Dig for a Day

On Sunday I went down to Beit Guvrin, almost an hour south of Jerusalem, to participate in the Dig for a Day program.

I figured with my interest in archaeology I had to get my hands dirty at some point, and that's exactly what Dig for a Day offered. The site near Beit Guvrin, called Tel Maresha, is mentioned four times in the Bible. Its people were Edomites, or Idumeans, who were forcibly converted to Judaism by the Hasmonean King John Hyrcanus in the second century BC. Among those forced converts was the grandfather of a later Israelite king, Herod the Great.

Large sections of the city were underground, carved out from chalk rock. In these caverns were the industries, and that's where we were digging. I arrived by taxi at 9:30 and was introduced to the guide and other visitors, a family from Brooklyn. A little while later we were crawling through caves underground, getting good and filthy.

We were given a dirt bucket and a find bucket, and told to just start digging. The excess dirt was put in the one, and as we dug, pottery just seemed to be everywhere. Eventually, I had about six dirt buckets filled and half a find bucket that included pottery, animal bones, parts of an oven, and charred date pits. As it turns out, I'd discovered a kitchen.

After the buckets were taken to the surface, we poured the dirt through wire mesh sifters in order to find the small pieces that digging doesn't get. That turned out well enough, with a few more charred date and olive pits in the middle of it all. After being eaten or crushed in an olive press in order to produce oil, the leftover pits were used as coal for winter heating.

We had to give up all the pieces we'd found at the end, naturally, so that it could be properly dated at a lab. One kid didn't want to give up a jawbone with teeth he'd found, but as the guide told him, "the State of Israel calls that antiquities theft." After much prying and crying, he finally did. As it turns out, we got to keep some pieces that had already been dated and examined, anyway. I got a pottery shard that looks Athenian but actually a Phoenecian knockoff!