Gordon Salyers: In Memoriam

I wrote this post on June 24 and sent it to family, friends, and colleagues. 

Dear Family and  Friends,

I am beginning this letter on the train from Haifa to Ben Gurion Airport.  I moved to a window seat on the right side of the car so that I could see the Mediterranean, but I mostly catch glimpses through industrial areas and medium-rise apartments whose designer chose not to squander his imagination on living spaces.  Oh, there it is, just a few hundred feet away.  Maybe I will catch the sunset.

I’m leaving the country early to be with Laura, Sarah, and my in-laws at the memorial service for Laura’s father, Gordon Salyers.  He died yesterday after a prolonged decline following a stroke around five years ago.  At Shikhin, my parents, Aaron Carr, and Dr.s Denny and Connie Groh will complete the final drawings, supervise the backfilling of our archaeological squares, and see to the storage of our artifacts.  I am profoundly grateful for their help.

I am also grateful for Gordon, for he helped Laura to become the woman I love, and he was also so important to Sarah, especially during those first five years of her life before we met.

He was someone to admire.  His father abandoned the family, leaving Gordon to assume responsibilities at an age when no one should have to do such a thing.  It is apparent to me that Gordon made a decision that he would become a different sort of man.  He married Betty and the two raised their three children together in Miami and Lexington, Kentucky.  Gordon became the provider that his own father chose not to be.  He did it by graduating with a Bachelor’s degree from the University of Miami, serving his country in the Air Force, and ending up at IBM where he worked very hard at sales and marketing, at which he was quite successful.  He became a Regional Director (I might not get all the terminology right) and was able to retire in his late 50s to a life filled mostly with golf and long vacations in North Carolina. 

One of my favorite memories of Gordon is watching him dance with Betty at their fiftieth wedding anniversary celebration.  In Phil’s (eldest son) and Janet’s (daughter-in-law) living room, Betty enthusiastically stepped and turned in bare feet while Gordon appeared to stand still.  But if you watched carefully, you could see his feet making small steps in all the right ways and his hands deftly moving Betty through her turns with understated bends of the wrist and subtle pressure on the small of the back.  But what I remember most is his smile.  I’d never seen that expression on his face.  Gordon had a great smile, but this one was different than the one that he put on for photos.  His eyes never left Betty, and his lips turned up delicately in the unvarnished pleasure of dancing with his wife of fifty years.  I love dancing with my wife too, but I’m glad that on that night I did not, for I got to see this sight instead.  It was a gift and a delight.

So I end the inaugural season of the Excavations at Shikhin thinking little about the project.  Later there will be time for combing through the data and composing a preliminary report.  This train ride is a time for thanking God for Gordon Salyers.  His decision about family, made those years ago, lives on in his children and grandchildren.  It is certainly present in my household.

The train is nearing Tel Aviv and the sun has set into the Mediterranean.

May Gordon Salyers’ memory be a blessing.

James

The Samford group at Khirbet Qana (NT Cana?) overlooking the Beit Netofa Valley; clockwise from upper left: Joe Clark, Aaron Carr, James Strange, Adam Quinn, Laura Snyder, Rachel Smith, Maggie Johnson, David Bayless

At the Roman aqueduct near Caesarea; L-R back: Carlos Lugo, Rachel  Stivers-Bender, Joe Clark, Rachel Smith, Olivia Leftwich, Andrew Watkins; L-R front: Michael Leung, Adam Quinn, David Bayless, Maggie Johnson, Laura Snyder, Claire Oldfather

Second Post 2012

Composed 2 June 2012

We have finished our second week of digging and have taken our second tour of sites and a body of water.  In addition to seeing Magdala and Capernaum, with a break for a dip in the Sea of Galilee, yesterday we toured Khirbet Qana, which lies across the Beit Netofa Valley from our site.  The view of the valley from this hill is simply breathtaking.  The site may well be the town of Cana, known to us only from the Gospel of John.  Its inclusion in that Gospel and the record of its occupation bring up some interesting questions, not the least of which is why does John mention it at all?  In the fourth century Christians and Jews co-existed at Cana as they did at Capernaum and many other towns in the Galilee.  The tour was led by Tom McCollough of Centre College, who is one of the site’s excavators and now the director of that project.  He has been helping us out at our site as well.  I told the students it is a rare privilege to be given a tour of a site by its excavator, especially if it is while the project is still going on.  They get to hear his reasons for digging there, what he has found, and the questions that remain.  And there are always questions.  I also tell the students that any time you return to a site you end up with more questions than you came with. 

