Curiosity—of course—is a prime requisite of a field archaeologist. Good instincts are also an advantage. But nothing substitutes for just plain good luck.
All three have lined up for the Hippos Excavation Project that I codirect with Professor Arthur Segal of the University of Haifa.a
Simply getting the permit to excavate the site was itself quite fortuitous. In late 1998, when I was still a graduate student, I accompanied Professor Segal, future director of the Hippos excavations, to meet with Dr. Vassilios Tzaferis, then head of the Israel Antiquities Authority’s excavations and surveys division. Arthur wanted to see whether Hippos, a city of the Roman Decapolis overlooking the Sea of Galilee, was already “registered” to another archaeologist or research institute.
In Israel, once an archaeologist has “hit” on a site with his spade, it is almost impossible for anyone else to get a permit to excavate the site unless the first excavator approves. As luck would have it, not only were there no registered “clients” at Hippos (also known by its Hebrew name, Sussita), but Vassilios himself had been the last to write about the site—in a BAR article poignantly titled “Sussita Awaits the Spade.”b Perhaps its location on a high mountain with extremely difficult access scared away generations of archaeologists. In these circumstances, our permit application and research proposal were quickly approved.
That wasn’t the last time, however, chance would intervene in our archaeological lives. One day in 1999, during our survey of Hippos, I needed to relieve myself in the field, so I went inside an old Israeli army shelter from the early 1950s, covered by a metal roof. While I was inside, I looked around and suddenly realized I was in the apse of a Byzantine church. My quite-accidental discovery led us to start excavating the church in 2000. Ten years later, a team from Poland led by Professor Jolanta Mƚynarczyck and Dr. Mariusz Burdajewicz has unearthed all of what we now call the Northwest Church.
The story of one of our latest discoveries begins in the 1940s, decades before a single pickax had fallen into the soil of Hippos. Mendel Nun, a member of the nearby kibbutz Ein-Gev (Mendel died in March 2010), sketched a very general plan of the ancient city. He thought a shallow crater next to a small hill might be the location of the city’s theater. In his BAR article, Tzaferis also speculated that the theater might be found here. He even reconstructed the theater on his plan of the site.
When we arrived at Hippos, the crater and small hill were still visible, but no evidence of the structure could be seen on the surface.
In 2008, while surveying the area, I noticed three well-hewn ashlar blocks that appeared to form the corner of a building. Were these three blocks part of a monumental structure buried beneath the small hill?
At first, the answer appeared to be no. We could detect no additional stones in the immediate vicinity. When I checked the location of the three ashlars on our latest aerial photographs, however, I began to see what I thought were the vague outlines of a small theater-like structure. That same day, I made a sketch of the theater’s features and e-mailed it to Arthur, who is a well-known expert on the theaters of the Roman East, hoping he might confirm my suspicions. He was not fully convinced, but we decided that we should excavate the small hill to see what was inside.
Later that season we started digging around the three ashlars and found several large structures, 070including a Byzantine burial chapel and several large walls. But we found no definitive evidence of a theater or its distinctive semicircular seating area (cavea). We persevered, however. In the middle of the 2009 season, we finally began to expose the outlines of a small theater hidden inside the hill. It was covered by 13 feet of piled-up earth and debris left from the army’s modern activities at the site. Once we removed all of the earth, a lovely odeion was revealed, an intimate, roofed theater for elevated intellectual presentations, such as literary readings and poetry recitations.
Although none of the actual seating from the odeion has survived, the size of the area contained within the structure’s semicircular perimeter wall, which originally stood to a height of nearly 50 feet, suggests that the theater had 11 rows of seats capable of seating as many as 540 people.
During the 2010 season, with the odeion fully exposed, we shifted our focus to another magnificent building that, like most of our past discoveries, continues to surprise us: the Roman basilica. The building’s impressive stucco work and the superb craftsmanship of its marble architecture indicate that this structure, one of the main public buildings of Roman Hippos, was built to the highest Roman standards.
Now, like small kids playing with a new toy, most of our enthusiasm is directed toward this new building and the many lucky surprises it will no doubt reveal.
Curiosity—of course—is a prime requisite of a field archaeologist. Good instincts are also an advantage. But nothing substitutes for just plain good luck.
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