Logs and photographs posted by participants in Samford Summer in Israel, a four-week program in which students dig at an archaeological site and receive course credit.
Photos from the advance crew and the first week of digging
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...
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 ...
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 s...
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