Highlights of the Dig Season
As promised, this blog entry is (mostly) about the dig itself, and not (too much) about the diggers. With the loss of half of our team (all the young, strong students and a couple of adults) for the second half of the season, naturally we did not get as much accomplished as Mark had planned for us. There was no opportunity to excavate newly-discovered rooms to the north or do much more work on the rooms to the west. Work on the street had to be abandoned as well; the plan had been to excavate as much as possible to toward the decumanus, the main street of the city.
Still, our little group of eleven with a couple of youthful forty-somethings made progress in some areas, and the full season yielded some interesting information. Mark divides the results of the 2006 season into three major categories.
Tomb
First, the team finished excavating the tomb in the chancel. Glenn Borchers and Jay Anders were the primary volunteers on this job. This was Glenn’s fourth season at Hippos; as a retired soil scientist, he’s a careful observer of changes in soil and has been invaluable for the last three years on the tomb excavation. (He’s also known by all volunteers as the guy who loves nature photos; one of the first days of the 2006 dig he spent nearly 10 minutes photographing a scorpion who seemed to be posing especially for Glenn. My first reaction when the scorpion made an appearance was to think, “Get someone else to kill this ugly thing quickly!” Glenn is of a different spirit and taught me some things this summer.) Jay is a medical doctor who used his expertise to analyze the bone fragments found underneath the sarcophagus that was removed during the first week and then carefully replaced (the sarcophagus, not the bone fragments) during the final week.
While the rest of us washed pottery on the shore of the Sea of Galilee, Jay and his wife Susan Pratt sat in the lab at the computer, comparing bone fragments from the day’s finds to the on-line version of Gray’s Anatomy. Last year the remains of what appears to be three separate persons were removed from the stone sarcophagus. Apparently there was an earlier burial underneath the sarcophagus, and excavating that earlier internment was the goal for 2006. Based on Jay’s analysis of the bone fragments from 2006, apparently there were two persons first buried in the main chancel area—an adult, probably male, and a juvenile, sex unknown. So many people! Were they all saints venerated by the early Christians of Hippos? Were they the patron and his/her family members who built the church and thus were given a place of honor at death? Were they somehow related to the woman whose resting place is off to the side of the chancel, and whose remains were venerated, probably even after the church ceased to have any regular liturgical function? The excavation of the tomb is complete, but endless questions remain.
Mosaic Floor
Work on the mosaic floor in 2006 yielded some interesting information about the church. The mosaic team lifted off a couple of sections of the top mosaic floor and exposed an earlier mosaic floor underneath. They discovered the original floor was of a superior quality to the second mosaic floor laid on top of the first. To me, it’s very similar to the kind of thing one experiences in an older home; underneath that cheap carpeting someone laid 30 years ago to spruce up the place is a well-worn but much superior hardwood floor. Some of the figures exposed in the original floor include several common border patterns, crosses, a duck, a lion, and perhaps a gazelle.
Once one has seen some of the mosaic floors in the Galilee, it’s easy to imagine a Byzantine-era family business of father and sons/daughters making the rounds of the major populations centers with their pattern books and letters of reference from Tabgha, Kursi, etc., meeting with the equivalent of the Byzantine church/synagogue/monastic councils, and saying, “Sure, we can do birds and fish. You like the tricolor braid border? No problem! You want something really special? How about the Nile flood measure or the famous lighthouse at Alexandria—you’ll be the talk of Palestina Secunda!” (The Nile flood measure and lighthouse at Alexandria are figures in the mosaic floor at Tabgha, the Byzantine church that commemorated the feeding of the 5000.)
The uncovering of the earlier floor together with Yolanta’s analysis of the pottery point to the second of the important discoveries of 2006: the NE church is earlier than the “Polish church,” perhaps fifth century, rather than the later date of sixth/seventh century for the NW church, that is, the one being excavated by the Polish team. Mark will be researching mosaic floors as part of his preparations for writing the final report of the season.
Rooms with a View
Finally, the discovery early in the season of a wall extending further west of the rooms immediately off the small atrium and of a room to the north of the nave during the final week point to a larger complex than we knew of at the beginning of the 2006 season. During the final week, Mark moved a group of volunteers to the north of the nave, thinking that if they found a stylobate (the foundation for a row of columns), it would be evidence that the church had been built on top of a earlier Greco-Roman temple platform. He was disappointed when the diggers didn’t find what he was looking for, but I keep reminding him that at least we know something definitive: the NE church was not built on a Greco-Roman temple platform. Instead, the diggers discovered another room with bench. We may end up with more benches than cisterns in this complex! The seemingly endless array of rooms on the north, south, and west sides of the church proper may take Mark back to an earlier theory: that the NE church is an urban monastic complex. If it is fifth century and not later, that could be a significant find. Most of the monastic communities from the Byzantine period that have been excavated in the Holy Land were isolated, desert communities. We know from my fourth-century liturgical soul mate, Egeria, that there were urban monastics as early as the fourth century, but the materials remains of a fifth-century urban monastery could shed new light on their daily communal life and on their role as the guardians of a pilgrimage site for the tomb of a woman saint.
