BAR Dig Scholarships

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Every year BAR offers $1,000 travel scholarships to a few people who couldn’t otherwise afford to volunteer for a dig. If this description fits you, the box at lower right tells you how to apply. But first you may want to read what two of last year’s winners—Carol Lowry, a Minnesota playwright who dug at Bethsaida, and Chris A. Rollston, a Ph.D. student in the Department of Near Eastern Studies at Johns Hopkins who excavated at Megiddo—have to say. Our third winner, Yekaterina Umarova, a University of Maryland student and recent emigré from Russia, should be arriving at Ein Gedi just about the time this issue of BAR hits the newsstands.

Magnificent Megiddo

As a student of ancient Israel, I had taken classes in Hebrew, Aramaic, Phoenician, Ugaritic, Akkadian and Coptic. I had read various inscriptions, such as the Siloam Inscription, the Samaria Ostraca, the Lachish Letters, the Mesha Stele and the Tel Dan inscription, but I had never been on an excavation in Israel.

So last summer I joined the excavation of Megiddo, politically one of the most important Israelite cities. Overlooking the Jezreel valley, Megiddo controlled the Via Maris, the ancient military and trade route that linked Egypt with Syria, Anatolia and Mesopotamia. Throughout the Late Bronze and Iron Ages, mighty fortifications, sophisticated water systems, and impressive palaces and temples graced the site.

Because I had previously participated in a dig at Umm el-Marra, in Syria, I was asked to work as a square supervisor at Megiddo. My team uncovered an abundance of everyday things—architecture, potsherds and bones—and some more unusual finds—beads, a large cooking vessel in perfect condition, a scarab and a sherd with a cylinder seal impression. The finds dated almost exclusively to the Iron Age. Perhaps most fascinating was our work exposing more of Megiddo’s magnificent Iron Age city wall.

My own research and teaching in the areas of Bible, archaeology and epigraphy will be greatly enhanced by this exciting and informative experience. I am deeply grateful to the Biblical Archaeology Society for helping make it possible.

Rocks, Rocks and More Rocks

When I learned I was a scholarship winner, I was thrilled. Then fear set in. Being 52, from Minnesota and having a desk job, I imagined myself laid low by heatstroke, sunburn and backache, surrounded by scornful, muscle-bound students and nasty bugs.

My fears were groundless. Dig volunteers ranged in age from 15 to mid-70s, and there was something for everybody. While younger volunteers hauled boulders and buckets of dirt up ladders from the Iron Age level, 8 feet down, most of us older folk concentrated on the Hellenistic and early Roman remains, only 3 feet down. The work was no more strenuous than gardening, and I was delighted to be working on the remains from the city that the apostles Peter, Andrew and Philip called home.

I also worked in a small pit along the outside of the Iron Age city wall, trying to measure how far down it went. We had to make our way through rubble bulldozed off the top of the tell when it was a Syrian military position. One man loosened boulders with a pickax while the rest of us took turns getting in the pit to sift the dirt and to roll boulders out of the way. Shortly before the last hour of the last day we exposed pavement at the bottom of the wall and found two almost-complete storage jars.

Two thousand years of earthquakes, erosion and recycling of building material have left their toll at Bethsaida. My first impression of the tell was that it was just a jumble of nondescript rocks, rocks and more rocks. But as we removed the dirt and the finds, the head archaeologist, Rami Arav, would come around and tell us which rocks to leave, because they were part of ancient structures, and which to remove. I wondered, how does he know? Near a newly excavated part of the Iron Age city wall, I had the opportunity to look more closely at the layers in the balk (the walls of unexcavated dirt usually left enclosing a square as it’s being worked on). I learned to recognize the remains of mudbricks, plaster and roofing material, and began to detect differences in the stones from the walls and those from the surrounding rubble. All around I saw a layer of ash and clinkers, the bubbly black stones formed when the Assyrians destroyed the city in 732 B.C.E. with fires so hot they melted stone and brick. I had researched the Assyrian conquests for a church play I wrote: Now I was seeing the results firsthand. I could imagine the panic of the city defenders who long ago faced the choice of remaining in the inferno or running out and being skinned alive or impaled on a pole. A few hours of quiet observation brought to life all the rocks I looked at from then on.