First Letter from Nazareth 2022

 

June 19, 2022 

Dear Family and Friends,

It’s Sunday before our last week of archaeology at Shikhin.  This means that there will be little digging, with most of our energy aimed at cleaning for final photos, drawing, taking elevations, and packing up.

It has been a challenging season.  We have dealt with more illness and injury than usual, which, in addition to caring for our own, has required constant redistributing of personnel.  Along the way, some squares did not accomplish as much as we had hoped.

Nevertheless, it has been a good season of careful archaeology done by a sharp crew who have become invested in our methods and what we’re learning here.  That really is the aim of a field school: train up people who will come back year by year and who will teach the next generation.  Motti Aviam, Tom McCollough, and I certainly can’t do the archaeology by ourselves.  We have to bank on this sort of commitment and care.  And we can, thank goodness.

This year, Yeshu Dray of Restoration of Ancient Technology (yeshuat.com) finally built a ceramics kiln from scratch.  I say “finally” because he planned to do it in 2020 and 2021 but COVID forced us to cancel both seasons.  In addition to reuniting with the landscapes, the site, and dear friends, we also were treated to an exciting bit of experimental archaeology.  Yeshu modeled the kiln after the small one we uncovered at Shikhin.  He used similar methods and materials, including clay from a place near Shikhin.  He conducted his lamp making workshop for us during our first week, and he left the materials so we could make more lamps.  Others made some too, and on firing day we had 240 clay lamps.  That is one tenth of what the kiln could hold.  For fuel, we burned oak from 150-year-old wine casks. (Yeshu says that the wine was famously awful.)  Now Yeshu wants to try burning gefet, the pulp that remains after pressing olives for oil.  We think the ancients burned this byproduct, since unlike modern centrifuges, their methods left behind a significant percentage of oil.  In this exercise, our only concessions to modernity were thermometers for tracking the heating, maintaining, and cooling of the kiln.  We began late Saturday afternoon and ended at 8 this morning when we removed well-fired oil lamps from a hot kiln.

We got to witness ancient technology at work.  Avner, a potter friend of Yeshu, tended carefully fed wood and coals into the fire box so that the temperature rose at the correct rate.  Several of us spent the night on Yeshu’s and Ilana’s property, going to bed after we closed the kiln and waking to the anticipation of what we would find. 

I cannot tell you how I felt during the event.  I had already been surprised at my response when I first saw the completed kiln weeks ago.  To see it successfully fired and to hold the lamps that emerged left left me thoughtful and moved.  You can see photos at our Facebook Group (you might have to join): https://www.facebook.com/groups/shikhin.

Right away we began drawing inferences about these lamp makers.  That is the goal of archaeology: learning about people who are no longer here but whom, for our own reasons, we wish to know about.  I have already speculated in print that these potters first came to Shikhin as war refugees after Rome’s destruction of Jerusalem and the temple in 70 AD (I owe this idea to my brother-in-law, Aaron Burke).  If I am right about that, understanding why these people fled, where and why they settled, and how well they integrated into their new homeland in the Galilee remains relevant.  That is a distressing conclusion.  Qohelet got it right about human nature and deeds: there is nothing new under the sun.

For example, after COVID closed the Galilee Hotel for two years, the first regular gests in this building were Ukrainian families.  Subhe Hamed noticed that it was mostly women and children who showed up limp and hollow.  Slowly they quickened in the care of a country willing to take them in.  I pray they reunite with family members and return, if they wish and are able to do so.  Neither staying in Israel nor going home will be easy.

Who were these lamp makers who struggled northward from ruined Judea?  Certainly they left family behind.  Surely most of their males were either children or grandfathers.  Did Shikhin’s lamp industry begin and flourish among the women of the household?  Did the trauma of war stamp generations of their descendants?  Did the families of Shikhin lend shelter and sustenance?  When did they begin to feel hope?  When did the Galilee become home?

It is my habit to close these letters, “Pray for the peace of Israel.”  Do that, but also pray for peace in Ukraine.

James