Still, our little group of eleven with a couple of youthful forty-somethings made progress in some areas, and the full season yielded some interesting information. Mark divides the results of the 2006 season into three major categories.
Tomb
First, the team finished excavating the tomb in the chancel. Glenn Borchers and Jay Anders were the primary volunteers on this job. This was Glenn’s fourth season at Hippos; as a retired soil scientist, he’s a careful observer of changes in soil and has been invaluable for the last three years on the tomb excavation. (He’s also known by all volunteers as the guy who loves nature photos; one of the first days of the 2006 dig he spent nearly 10 minutes photographing a scorpion who seemed to be posing especially for Glenn. My first reaction when the scorpion made an appearance was to think, “Get someone else to kill this ugly thing quickly!” Glenn is of a different spirit and taught me some things this summer.) Jay is a medical doctor who used his expertise to analyze the bone fragments found underneath the sarcophagus that was removed during the first week and then carefully replaced (the sarcophagus, not the bone fragments) during the final week.
While the rest of us washed pottery on the shore of the Sea of Galilee, Jay and his wife Susan Pratt sat in the lab at the computer, comparing bone fragments from the day’s finds to the on-line version of Gray’s Anatomy. Last year the remains of what appears to be three separate persons were removed from the stone sarcophagus. Apparently there was an earlier burial underneath the sarcophagus, and excavating that earlier internment was the goal for 2006. Based on Jay’s analysis of the bone fragments from 2006, apparently there were two persons first buried in the main chancel area—an adult, probably male, and a juvenile, sex unknown. So many people! Were they all saints venerated by the early Christians of Hippos? Were they the patron and his/her family members who built the church and thus were given a place of honor at death? Were they somehow related to the woman whose resting place is off to the side of the chancel, and whose remains were venerated, probably even after the church ceased to have any regular liturgical function? The excavation of the tomb is complete, but endless questions remain.
Mosaic Floor
Work on the mosaic floor in 2006 yielded some interesting information about the church. The mosaic team lifted off a couple of sections of the top mosaic floor and exposed an earlier mosaic floor underneath. They discovered the original floor was of a superior quality to the second mosaic floor laid on top of the first. To me, it’s very similar to the kind of thing one experiences in an older home; underneath that cheap carpeting someone laid 30 years ago to spruce up the place is a well-worn but much superior hardwood floor. Some of the figures exposed in the original floor include several common border patterns, crosses, a duck, a lion, and perhaps a gazelle.
Once one has seen some of the mosaic floors in the Galilee, it’s easy to imagine a Byzantine-era family business of father and sons/daughters making the rounds of the major populations centers with their pattern books and letters of reference from Tabgha, Kursi, etc., meeting with the equivalent of the Byzantine church/synagogue/monastic councils, and saying, “Sure, we can do birds and fish. You like the tricolor braid border? No problem! You want something really special? How about the Nile flood measure or the famous lighthouse at Alexandria—you’ll be the talk of Palestina Secunda!” (The Nile flood measure and lighthouse at Alexandria are figures in the mosaic floor at Tabgha, the Byzantine church that commemorated the feeding of the 5000.)The uncovering of the earlier floor together with Yolanta’s analysis of the pottery point to the second of the important discoveries of 2006: the NE church is earlier than the “Polish church,” perhaps fifth century, rather than the later date of sixth/seventh century for the NW church, that is, the one being excavated by the Polish team. Mark will be researching mosaic floors as part of his preparations for writing the final report of the season.
Rooms with a ViewFinally, the discovery early in the season of a wall extending further west of the rooms immediately off the small atrium and of a room to the north of the nave during the final week point to a larger complex than we knew of at the beginning of the 2006 season. During the final week, Mark moved a group of volunteers to the north of the nave, thinking that if they found a stylobate (the foundation for a row of columns), it would be evidence that the church had been built on top of a earlier Greco-Roman temple platform. He was disappointed when the diggers didn’t find what he was looking for, but I keep reminding him that at least we know something definitive: the NE church was not built on a Greco-Roman temple platform. Instead, the diggers discovered another room with bench. We may end up with more benches than cisterns in this complex! The seemingly endless array of rooms on the north, south, and west sides of the church proper may take Mark back to an earlier theory: that the NE church is an urban monastic complex. If it is fifth century and not later, that could be a significant find. Most of the monastic communities from the Byzantine period that have been excavated in the Holy Land were isolated, desert communities. We know from my fourth-century liturgical soul mate, Egeria, that there were urban monastics as early as the fourth century, but the materials remains of a fifth-century urban monastery could shed new light on their daily communal life and on their role as the guardians of a pilgrimage site for the tomb of a woman saint.
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