D. 380–638) suggest that some public buildings were constructed there. Barkay and his colleagues have published their main findings in two academic journals in Hebrew, and they plan to eventually publish a book-length account in English. But Natsheh, the Waqf’s chief archaeologist, dismisses Barkay’s finds because they were not found in situ in their original archaeological layers in the ground. “It is worth nothing,” he says of the sifting project, adding that Barkay has leapt to unwarranted conclusions in order to strengthen the Israeli argument that Jewish ties to the Temple Mount are older and stronger than those of the Palestinians. “This is all to serve his politics and his agenda,” Natsheh says. […] Barkay and I get into my car and drive toward Mount Scopus. I ask him about Natsheh’s charge that the sifting project is infused with a political agenda. He shrugs. “Sneezing in Jerusalem is an intensely political activity. You can do it to the right, to the left, on the face of an Arab or a Jew. Whatever you do, or don’t do, is political.”

You have to love Natsheh’s logic. He allowed the removal of the evidence and now claims that Barkay’s work is worthless because the material wasn’t found in situ! The full article begins here.

Tagged Excavations, Jerusalem, Temple Mount

Archaeologists Battle in Elah Valley

A feud between archaeologists in Israel today resembles the ancient struggle between David and Goliath. As with the battle of old, one combatant is from Jerusalem (Yosef Garfinkel of Hebrew University) and the other from the Philistine plain (Oded Lipschitz of Tel Aviv University). The skirmish is only the latest in an on-going conflict that goes back to the establishment of the entity on the coast (the Institute of Archaeology founded by Yohanan Aharoni). The subject of dispute is the very same as that between the ancient Israelites and Philistines—control of the lowlands (Shephelah). In fact, it is the site of Socoh, identified in connection with the Philistine encampment that is at the heart of the dispute between the two archaeologists.

Aren Maeir, excavator of the Philistine city of Gath, is an outside observer who drew our attention to a report of the clash in Haaretz (Hebrew). The article observes that archaeologists at Tel Aviv University typically deny or minimize the existence of David and the Israelite kingdom. Hebrew University researchers, however, tend to defend the greatness of the ancient state centered in Jerusalem. Archaeology has been used to support both sides of the debate, and most recently Hebrew University has claimed a major advance with the excavations of the 10th century site of Khirbet Qeiyafa and its ancient inscription.

With Hebrew U excavating Khirbet Qeiyafa on the north side of the Elah Valley and Tel Aviv U surveying Tel Azekah on the west side, Tel Socoh on the south side is up for grabs. The Israel Antiquities Authority gave permission to survey the site to both parties. But when Tel Aviv U discovered that more than surveying work was going on, Lipschitz fired off a testy letter to the authorities, claiming that Hebrew U had opened excavation squares and was blatantly violating the terms of the license.

Garfinkel has defended himself against the attack, arguing that the “excavation” is clearly the work of antiquities thieves and that Lipschitz cannot tell the difference between an excavation and a robbery.

Lipschitz, however, found incriminating evidence in one of the excavation trenches—a water bottle with the name of one of Garfinkel’s team! Garfinkel has observed that the site is not far from the
West Bank and the area where the partition fence ends giving Arab thieves easy access.

The Israel Antiquities Authority has responded to Lipschitz’s letter by rejecting his claims and declaring the “excavations” to be the work of antiquities thieves. Only time will tell who will secure rights to excavate Socoh and what evidence it will supply concerning the ancient conflict between the Israelites and the Philistines.

Tagged Excavations, Shephelah