The Temple Mount Sifting Project

Gaby Barkay and Zachi Zweig have gone into business. Bring your excavated dirt to them for “wet sifting” and they will take care of it for you. Business is good.

Gaby (actually Gabriel) is one of the most prominent archaeologists in Jerusalem. Zachi, now his colleague, was his student at Bar-Ilan University.

It all started when the Israel Antiquities Authority (IAA) had Zachi arrested. The Muslim religious authority known as the Waqf, which controls the Temple Mount, had dug an enormous hole on the Temple platform to create a monumental staircase leading down to the area known as Solomon’s Stables in order to turn it into a mosque. During this operation, the Waqf dumped hundreds of truckloads of unscientifically (and illegally) excavated earth into the adjacent Kidron Valley. Zachi was caught rummaging around in this mound of earth to see if it contained anything archaeologically valuable. According to the IAA, he was illegally excavating without a permit.

Zachi was soon released, and his teacher Gaby obtained a permit from the IAA to “excavate” this artificial mound of earth that had been simply dumped there.

Thus was born the “sifting project.”^a Gaby and Zachi obtained a site on the slope of Mt. Scopus in view of the golden Dome of the Rock, put up a tent, began trucking bags of earth from the Kidron Valley to their site and started to sift. They and their staff and volunteers have been enormously successful, having found thousands of artifacts dating from the Middle and Late Bronze Ages to modern times in this archaeologically rich dirt. In addition to millions of pottery sherds and thousands of bone fragments, the finds include Egyptian scarabs, Israelite seals, countless coins from the Second Temple period and numerous architectural fragments from Herod’s Temple Mount complex.

Since its rather humble beginnings in 2004, when Gaby and Zachi were simply trying to sift as much of the Temple Mount debris as they could with a limited staff and an even more limited budget, the sifting operation has grown exponentially. With increased publicity and financial support, as many as 20,000 volunteers a year participate in the project, and the number of visitors is even larger. To handle that many volunteers, and the resulting flow of sifted material, the project has expanded by setting up several rows of sifting stations and building new facilities, including a processing lab and training and storage rooms. They also have a trained staff that oversees the work of the scores of volunteers that come to the site every day to sift the ancient soil from the Temple Mount.

Through its success, the project has confirmed the value of sifting, which has long been practiced on professional digs, but even more so of wet sifting, which has been used much more rarely. In wet sifting, excavated buckets of rubble, debris and soil are first soaked in water to loosen and dissolve the dirt that tends to encrust buried archaeological material. After soaking, the murky mixture is then dumped into sieving screens where pressurized water hoses are used to wash off and drain any dirt that may still cling to objects in the sift. Once the dirt has been washed away, important archaeological artifacts such as bones, coins and inscriptions can be more easily distinguished.

The operation has been working so well that Gaby and Zachi decided to offer their services to other excavations in and around Jerusalem. They can do the sifting less expensively, more efficiently and more thoroughly than archaeologists working in the field, with the added assurance that all material would be handled and sifted not by volunteers, but by the project’s trained, professional staff. Loads of bagged dirt could simply be trucked to their site from nearby professional excavations, just as they had done with the dirt from the Temple Mount dumped in the Kidron Valley.

This was the obvious solution for archaeologist Eilat Mazar, another prominent Jerusalem archaeologist, who was excavating just south of the Temple Mount. She works in a very sensitive area and in a confined location where there is no room for a sifting operation. “Contracting out” the sifting of the soil seemed like the perfect solution. So she began shipping large bags of dirt about a mile up the hill to Mt. Scopus. It worked well, and one of her last bags of excavated dirt produced one of the more dramatic finds to be discovered in Jerusalem in recent years.

But before we get to Eilat Mazar’s new find, you should know a little more about her exciting dig south of the Temple Mount and the dirt she had shipped to Gaby and Zachi for sifting. Mazar contends that her excavations have exposed a city wall and fortified gate complex originally constructed by none other than King Solomon.

Gaby Barkay and Zachi Zweig have gone into business. Bring your excavated dirt to them for “wet sifting” and they will take care of it for you. Business is good.