Step Aside, Indiana Jones – Part One

It was a glorious morning. And of course, since it was the anniversary of the recapture of the Old City, I couldn’t help thinking about the battle that had raged there forty years before, as I entered through Jaffa Gate, wound through the Armenian Quarter, and walked out bullet-scarred Zion Gate. I turned left and began looking for the dig. Ah, there it was: in the grassy area between the Old City wall and the street, ringed with a wire fence, and already busy-looking. It was six-thirty, and everyone had been working for half an hour. I hitched up my backpack, and stepped over the fence.

My friend Maia introduced me to the women, and before I knew it, we were chatting away while we sifted through one or two of the dozen or two of huge totes full of dirt from the day before. Bones, I learned, went into one of those tiny cardboard boxes. Pottery, of course, went into the bucket. And there was no need to be fussy: there’s always more dirt to get through!

Pretty soon one of the leaders called us over to our square. To get to it, we had to walk through a square that was about a yard deep, and sported the edge of a Byzantine mosaic. They’d removed the mosaic in our square, and gone down another several feet. Ancient stone walls hemmed us in, and overhead a thick mesh canopy protected us from the sun. In one corner was a narrow drain which was undergoing the ministrations of an excitable young man and a calm middle-aged lady. A few feet away was the third square, narrower and deeper than ours, and attended by several of the guy students and a hired Arab helper.

We got right down to business, breaking up the top inch or two with a small pick, before simply crouching on our heels and doing more sifting through dirt with our hands, and pulling out pottery. It was thickly laced with pottery shards: sometimes handles or spouts, once part of a lamp (which was exciting because they are distinctive and easier to use for dating than other pottery). “What’s this?” I kept saying, and my fellow diggers were most patient about answering. I quickly learned that the answer to “What is it?” was nearly always “Bone.” Didn’t matter that sometimes it’s clearly a bone, complete with a nubbly joint, while other times it’s long and shiny, and still other times porous and crumbling. The spot must have been trash heap or a kitchen, because there was lots and lots of bone.

The most ticklish item was charcoal. Yes, plain ordinary charcoal. Apparently it can be used for carbon dating the layer. If you don’t touch it with your bare hands, that is. Oops. I got me a pair of Muppet-esque gloves just for picking up charcoal, but learned a much better way by watching the others: pick it up with the tip of your pointed trowel, and slip it gently into one of the miniature plastic bags for storage in the special finds box. Also into that box went: bits of Roman glass, with that lovely mother-of-pearl look that it gets after being buried for a couple of millennia. Once I found a chunk of packed earth which simply had a paper-thin layer of the sheen from glass that was no longer there. Oh yes, we found worms, too. I felt bad for them, as they got dumped into the goofas (rubber baskets) and trundled off to the growing row of giant totes.

Did I mention the fact that there’s no need to be slow, because there’s always more dirt to get through? Our hands flew to find just a few more shards, and start on the next level. It was amazing how quickly it became ordinary to sort stuff I should be staring at in a museum case. Perhaps my gardening experience came through, because I felt as if I’d always been doing this sifting-through-dirt thing. I was having a blast!

…to be continued