Monday July 3, 2006
“Was this only the second day?” That was Dr. Mark Schuler’s question after tonight’s evening devotions, yet it was a sentiment we all shared. So much has been happening, it’s hard to believe we’ve only been digging for two days, and in Israel for three.
The first full day in-country was Saturday, which we spent on a bus tour of major Christian sites around the Sea of Galilee. We began by spending two hours walking around “our” city, ancient Hippos, checking out the highlights that have been excavated so far. Even though the Ggospels never tell us that Jesus himself was here, Hippos became a major Christian centre in the early church. In fact, one of the most interesting ruins is of a large Christian church which was built right smack on top of the ruins of a very impressive temple that was probably devoted to the worship of the Roman emperors.
After seeing Hippos, we went a few kilometers up the road to Kursi, where Jesus’ casting-out of a demon into a herd of swine is commemorated by a reconstructed Byzantine church that’s a lot like the one we’re workin on in Hippos. Actually, “our” church is in many ways even nicer than this one in Kursi—it’s just not fully excavated yet, let alone reconstructed. Maybe someday people will come see the Hippos churches too, on tours like this one.
Then we went on to Capernaum. Most people who go there focus on the churches on the place where Peter’s house probably was, but though we spent some time there, we were more interested in two other things: the large (and much later) synagogue, and a fairly typical Jewish house. Dr. Mark Schuler gave really good talks on both of those places, and we had a lot of good conversation after too.
Other places we saw included Tabgha, which commemorates Jesus’ feeding of the 5000, and the Mount of Beatitudes, where he might have delivered the Sermon on the Mount. As Mark Schuler carefully reminded us though, the point isn’t so much whether or not Jesus “really” did those things in those exact places. He probably didn’t! But the point is that these sites have for centuries given Christians specific places at which they can remember those events. So, like generations of Christians before us, we read the appropriate Gospel accounts at each of these places, and spent time talking and thinking about them. Even though this isn’t our main reason for being here, it was a great experience to make this kind of “pilgrimage.”
At 4:45 on Sunday morning, we boarded the bus to make the trip we ARE really here for—up to Hippos! Before arriving, I imagined that we’d have to make the 45-minute hike up the mountain on foot, but thankfully there are so many of us—between our team working on the Northeast Church, the Polish team working on the Northwest Church, and the University of Haifa people working elsewhere (I’m not sure where)—that we ride up and back in buses every day. Even so, we have to hike for about 15 minutes with our gear from the bus to the dig site itself. At five in the morning, that’s enough of a walk for most of us.
Then the fun begins. Really! I’m having an absolute blast so far. Much of yesterday was spent doing prep work—cutting down weeds, clearing away dirt and rock that blew and drifted in over the winter, removing protective tarps and dirt that last year’s team purposely placed on top of sensitive areas before leaving the site alone all winter. I spent a couple of hours chopping down and hauling away big dry thistle-bushes that looked like sagebrush but could pretty much poke us right through our jeans. I used a turreah to do this—a big Arabic hoe that’s excellent for chopping and scraping stuff. Unfortunately, one of the things I chopped was my left ankle, when the blade glanced off a rock that the weeds were hiding. This happened about 7:00 in the morning, and by lunchtime, walking was pretty tough. After icing and elevating it for most of the afternoon, it was a lot better. Today it feels better but looks worse—a typical bruise—and I’m hoping that the worst of it is over.
Anyway, after cleaning up, we staked out our squares, the 5 x 5 (metres) areas that each of our teams works in. My team is working just outside the left rear corner of the church proper. We’re looking for one of the walls of the church’s atrium—a big courtyard surrounded by a colonnade (a covered porch held up by columns) and then an outer wall. The east section of the colonnade was found last year, and our job is to find and uncover the north wall. If it’s there, that is! We expect to find it, but of course until we’ve actually done so, we don’t know for sure that it even exists.