I’ll prove it to you.  At Shikhin we now have uncovered part of a public building of some sort.  We have exterior space in which the bedrock was quarried before there ever was a building, and then someone leveled up the quarried parts by adding soil and cut stones to make a platform of some type, perhaps an outdoor courtyard or a wall foundation.  Decades or centuries later, annual plowing scored the top of the bedrock.  East of that we have remnants of a plaster floor, a lower course of a wall, and lots of tumbled stones.  Further east is more tumble and smaller patches of plaster floor, as well as a threshold, but the threshold is busted into two pieces that do not seem to belong together. Furthermore, it seems too narrow when we compare it to the thresholds we usually find.  So we are unsure that it functioned as a threshold in its current location.  To the west of all of these features, five very large column bases and column drums were placed into a terrace wall long after the building they held up came crashing down.  It was these architectural fragments that alerted us that we probably had a substantial public building on this hilltop.  Our biggest challenge is figuring out how all of these features relate to one another.  What in the world did this building look like when it stood?  We have to dig more to find out.  See how the questions multiply?

Here is what we know and what we can guess.  We cannot date the construction of the building until we excavate its foundation, but we can say that it lay in ruins by the Early Arab Period (7^th–8^th centuries).  In fact, every single soil layer that we have excavated has contained mostly Early Roman (1^st century) pottery and some later sherds, but almost no Arab sherds (“Arab” refers to the Arab Period, not necessarily to the people who lived here).  But we keep finding Arab lamps and lamp fragments!  What were these people doing up here that they left virtually no pottery but did leave their lamps behind?  One begins to suspect that whatever they were doing, it was at night!  But I don’t think that’s right.  One possibility is that these were the people who cleared the ruin, built the terrace walls, leveled the hilltop, and planted.  They’re the ones who left their plow marks in many stones.  They didn’t live on the hill, but they did spend the night sometimes.  Here’s the kicker, however: only one of their oil lamps has any soot on the nozzle where the wick is supposed to burn.  So what are all of these unused oil lamps doing up here?  And why aren’t we finding the pots they cooked their dinner in?  Again, the questions multiply.

Today (Sunday) David Bayless and I used the magnetometers I mentioned last time.  We detected a faint magnetic field on a flat terrace of the hill.  The signal is too weak to pick up by ear (the magnetometer produces a tone), but the digital read-out did let us know that there was a field under our feet, over 20 meters long and around 8 to 10 meters wide.  It was on a terrace much higher up than I thought it would be.  If only everything were nicely predictable.  We will have to dig to know for sure, but we may have found a pottery-production site, which would be very important in the archaeology of the Galilee.

So much for archaeology.  The students are doing very well as a group.  The biggest lot is from Samford (six), and there are two students from USF in Tampa, Florida and two from Centre College in Danville, KY.  We have one who will enter UK in the fall and one sophomore in high school.  We have one who just graduated from Samford and another who just graduated from Alabama.  On the whole they are energetic, upbeat, and optimistic.  They also appear to be learning something.  Well, that stands to reason, as they are a bright bunch.  I have learned that some students who are very quiet in a Bible class can be boisterous on an archaeological dig.

Last night we took Richard Knott out to a delicious dinner at a new Nazareth restaurant.  Richard used to run the bed and breakfast at Kibbutz Ha-Solelim where the USF Excavation team lived for around a decade.  He celebrated his birthday last week, but we also wanted to say thank you.  Although he has no official connection to our dig, he has been extremely helpful in our dealings with the Israeli government, renting vehicles, and getting porta-potties up to our site.  Yeah, that’s important.

So the archaeology is being done impeccably and things are getting interesting.  They were already exciting.

I told myself I would take a break from this topic, but the guy said it with no prompting from me, so I’m going to repeat it.  The guard at Magdala, who turned out to be a local Bedouin Arab, informed me and Dad that in this country, Jews, Muslims, Christians, and Bedouin (four separate categories in his mind) live together in harmony.  It is interesting that he wanted to volunteer that information to us as we were leaving.  The political situation is different in the West Bank, but even there on the whole people have figured out how live their lives so that the main challenges are more mundane than we think.

Continue to pray for the peace of Israel, and for peace in all of the Middle East.

James

First Entry 2012

Composed 27 May 2012

We arrived in Israel in two separate groups and have begun the inaugural season of the Excavations at Shikhin.  The mishaps have been minor.  They involved one student missing her flight but arriving with the later group and one student (not a Samford student) arriving on time and taking the train from the airport because he assumed we had left without him.  We had not, and we spent quite a long time scouring the airport for him.  He arrived safe and sound despite the inclination of several people to throttle him.

It’s difficult to describe what this country does to a person who returns often over a lifetime.  Some say, “It gets in you and you can’t get it out.”  “It,” of course, refers to Israel, however one constructs it.  If that statement sounds a bit like a layman’s diagnosis of an infection, I suppose the metaphor is apt if you regard this particular contagion as something you want.  I do know that I begin to anticipate the trip early in the year, even as I face separation from Laura and Sarah with dismay.  Once here, even while possessing a trifling command of Hebrew and only the ability to greet in Arabic, I experience a powerful feeling of having come home.  I think that would be the case even if the hotel staff did not greet us with genuine warmth, glad smiles, and Mediterranean kisses on both cheeks.  It would be true even if they did not treat us like emperors of the realm.

