Strata

014

Last-Minute Rescue

Stolen Artifacts Recovered at Port

Three years of careful surveillance paid off for the Israel Antiquities Authority (IAA) last summer when agents at Haifa’s port seized a shipping container loaded with hundreds of ancient artifacts bound for Atlanta, Georgia.

Looted from ancient graves and other archaeological sites throughout Israel and the West Bank, the booty includes glass and bronze vessels, architectural fragments, stone carvings, coins, pottery and other objects dating from the Canaanite to the Islamic period (3000 B.C. to 1000 A.D.).

A former antiquities dealer who recently fled to the United States is believed to be responsible for the theft. The IAA has filed charges with the police, said Amir Ganor, director of the IAA’s antitheft unit. In Israel, antiquities theft and unlicensed antiquities commerce are punishable by up to three years in prison.

The cache of stolen artifacts is the largest recovered by the IAA since 1996, when it thwarted an attempt to transport some 5,000 relics out of the port in Ashdod, Ganor said. The monetary value of the artifacts seized in August is relatively small—perhaps $10,000—but their illegal removal from their original context is an even greater loss. “If we had found these pieces in situ, it would have been worth a lot to us in archaeological terms,” Ganor explained. “What is important here is the archaeological damage these people do.”

The suspect is a former licensed antiquities dealer who informed the IAA three years ago that he intended to get out of the antiquities business. Apparently, he never did.

The IAA was recently tipped off by an informant that the man planned to move to the United States. When the suspect attempted to transport the artifacts to the United States, the IAA asked customs inspectors to have the container taken off the ship.

“This kind of thing happens all the time,” said Ganor. “We stop smugglers at the airport, as well as tourists who unknowingly [purchase] stolen objects. But … this is a person who knew the law against transporting antiquities, and he broke the law knowingly. He chose to take the illegal path. It is people like him, who buy and sell stolen antiquities, who maintain the chain of antiquities theft.”

Quotable

The death of the great Byzantine historian Sir Steven Runciman last November at the age of 97 provides an occasion to recall this famous passage from the preface to the first volume of his History of the Crusades. His memorable words seem especially applicable to some archaeologists we know:

Faced by the mountainous heap of minutiae of knowledge and awed by the watchful severity of his colleagues, the modern historian too often takes refuge in learned articles or narrowly specialized dissertations. I believe that the supreme duty of the historian is to write history, that is to say, to attempt to record in one sweeping sequence the greater events and movements that have swayed the destinies of man.

Isn’t archaeology simply a special branch of history?

015

Underwater Cooperation

Israeli Maritime Team Invited to Turkey

The first-ever joint Israeli-Turkish archaeological excavation occurred this past summer when a team of 18 divers, archaeologists, geologists and students from the University of Haifa joined their Turkish counterparts from Ankara University to explore the ancient Aegean port of Liman Tepe. The well-protected harbor city lies on the southwestern coast of the Izmir (Smyrna) peninsula, which juts out from Turkey’s western shore.

One of the longest-inhabited Aegean sites, Liman Tepe boasts remains dating from the Neolithic to the Classical period (fifth to first millennium B.C.). But it is the Early Bronze Age city (3200–2200 B.C.), protected by a massive 20-foot-high wall and a tower, that is the focus of the current excavations. A 650-by-650-foot stretch of this city now lies underneath the sea. The outline of the area can be clearly seen in aerial photographs, according to team leader Michal Artzy, an eastern Mediterranean specialist at the University of Haifa’s Leon Recanati Institute for Maritime Studies and excavator of Tel Nami and Tel Akko, on Israel’s northern coast.

Since the 1980s, a Turkish team, currently led by Hayat Erkanal of Ankara University, has conducted land excavations at Liman Tepe (jointly sponsored by the Ankara University Research Fund, the Turkish Scientific and Technical Research Foundation and the Institute of Aegean Prehistory). Erkanal called on the Israeli team to collaborate on the underwater portion of the dig because of its expertise in maritime exploration.

In addition to Artzy, the Israeli team includes harbor specialist Avner Raban (BAR readers may be familiar with his underwater exploration of Herod’s harbor at Caesarea Maritima), geologist Dorit Sivan, boat specialist Ya’akov Kahanov, Mediterranean and Early Bronze Age specialist Ezra Marcus and information technologist and archaeologist Yossi Salmon.

The Turkish team may also have turned to the Israelis because of the strengthening of political ties between the two countries, which recently established diplomatic relations, Artzy said. Israeli rescue teams played an important role in rescuing victims buried by an earthquake in Turkey in 1999, and the two countries have been negotiating a major sale of water to Israel, which is suffering from one of the worst droughts in years.

Artzy said the Israeli team will continue its work next year. She called the initial season a “taste of honey.”

“Finally the Mediterranean is becoming smaller,” Artzy said. “The sea is a bridge, and [although] we tend to divide things by modern borders … it did not work that way in the past. Who knows what connections we might have had here at our coast with sites over there?”

Dig These Web Sites

For several years now, BAR’s annual dig issue has provided you with a guide to excavation opportunities in the Holy Land. This year, we thought we’d help you dig a little deeper—on-line. Our Digs at a Glance chart lists Web addresses for most of this year’s 28 featured digs. If you’d like to extend your research, however, you should also visit the site maintained by Hebrew University’s Institute of Archaeology (www.hum.huji.ac.il/archaeology). An excellent point of departure for anyone who wants to keep up with all the latest digging, this site provides links to archaeological research projects throughout Israel and Jordan.

The visually engaging site developed by the Megiddo Expedition provides all the basic information—a history of Megiddo, an overview of past and current excavations and numerous images of the tell (www.tau.ac.il/~archpubs/megiddo). But you’ll also find articles from the expedition’s newsletter, Revelations from Megiddo, and a section devoted to the scholarly debate over the tenth-century chronology of Israel. The real attention grabber, however, is the site’s virtual tour of Megiddo.

