Diversity marks volunteers at archaeology dig

c. 1997 Religion News Service TEL REHOV, Israel _ As dawn comes, the wheat fields of nearby kibbutz Ein Ha Natziv and the mountains of Jordan to the east come alive with golden color. It is quiet here at Tel Rehov, a quiet broken only by the sound of picks and shovels, scraping the earth, […]

c. 1997 Religion News Service TEL REHOV, Israel _ As dawn comes, the wheat fields of nearby kibbutz Ein Ha Natziv and the mountains of Jordan to the east come alive with golden color. It is quiet here at Tel Rehov, a quiet broken only by the sound of picks and shovels, scraping the earth, as well as jokes and kidding among the 100 or so volunteers from around the world, who have gathered to uncover a 3,000-year-old city from the period of kings David and Solomon. Pulling up pot shards and charcoals of an old domestic hearth, uncovering the walls of a home destroyed almost 3,000 years ago, one can almost hear the screams of war and destruction rising from the ruins, undisturbed until the shovels hit the soil. Tel Rehov is one of the largest still-unexplored archaeological sites remaining in Israel. The volunteers who excavated here this summer touch virgin remains, buried since the town was destroyed in a battle around the 8th century B.C., the period in which Assyria conquered the northern kingdom of Israel, and drove the 10 northern tribes of ancient Israel into exile. Internationally known Israeli archaeologist Ami Mazar has opened the site for the first time this year, hoping to find clues among the ruins to the sparsely documented biblical era of the 10th century B.C., when Tel Rehov flourished. His excavation team, drawn from 16 countries, is an unlikely mix of recruits. They range from affluent investment brokers to young ex-Marines, Americans and Canadians, contingents of Japanese and Korean Bible students, Israelis, Europeans and South Americans. Many of the most dedicated diggers are deeply religious Christians who believe their efforts may yield hard evidence confirming the biblical account of early history that is regarded by some academics as myth and legend. But there are also plain old skeptics in love with the past, religious and secular Jews exploring their heritage in the land of Israel, and even American Indians and a Sikh. The volunteers all pay for the experience _ which in its first days yields more snakes and scorpions than artifacts. Still, over the six-week duration of the excavation, this melting pot of peoples and religions becomes a team of highly professional diggers, says Mazar _ a group more skilled and serious than anyone he would be able to hire. The small”destruction corner”in”Area C”of Tel Rehov, as it is described in archaeologist’s lingo, has yielded the most lucrative finds of the dig. Christine Allen, a New Yorker from the posh Upper West Side of Manhattan, is stationed in the corner on her last day at the dig before returning home so she may savor the satisfaction of unearthing the rich assortment of ceramic pots and urns slowly emerging from the ground. Neither the modest quarters, the work schedule beginning at 5 a.m., nor the monotonous diet of fresh vegetables and eggs elicit any complaints. (FIRST OPTIONAL TRIM BEGINS)”I love this little corner,”says the slim, fine-boned woman wearing a small tri-cornered kerchief.”They put me here to placate me before I go.” She speaks with the refined East Coast accent of a Katharine Hepburn, and in her everyday life oversees a family business and sits on the advisory boards of museums and a graduate school at Harvard University. But her real passion is archaeology. She has traveled to digs in Jordan and Syria. In the simple mobile-home camp of kibbutz Nir David, where the volunteers sleep, she shares a small bedroom and living room with two other roommates. Delicately, Allen sweeps the dirt and chips away at the dirt still gripping a 10-century pot that has”popped”out of the ground just a yard below ground level in the destruction corner. The pot is decorated with a series of concentric circles, and two blue ladders rising at 45 degree angles from the base of a palm tree, a design archaeologists say is common to the period.”The interesting thing is that the 10th century B.C. remains are right at the surface here,”Allen observes, surveying half a dozen ceramic objects yet to be pulled from the earth in the small closet-sized pit. (FIRST OPTIONAL TRIM ENDS) The abundance of pottery cluttered in one small corner of the excavation comes as little of a surprise to Willie Wilson, 39, an American Indian from Oklahoma studying archaeology at San Diego State University.”It’s a classic destruction layer _ textbook stuff,”the tall, slender Wilson observes. Using the dusty ground as his drawing board, he etches into the sand a picture of the way the site probably looked when it was inhabited.”Here you have your foundation trench, full of cobbles and small pebbles for drainage. On top of that, you built a mud brick wall _ up to 25 feet high if it was part of the outer defense wall. And here, in this corner, you’ve got your living quarters, your table for food preparation,”he says pointing down into the pit where the pieces of pottery have been found.”Now here you are sitting all fat and happy one day, and someone comes and ravages the city. They enter your house, looking for valuables, turn the table over, smashing things up all over the place _ just like if a prowler came into your house, and starting pulling things out of the kitchen cupboards and dumping them onto the floor.”Finally, the invaders set the house on fire,”continues Wilson with the relish of a writer scripting an action movie.”The house is burning, the internal supports to the ceiling fall in, covering up the broken pottery. Some