We have a nice sized group for a first dig season: we’re about 26 strong including students, non-student volunteers, and staff.  The hotel staff has already complimented us on what a nice group we are.  One young Israeli man (he’s 25, which means he has graduated high school, served in the army, and taken a long trip out of the country before starting university) called me yesterday to ask if he could dig with us.  He had learned about us by word of mouth through a connection at the Israeli Antiquities Authority, which is how he got my phone number.  I think he chose an American dig to improve his English, but even so he proved himself to be a hard worker and eager learner, besides a good conversation partner.  I overheard him carrying on at the sifter with a volunteer who is well-known for his taciturnity.  He showed up at the site at 5:00 am like the rest of us did.

Today is Sunday and Shavuot (Christians might be more familiar with the alternate names of Pentecost or Weeks in the New Testament; see Acts 2, for example).  Nevertheless, we worked a full day because of a slight delay last week.  We did celebrate our Friday evening kiddish (a service of blessings, wine, and bread that begins the Sabbath) and our Saturday tour of archaeological sites with a dip in a body of water.  This year the selections were Sepphoris, Caesarea, and the Mediterranean Sea.  At kiddish I reminded the group, which was mostly made up of Christians, that unlike communion this was not supposed to be a somber occasion. Then our resident Presbyterian minister corrected me: communion isn’t supposed to be somber either.  Maybe I’ve been invoking the wrong disposition all these years.  Maybe that’s the difference between Presbyterian and Baptist communions.

We have established Field I of Shikhin by laying out our first squares in an area that we think lies over a public building of some sort.  It is on the crown of the hill, and we found column fragments and pieces of molding in a nearby terrace wall that was surely built to accommodate the olive grove that now stands here.  One does not normally see these sorts of Greek and Roman architectural features on houses in small villages, but here they are.  It is tempting to say that our public building is a Roman-period beit sefer, or synagogue, but it is still too early to tell.  Our first step is to find where the building actually sat and then to determine when it was built.  Figuring out what it was will be a third step.  After two days of digging we can say this: it lies under soil in which the preponderance of the pottery is from the first century of the Common Era, with a few later sherds.  Also, there are scads of pieces of a certain kind of bowl, which makes us highly suspicious that the people of Shikhin manufactured that particular form.  We know they made pottery on-site because we keep finding “clinkers,” or sherds that have been over-fired.  Also, the rabbis remember Shikhin’s pottery for its high quality.

We brought along two magnetometers built from kits.  The idea is to use them to locate the village’s kiln or kilns.  Tommy Tarvin of Samford’s physics department and I were able to get a grant from the school to purchase the equipment, and one of our students, David Bayless, is prepared to use them.  If we find a strong change in magnetic field on a part of the hill we will be suspicious that we have located the kiln and will certainly dig there.

This topic brings up the point that a project like this one is simply impossible without much generosity, and I am grateful every time I remember that fact, which is often.  As an example, while Tommy and David were putting together one magnetometer with the help of Alan Hargrave’s soldering skills (Alan is the chair of physics), David’s father offered to supervise the construction of another in Texas.  It turns out he’s a retired microchip engineer and he called on other retired buddies to take on the project.  So we now have two working magnetometers in Israel because someone was interested in the project and wanted to help.  Of course, that’s true of all of our volunteers whether they are students or staff, Americans or local Israelis.  And by Israelis I mean both Jewish and Muslim people. 

Those of you who have read these posts over the past few years know that this is a theme to which I return often because it is simply part of daily existence in much of Israel, but few care to comment on it.  That is, people get along here as a matter of course, whereas we want to think that they hate one another.  Perhaps that is a reflection of our own fear.  There is certainly hatred to be found but it is not the dominant reality.  Who wants to report on people living, working, shopping, and going to the beach side by side without incident?  Yes it’s true: on the beach at the remains of the ancient Roman aqueduct north of Caesarea one sees men and women in bathing suits that barely “cover the subject” alongside fully-clothed people, the women in full, shapeless garments and hijab head coverings.  One cannot say how they feel about one another, but they are willing to occupy the same stretch of sand and tolerate each other’s chosen dress, or lack of it.  They buy ice cream at the same kiosk and are yelled at by the same lifeguards.  The Muslim Israelis speak Hebrew just like any other citizen, after all.  More importantly, more than one of the Muslim proprietors of our hotel has told me how much he appreciates living in Israel, where his family experiences a good life, unlike people in other Arab countries.  They think in their own stereotypes, but the point is that they appreciate where they live, which no American expects to hear.  One can find different attitudes among the Palestinians, both Muslim and Christian, but they are not citizens.  That is a problem of substance.

Yet God is at work here.  How else can you explain the tenacious peace of everyday human existence?

Continue to pray for the peace of Israel.  It is working.

James

Erica Thornton, Eddie Padrino, Kathleen Hyland, and Sam McFarland

Paschal takes photos