Finally, it’s always a good idea to check in with the Israel Antiquities Authority, which regularly posts news of interesting finds on its Web site (www.israntique.org.il). Often these news bulletins bear directly upon debates surrounding the Temple Mount and other politically contentious areas, and thus offer an archaeological slant on some of the front-page headlines of the day.

Happy surfing!

016

New Money For Old Digs

White-Levy Grant Winners Announced

The Shelby White-Leon Levy archaeological publications program has announced its grant winners for the year 2000. The annual grants assist researchers who are preparing final reports from excavations that have been completed yet remain unpublished. Since the program’s inception in 1996, nearly two million dollars have been awarded.

While the White-Levy program also awarded money to publication projects in Greece, Syria, Cyprus and southwest Asia, seven of the fourteen grants awarded in 2000 went to scholars writing reports on sites in Israel. One of the awards went to Harvard University’s Tristan Barako, who will publish a report on Moshe Dothan’s 1959–1960 excavation at Tel Mor, near Ashdod, on the Mediterranean coast south of Tel Aviv. Barako plans to study and publish the stratigraphy, pottery and small finds from that excavation in coordination with Trude Dothan, Moshe Dothan’s widow.

Trude Dothan, meanwhile, was awarded her own White-Levy grant, in association with her colleague at Hebrew University, David Ben-Shlomo. The two archaeologists plan to publish the results of the 1968–1969 excavation seasons at Tel Ashdod. During those seasons, excavators uncovered complete houses, cult objects, jewelry and pottery, dating from the Late Bronze Age (1550–1200 B.C.) to the Hellenistic period (332–141 B.C.). The results, when published, will complete the work performed by Moshe Dothan at the site.

David Ussishkin of Tel Aviv University finished his excavations at Tel Lachish, in southern Israel, in 1994. His grant will allow him to publish a summary (in English) of the fieldwork conducted at the site between 1973 and 1994. Tel Lachish is familiar to BAR readers because of its role in the eighth-century B.C. Assyrian invasions of Judah; it is also well known for the Lachish Letters, a hoard of sixth-century B.C. ostraca discovered in the 1930s.

Also receiving a White-Levy grant in 2000 was Stephen Pfann of Hebrew University, Jerusalem. Pfann will publish an expanded and annotated English translation of Father Roland de Vaux’s final report on the Qumran excavations.

Eilat Mazar, also of Hebrew University, was awarded a grant to publish finds from her grandfather Benjamin Mazar’s excavations south and southwest of Jerusalem’s Temple Mount.

Mazar’s Hebrew University colleague Amnon Ben-Tor will use his White-Levy grant to publish a report on the Yokne’am Regional Project in the western Jezreel Valley.

Finally, Tel Aviv University’s Moshe Kochavi, along with co-grantees Esther Yadin and Yuval Gadot, a Ph.D. student, was awarded a grant to publish the results of excavations at Tel Aphek, east of Tel Aviv, which were completed in 1985. Earlier excavations at Tel Aphek brought to light one of the earliest city walls recovered to date, as well as a series of Late Bronze Age palaces.

Mark Your Calendar

The Year One: Art of the Ancient World, East and West

Through January 14, 2001

This exhibition of 150 artifacts showcases the cultural connections between East and West in the years just before and after the year one, exactly 2,000 years ago. Highlights include a Chinese sculpture of a dancer and a silver-gilt rhyton from the Parthian Empire (modern Iran and Iraq).

Call 212-570-3951 or visit www.metmuseum.org.

Gold of the Nomads: Scythian Treasures from Ancient Ukraine

Through January 21, 2001

The seminomadic Scythians left behind a wealth of treasure, mostly golden artifacts they obtained through trade with Greek craftsmen working along the northern coast of the Black Sea.

Call 718-638-5000 or visit www.brooklynart.org. The exhibit will travel to the Nelson Atkins Museum of Art in Kansas City, Missouri, in May 2001.

Antioch: The Lost City

Through February 4, 2001

Antioch, the ancient capital of Syria and one of the four great cities of the Roman Empire, comes to life in an exhibit featuring mosaics, glassware, sculpture, inscriptions, portraits and jewelry. Visitors can learn about the faiths practiced in Antioch through cultic objects and early Christian art.

The exhibit will travel to Cleveland and Baltimore in 2001. Call 508-799-4406 for more information.

The Golden Deer of Eurasia: Scythian and Sarmatian Treasures from the Russian Steppes

Through February 4, 2001

Two-foot-tall wooden stags covered in gold and silver … smaller deer with richly patterned bodies, also covered in gold … as if King Midas himself had visited the forests and steppes of Russia. Now some 300 dazzling artifacts from the late fifth through the fourth century B.C., discovered only a decade ago on the steppes of southern Russia and never before displayed, light up the Met this winter in a special exhibition. Gold objects from Scythian tombs, and textiles, leather, and golden art and wooden works of art from Siberia showcase the art of the Eurasian nomads who roamed Russia 2,500 years ago.

Call 212-570-3951 or visit www.metmuseum.org.

014

What Is It?

A. Foot prosthesis

B. Shoehorn

C. Statue base

D. Vase

016

What It Is, Is …

D. Vase.

Hailing from eastern Greece, this late-sixth-century B.C. terracotta vase bears the face and form of a siren, the seductive sea nymph of Greek mythology—part woman and part bird—that lured sailors to their deaths with a song. Famous from Homer’s Odyssey, sirens were depicted on vases throughout the sixth century B.C.

Last-Minute Rescue

Stolen Artifacts Recovered at Port