broken mud bricks fall down. Soot and small chunks of mud brick wash in with the rain and eventually the fire burns out. “You get rain and mud, which seal the”destruction”layer. Wind blows in, starts depositing more dirt _ this is a tel (an archaeological hill).” A few thousand years pass, and one day at dawn the archaeologists appear. They scout for old shards of pottery among the kibbutz wheat fields and uproot the groves of trees now covering some of the ruins.”So how come in this corner we’re finding whole pots? They were in the corner, well protected by the supporting wall when the roof caved in.” (SECOND OPTIONAL TRIM BEGINS) Around his neck, Wilson wears a medicine bag and the emblem of the Cherokee nation. His dad is full-blooded Cherokee, he says, pulling out a wallet-sized card certifying his American Indian identity. In his everyday life, he operates F-111 aircraft test equipment for GDE Systems, a skill he developed in the Army. He studies for a bachelor’s degree in archaeology at night, and saves his vacation time for experiences like this summer’s dig. Eventually, he hopes to be able to find a job teaching American Indian history and archaeology. At the top of the tel, are the ruins of the”upper”city, the neighborhoods where public buildings and the homes of the ruling elite would presumably have been located. It is here that an archaeologist might hope, even pray, to find a shred of a rare inscription, providing concrete evidence as to who ruled here in the 10th century B.C., and what peoples and religions predominated. (SECOND OPTIONAL TRIM ENDS) Already, the walls of the upper city’s homes and fortifications have come into view _ some walls almost as wide as 9 yards. But the site has so far yielded fewer intriguing finds than the”lower city”with its rich cache of 10th century pottery.”What we found in the upper city was expected,”observes Mazar, the head of the dig, and director of the Hebrew University’s Institute of Archeology.”But the 10th century remains that we are finding in the lower city are very unexpected. For Mazar learning more about the 10th century period is one of the primary aims of the dig.”The 10th century B.C. is a very problematic time in the history of Israel,”he remarks, sitting on a bench under a protective sun canopy during the 8:30 a.m. break for a breakfast of cheese, bread, water and fresh vegetables. “These days there is a big debate among historians about the historicity of the biblical accounts of Solomon and David. There are those who claim that all of this history from the stories of the patriarchs to the Davidic stories, are just literary narrative, and not history.”They say that if the kingdoms of David and Solomon were as big as they are described in the Bible, why are the remains of David and Solomon so slim? Archaeology is the only tool we have to investigate this.” The controversies over the accuracy of the Bible only whet the appetite of religious Christian volunteers who come to Tel Rehov _ from places as far-flung as Korea and the southern U.S. Bible Belt. Se Jin Koh, an ordained minister with a Ph.D in archaeology, who originally is from Korea and now lives in Jerusalem, is one such figure. “I should have majored in Egyptian or Mesopotamian archaeology. They were more glorious periods,”Koh remarks.”But this has more meaning to me, in terms of biblical records. It’s important for us to recover real culture from that period. You can argue about a lot of things, but if you find things in the archaeological setting that supports the existence of historical figures such as David and Solomon, it’s very important.” A faculty member of the Jerusalem University College, an evangelical Christian institution, Koh has brought together a contingent of Korean and Japanese theology students, and professors, directly from the Far East to Tel Rehov this summer. Koh’s contingent of volunteers dig silently and solemnly at a far eastern end of the Tel, looking towards the Israeli-Jordanian border. Some of them are new arrivals, and they still are getting to know each other. After a week or two, they will be laughing and talking with each other, Koh assures, and he ribs them gently and says, “Hey, can’t we hear some jokes _ this really is a dead civilization.” About a half-mile away on the western end of the dig, where Jim Lever and Travis Smith work, there is, on the other hand, no shortage of casual banter. An ancient potshard with a lid is a”thermos.”A skeleton without a head is pronounced”very dead.” Lever and Smith are childhood friends from Tifton, Ga., who collected arrowheads together even as kids. Today, Lever, 55, is a retired contractor and stockbroker. Smith, also 55, is an ex-Marine, and a dentist. While the two friends periodically go on adventure vacations together this particular dig also conceals a more serious purpose for both of them; they wanted to live in the land of the Bible, and not just observe it.”An archaeological dig is really a humbling experience, bringing together people from five continents, from all over the world, and every background,”says Lever.”In light of the events of this century, a dig is an example of how much in common we have as human beings, as part of the family of man.””And if you really get bored, all you need to do is to stand up, and look across the Jordan River, or east to the Gilboa Mountains of Israel, or do a 360 degree turn around you and take in past, present and future altogether, some 5,000 to 7,000 years of some of the most significant human civilization there is. “Then you get down onto the ground again and start digging. Who knows, you just might be five minutes away from tangible proof that David and Solomon existed.” DEA END FLETCHER

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