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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 fiel
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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
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Second Letter from Nazareth

June 16, 2019 Dear Family and Friends, Because today is Father’s Day, I begin with three discoveries from this season’s excavation that my father would have liked to see. There are, of course, more than three. Remember that in two articles published in 1994 and 95, he and a team from the USF Excavations at Sepphoris identified this hilltop as the “Shiḥin” ( שיחין ) of rabbinic literature and the “Asochis” ( Ασωχις ) in the writings of Josephus. They based their conclusion on their survey of the site in 1988. The first discovery is the mold for making a Northern Darom lamp that I mentioned last week. It is the first from the site that is nearly complete, and it is lovely. Before excavating, no one expected to find evidence of lamp production here, or in any village. Dad would also be interested in an emerging debate. On one hand, Yeshu Dray, who is conserving the artifact, thinks the mold’s carvers were making a political statement. This is because the
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Complete lamp mold found in the north balk of I.24

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First Letter from Nazareth

June 9, 2019 Today, Pentecost Sunday, is the third Sunday I’ve been in Israel. I’ve not written until now because I’ve been busier than usual. We’ve completed two weeks of good archaeology. The veterans know what to do and the new volunteers—this year mostly undergraduate students from four institutions—soon snap into place. With the instruction they receive in the field, by now they are seasoned archaeologists who are asking good questions about the method and the site. We’ve toured Sepphoris, the nearby city built by Herod Antipas in the year 4 BCE; the synagogue of Beit Alpha that was one of the first to be found with a mosaic floor depicting both biblical scenes and the zodiac wheel; and Beit She‘arim, a village famous for over 20 catacombs with 400 burials, and for the largest block of raw glass ever excavated. We’ve also been to Caesarea, one of the cities Herod the Great built in honor of his friend, Caesar Augustus. It later became the capital of t
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Fourth Letter, from Jerusalem

Dear Family and Friends, Today is our second full day of three in Jerusalem.   We arrived Friday evening—the beginning of Shabbat—as we usually do and ensconced ourselves in rooms at St. George’s Cathedral guesthouse.   We had a few minutes to take in the attractive dining room and bar with the lovely garden, then we hiked down Nablus road and through the Damascus Gate until we reached the Western Wall.   Up to this point the experience has been full of novelties and adventure for our first-timers, but Jerusalem multiplies the exotic encounters.   On these hikes I wear my big white hat (a gift from David Johnson at Samford) so that those at the back can keep sight of me, and I give a brief lesson on how to move through a crowd like a Middle Easterner.   But the sights, sounds, and scents allure, and the group slows like rubberneckers on a highway.   Well I can’t blame them.   They are seeing architecture that dates from the Crusades to the 16 th century;
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Third Letter from Nazareth Dear Family and Friends, Last week’s letter is my Father’s Day post.   I’m writing on Saturday because of a change in plans.   Today the high temperature will be 101 ° F/38 ° C in Nazareth where I am and 109 ° F/43 ° C at Kinneret College where I had planned to be.   No.   So tomorrow when it will be merely 85/29 up here and 96/36 down there, I and a few others will travel to our shipping container to organize artifacts and collect some for study.   Along with trimming balk, taking line level elevations, and pottery reading, no one makes movies about this aspect of archaeology.   We will have to reward ourselves with gelato afterwards.   Today, therefore, I write. Speaking of archaeology, the biggest surprise this year has been the Late Bronze age (1500–1200 BCE) pottery that has begun to turn up in the eastern squares of our Field I.   We only have about four or five sherds so far.   The first was a “wishbone hand
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