Thursday 25 June 2015 (Finished Saturday at home)
Dear Family, Friends, and Colleagues,
I said goodbye to the site this morning. I met my partner, Motti Aviam, there for some
final business, and after we hugged and he left, I walked the balks, observed our
archaeology, and remembered the hubbub and the hubbub makers of this
season. I also imagined the buildings as
they once stood, with plastered stone walls holding up roofs well over my
head. It took some effort to see them where
thistles and olive trees now stood. We
archaeologists cast our eyes to the ground, looking for the evidence the
ancients left us, which now lies below surface level in our squares. But the ancients themselves walked the
streets and alleys between their buildings, glancing up to doorways and
windows, or higher still to roofs, calling out to their neighbors. I wonder if the commotion of their daily
lives sounded anything like the din of our digging.
By now a press release that Motti and I put out about
Shikhin’s lamp production has been distributed. You
can read it at http://www.samford.edu/arts-and-sciences/religion/news/?id=21474875959
before other news services pick it up.
Surely this industry added to the sights, smells, and sounds that Shikhin’s
residents accepted in their workaday lives.
There was clay to be dug at the base of the hill, levigated, and
tempered. There were molds to carve. There were kilns to load with fuel and to
stock with whole lamps. The fire
produced its heat, but smoked only if the apprentice was in charge. After the kiln cooled someone had to unload
the lamps and prepare them for transport.
All of this required questions and answers and shouted
instructions. Discarding the wasters
made a crash.
All of this was going on just meters from the village’s beit k’nesset, or synagogue. In all of our squares, we have yet to find
anything we can identify as an alley or street between the synagogue and the
lamp maker’s shop to the northeast. We
might need to look a little harder, but in any case, one passed quickly between
spaces. Our lack of foundation trenches
continues to frustrate us, because all over our Field I, Shikhin’s residents
founded their walls directly on exposed bedrock. It is foundation trenches that allow us to
date the structures we dig. That is one
reason I was so eager to lift the foundation stone for the synagogue’s threshold. What a letdown that was: the soil beneath was
almost completely sterile (our word for containing no material remains), and
had the consistency of water erosion.
When we re-set it and the threshold stones, we placed modern coins
beneath them so that, when archaeologists re-excavate Shikhin 2,000 years from
now, they will know we were there, monkeying with their site.
Here is what we learned about the synagogue this year. First, not long after it came down (some time
before 363, when we typically end the Late Roman period), people removed most
of its stones, right down to bedrock, and probably transported them to
Sepphoris. It is simply astounding to
see how thoroughly they did their work.
Second, one of the two cisterns yielded pottery dating no later than 70
CE in the lowest elevations we dug this year.
Not only that, but the pottery was waste from kilns. Among the waste lay fragments of painted
plaster and one iron bowl with bronze rivets.
The eastern outer wall of the synagogue cut through the top of this
cistern, rendering it useless, which is why I think the builders cut the second
cistern and a channel directing runoff into it.
All this leads me to think that before the synagogue was built—probably
in the 2nd century—another building sat here. Whether it was a wealthy person’s house or an
earlier synagogue (one option doesn’t exclude the other), I can’t say. The synagogue had interior columns that
probably surrounded its nave on four sides rather than three. So far we have found only one piece of a
column still on the interior of the building, and the stylobates (the low walls
on which columns sat) have been almost entirely robbed out, but the robbers
left one stylobate corner made of two stones, and we still see the imprint of
other stylobate stones in the bedrock.
Every year we partially answer some of our questions, and we
come up with more. This is what makes
ending a dig so difficult, archaeologically speaking. For now, God willing, we will continue in
future seasons, patiently gathering the data that help us see, dimly, the lives
of the people who called this village their home.
I am grateful to all who make this project possible. Everyone is a volunteer, and everyone pays a
lot of money to travel far and to work hard.
The dig, scheduled as it is during the Israeli semester, complicates the
life of Motti Aviam. I am most grateful to
my own parents and to Laura. Out of
their own love for Israel (and for me, I suppose), and out of their own sense
of this project’s importance, Mom and Dad perform marvelous acts of generosity
every year of this project. Because of
her love for me, without complaint, Laura endures many weeks alone every summer
during the dig. That is also a marvelous
act of generosity. Thank you.
Pray for the peace of Israel.
James
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