First Letter from Nazareth 2023
Sunday June 18, 2023
Dear Family and Friends,
I’m late with this first letter, so I’ll do my best to catch you up on our progress.
I landed on May 30 with a small early crew. Most headed to Nazareth to start preparing our storeroom in the hotel and the site for the dig, while Tom and Mary Lynn McCollough and I drove to Jerusalem for a couple of meetings with folks at Hebrew U. The next day we joined everyone at the site to supervise the delivery of our tool container and toilets, and to get shade over our squares. Tom McCollough, Motti Aviam, and I walked the site, discussing where to re-open old squares and where to sink new ones.
The weather has been kind to us. That has been the general pattern this year, with the exception of one day that hit 40 C/104 F, and yesterday, which got close to 38/100 during our tour of Megiddo, Beit She‘arim, and Caesarea. Most days have been somewhere in the 80s Fahrenheit, and today the high is predicted at 81. Two Fridays ago, we left the field just in time to avoid most of a soaking rain.
This morning as I write, while some attend church services, two vanloads of our folks are headed to the Golan Heights to see a couple of synagogue sites, Majduliyya (you can see the similarity to the Aramaic name Magdala) and Deir Aziz, guided by Micky Osband, the excavator of Majduliyya. I’m staying behind to swap out my rental van with another. At Caesarea beach, someone broke into a side window to take a duffel bag. Thankfully, the thief got no passport or credit card, but the bag’s owner did lose some gifts he had bought for family members. So I’m not on the trip, which I organized because I wanted to see the sites, but unlike the weather, fate has not co-operated.
South of them, another crew is looking for the building’s southern wall. They have their own challenge, for in this area, the building has been dismantled down to bedrock in most places, leaving only shadows and hints of what once stood here.
In the eastern part of Field I, work is continuing in a spot where Shikhin’s pottery makers dumped waste from making everyday pots and lamps, along with broken lamp molds, imitation imported fine ware, and incense shovels and pateras. I think that one family’s industry was producing all these things. We are now in the third season of excavating that square, and it is only a partial square due to an olive tree that’s minding its own business, but digging out all that waste requires slow, meticulous work, and it generates a huge load for the registry.
Further east still—around 100 meters—in Field VI, two teams are looking for a clearer stratified record of Shikhin’s occupation than we find in Field I. Both have come down on plaster floors, which means that the upper earth layers accumulated from wind and water erosion. They’ll have to dig through plaster in order to get evidence of human activity.
We are finally clearing out the miqveh—ritual bath—in Field IV, having rid it of fever-causing ticks (with spray) and the porcupines that bring them in (by taking out their way in). That is presenting its own puzzle, for where the stairs should be we have calcified rubble and hard-packed earth instead. Yeshu thinks this mess is hiding the stairs. Tom thinks there aren’t any stairs and that the feature isn’t a miqveh. I say, there have to be stairs, miqveh or no miqveh. What did they do, speak to the water politely? In any case, it’s taking a lot of effort to get that stuff out.
It is typical for our first timers, whether students or older adults, to be struck with wonder and delight upon their arrival. As the group forms bonds and a culture of work and relaxation, other emotions enrich their experiences. Because all this helps us do good archaeology, I no longer market the dig as a scientific expedition (it still is one) and now emphasize experience. That is, after all, why most people come: I want them to dig stratigraphically whereas they want a mélange of adventure, discovery, faith, and rootedness. It turns out that these aren’t incompatible goals. I think our 2023 team has learned this.
But we are visitors here, so we have these experiences that generate nostalgia almost the minute we touch down at our home airports. The people of this land, however—the Muslim Israeli family that runs our hotel, their Christian Israeli employees, the Jewish Israeli members of our team, and our Muslim and Christian Palestinian friends in Jerusalem—live out their workaday lives in a place that seems resistant to reconciliation and peace. Well, they’re no different from anyone else in that way.
We love them and their land, yet we must leave them to work out what they must do to form a just society for all people. And they must send us home to do the same. While we work in our homelands, we can pray for each other.
So pray for the peace of Israel.
On this Fathers' Day, I'm reminded that if all goes according to the due date, I’ll land Birmingham a grandfather. If it doesn't, the transformation will happen shortly after I return. Laura and I will need no help loving this child, but we’ll need help to love her in the best way possible, so pray for us, the baby, and Sarah and Lawrence too.
From Nazareth,
James
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