Beyond looking for that one specific thing, our job is just to see what’s buried in this 25 square metres. The ground level right now is about 1.5 metres above the ancient street level, so that’s a lot of dirt to dig through. If we had a Bobcat, or even if we used regular shovels, we’d be done pretty fast, but of course it’s a lot harder and slower than that. We start with a pick, loosening up the hard-packed dirt—and, of course, the bazillion rocks it holds. Then another person comes in with a turreah, carefully scooping up the dirt into buckets while looking through it for bits of pottery, glass, bone, etc. All of that stuff gets set aside in buckets and bags. Another person then carries the dirt away and dumps it away from the excavation.
It’s hard work, not because it’s so heavy but because it’s so hot. We have to wear long pants, work boots, a hat, and gloves. When we start at 5:00 in the morning, it’s in the high 20s. By noon, when we quit, it’s easily in the mid-30s, maybe more. One of the guys in our apartment has a thermometer, and he found out today that it was 34 degrees at about 6:30 pm in the shade, and well in the 40s in the sun. And this was when things were cooling off!
We drink LOTs of water, naturally—a minimum of 4 litres each, over the 7 hours we’re digging. Dr. Schuler calls for a water break every 25 minutes, but sometimes that’s not even often enough. When I was chopping weeds yesterday, wearing my dust-mask, I needed a lot more water even than that.
Because yestereday was just “getting-started day,” it wasn’t until today that we really started to fall into a good routine. Now that we’re organized, we’ve been doing great. I’m in charge of the 4-person crew in our square, and we’ve got a good system going. The goal is to keep excavating the whole square evenly, which takes real discipline because it’s so tempting to just keep working on an area where you’re finding neat stuff! We have found some pretty cool stuff so far too: small pieces of Roman glass, some animal bones, a couple of intact pot-handles (ceramic), and a whole bucket-full of potsherds.
I had no idea that potsherds—broken bits of pottery—were so common on sites like this. The first ones I saw, yesterday morning, were just lying there on the surface when I was pulling weeds. Crazy! Now that we’re digging, we’re running across them constantly. The rule of thumb is: if it’s bigger than a fingernail, we keep it. Even though the most intact things we’ve found before are those pot-handles, nothing better than that, even the little bits are neat. Some are decorated with different kinds of patterns in the clay, some are different colors, and for some of them, you can tell what part of the piece they came from (bases and rims especially).
The biggest contribution we’ve made so far though is in finding walls. This morning, we found a wall right where we expect the wall around the atrium to be. Eureka! How do we know it’s a wall? We’ve only dug down about a foot so far, at that place, but it’s pretty clear: the outer face of stones is nicely cut (fairly smooth surfaces) and each of the half dozen stones we’ve found is lined up with the others. What we’re not quite sure of yet is whether the second face of the wall is to the north or the south of this more obvious face. Byzantine walls, see, were made of two parallel rows of squared-off stones, with “fill” of various kinds in between them—small stones, broken stones, dirt, etc. The total thickness is usually about 80 – 85 cm. Probably tomorrow we’ll figure out where the second layer of this wall is, but for now it’s a bit of a puzzle, because we haven’t dug deep enough yet to figure it out. According to the stones we found today, it looks like it’s probably to the south of the row we’ve definitely identified. On the other hand, it would like up better if it were on the north. I’ll keep you posted!
We also found another wall that’s totally unexpected, because it runs at a diagonal to the “expected” walls, which are all on a nice neat grid that runs N-S, E-W. This wall cuts right across, running from NW to SE, which is weird. Our initial guess is that it might have been built after the church was destroyed by the earthquake of 749 AD, on top of the earlier structure. Dr. Schuler thinks people might have started living in the church at that point, and maybe this is something they built for a completely non-churchly purpose. It seems to be too elaborate to have been the wall of an animal pen, since it follows the usual double-row pattern, 82 cm thick, but other than that we don’t really have a very good guess at this point. Again, I’ll keep you posted.And that’s about it for tonight. It’s 9:30 pm and the wake-up call comes awfully early. But I’ll try to get more news, and with any luck pictures, in the next while.