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 handle” that normally is found on “milk
bowls.” Then we got a body sherd from
the same form. (You can find images of
these on the Internet.) I would not have
known what we were looking at if it weren’t for Motti, who saw them in surveys
20 years ago. Tsvika Gal came to the
site and identified a sherd from a Late Bronze cooking pot for us, so now I can
add three LB forms to the list of Hellenistic and Roman forms I can call at the
pottery reading table. Baby steps. It has been a real help to have Carl Savage
with us. He has been digging at et-Tell
(possibly biblical Bethsaida) for a long time and knows Iron Age, Persian, and
Hellenistic forms well. It was
gratifying to see him nodding his head when I made a call at the table. I also could hand him a form I didn’t know
and either pat myself on the back when he also shrugged or learn the form when
he did. Most photos of me reading
pottery appear to capture my “I don’t know” face.
The same squares are also yielding more Late Iron age
(1000–586) pottery than we are accustomed to seeing. That means we’re missing Early Iron age and
Persian period pottery at Shikhin, at least in Fields I–V. Maybe we’ll start finding it in whatever
Field VI turns out to be. All of these
readings, by the way, are preliminary.
Closer to publishing time, we will look over our pottery again, perhaps
inviting colleagues who know the early periods better than we do and other
colleagues who can show us pottery from cognate sites. We will draw or scan the pottery that we need
to publish in order for our peers to evaluate our arguments. 20th Century Fox will not show up
to film that either.
On Monday evening of this week Yeshu Dray led us in a
hands-on workshop. He specializes in
ancient technology and figured out the process and equipment that local
artisans used for carving lamp molds into soft chalk limestone. Many that we have at Shikhin were carved into
cores discarded after turning stone cups on a lathe. This is ancient industrial waste, and Yeshu
went to a nearby site where these vessels were made in antiquity, picked up
several chalk cores, and sawed them in half as the ancients did. He invented tools and carved replicas of some
of the patterns we see in Shikhin molds and on Shikhin lamps. We got to try our hands at carving designs
and making our own lamps by pressing clay into the molds.
These sorts of workshops transform our thinking about
ancient technologies. We have been
trained to assume that division of labor marks one of the social practices responsible
for creating civilization. Now I wonder
if we haven’t been projecting our own notions of specialization onto the scrim
of prehistory. One thing that becomes
clear to neophytes who carve their own molds and then make their own lamps in them
is both how simple and how challenging the tasks are. The same person could certainly do both (and
could even carve stone cups on a lathe), yet once you see the fine-veined grape
leaves and millimeter-thick walls of some lamps, you realize you are looking at
the work of masters.
Yeshu led the same workshop in December last year at the
symposium held in my father’s honor. Dad
gave great attention to making his own lamp, and we talked about the importance
of what we learned.
Our numbers are now greatly diminished. We were at 47 at one point, but today we are
down to 23 or so. Saying goodbye to Tom
McCollough and Randy O’Neill has kind of taken the wind out of my sails,
compounded by missing Laura. Tom is an
old friend who was Field Supervisor at Sepphoris when I returned to digging in
1992. I worked under him for the next
several years, and we share many fond memories and stories that make us
laugh. He joined the dig this year as
Associate Director and boy was that a good thing. Randy O’Neill became Shikhin Field Supervisor
in 2012. He handles more things than I’m
usually aware of and left yesterday.
Motti’s last day with us was Friday and tomorrow he begins another dig
at the site el-Araj (another contender for biblical Bethsaida). So I have to Associate Direct and Field
Supervise for a week. Having a competent
crew of Area Supervisors makes the tasks much easier.
Be thinking about our students who take their field exam
late tomorrow afternoon. I hear they are
nervous but apparently they are calming themselves by visiting sites in the far
north of Israel today. They will escape
the worst of the heat.
Tonight some of us will have dinner with Richard and Jackie,
who took care of our group when we lived at Kibbutz Ha-Solelim in the
1990s. No doubt we will spend some time
telling our old stories and laughing, mixed with remembering Dad.
Pray for the peace of Israel, and Happy Father’s Day.
James
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Thanks for sharing Dr. Strange. Try to protect yourself from that heat. We are enjoying gazing at your photos that you have been sharing. Happy Father's Day to you.
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