Inside BAR

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If a dog is a man’s best friend, the inhabitants of ancient Ashkelon had many friends indeed. Excavators at this site along Israel’s Mediterranean coast have uncovered a huge dog cemetery, with more than 700 burials—the largest animal cemetery known from the ancient world, leading Lawrence E. Stager to wonder, “Why Were Hundreds of Dogs Buried at Ashkelon?” In our last issue, Stager traced the history of Ashkelon under the Canaanites and the Philistines. Now he takes us to the Persian period, an economic boomtime for the port city. Phoenicians, Persians, Greeks, Egyptians and Jews lived side by side, their cultures enriching the city. And then there were all those dogs. Stager links the dogs to healing cults in the ancient Near East and contributes a box elaborating on healing and plague gods. For those of you who have been awaiting—either with eager anticipation, glum trepidation or scholarly detachment—Stager’s discussion of the erotic lamps from Ashkelon, you will have to wait yet another issue. What started as one large article grew to two and, now, to three (where it will end, we promise!).

Stager is Dorot Professor of the archaeology of Israel at Harvard, director of the Harvard Semitic Museum and head of the Leon Levy Expedition to Ashkelon. His article “The Song of Deborah—Why Some Tribes Answered the Call and Others Did Not,” BAR 15:01, won the Fellner Award for the best BAR article of 1989.

Given a few stones, archaeologists can often envision how an ancient edifice once looked. The rest of us need more help. Recognizing this gap between the expert and the layperson, Ann Killebrew found a way to make the results of her nine-year excavation at the ancient Golan village of Qatzrin more accessible to the general public. She made the archaeologist’s vision palpable by reconstructing, in detail, one of the village houses. In “Qatzrin—Reconstructing Village Life in Talmudic Times,” she and co-author Steven Fine, an expert in Jewish history and literature, look at the results of her excavation, the house reconstruction and the illuminating correlations with rabbinic literature. Fine also contributes “Entry into Rabbinic Literature,” a helpful assist to sorting out the when and the what of the literary sources.

Killebrew is a Ph.D. candidate in archaeology and a lecturer in the Foreign Students Program at Hebrew University in Jerusalem. She has also served, since 1983, as a research fellow at the W. F. Albright Institute of Archaeological Research. Her 12 years of field experience includes work as an area supervisor at Tel Akko, Tel Miqne, Tell Beth-Shean and Tel Gezer. Since 1982, Killebrew has co-directed the Qatzrin Synagogue and Village Excavations. She has published two previous articles in BAR.

Fine, too, is a doctoral candidate at Hebrew University, in the department of Jewish history, and a visiting lecturer in the University’s Rothberg School for Overseas Students. He has curated numerous museum exhibitions and written or edited several exhibition catalogs.

From the No Stone Unturned Department: Excavators have discovered two toilet seats at the City of David, the earliest inhabited section of Jerusalem. Despite what you may think at first, the finds have yielded a wealth of information on how ancient Jerusalemites lived, especially during the harsh period that preceded the Babylonian destruction of their city in 586 B.C. Using techniques honed in New World archaeology for the study of ancient pollen and parasite eggs, the excavators have been able to reconstruct what people ate, how they cooked, even the sanitary conditions prevalent at the time, as authors Jane Cahill, Karl Reinhard, David Tarler and Peter Warnock explain in “It Had to Happen—Scientists Examine Remains of Ancient Bathroom.”

Cahill and Tarler are senior staff members at the City of David excavations. Following the untimely death of dig director Yigal Shiloh, they were appointed to publish the excavation results in Area G, their area. Since 1984, they have also co-directed the excavation at Tell el-Hammah, in the Jordan Valley. Reinhard is professor of biological anthropology at the University of Nebraska at Lincoln. His research includes the study of ancient diet and disease in South and Central America and in the Southwest United States, and in Colonial America. Warnock is a graduate student at Texas A&M University, studying botanical remains. He identified the wood of the diptych found in the Bronze Age shipwreck off Ulu Burun, Turkey and is working on the pollen, seeds and wood charcoal from a number of sites in Israel and Jordan.

The issue of cultural treasures that have been carted off from their homelands in years past by former colonial powers is a vexing one: Countries that have displayed priceless artifacts for, in some cases, centuries have been understandably reluctant to part with them. Yet the trend in recent years has been to return treasures to their place of origin. In keeping with this new spirit of repatriation, BAR editor Hershel Shanks, in “Please Return the Siloam Inscription to Jerusalem,” calls on Turkey—itself a nation that has been in the forefront of recovering its national patrimony—to send the best-known ancient Israelite inscription back to its home.

In another short article, “Buzz or Button?” we look at a newly proposed explanation for some mysterious artifacts: small discs made from potsherds and perforated by two holes. Found in excavations in Israel, Lebanon, Egypt and India, and dated by associated artifacts to periods ranging from 3000 to 152 B.C., the discs are often identified as buttons. But Smithsonian Institution archaeologist Gus Van Beek suggests they may actually have been a simple toy, called a “buzz.”

If a dog is a man’s best friend, the inhabitants of ancient Ashkelon had many friends indeed. Excavators at this site along Israel’s Mediterranean coast have uncovered a huge dog cemetery, with more than 700 burials—the largest animal cemetery known from the ancient world, leading Lawrence E. Stager to wonder, “Why Were Hundreds of Dogs Buried at Ashkelon?” In our last issue, Stager traced the history of Ashkelon under the Canaanites and the Philistines. Now he takes us to the Persian period, an economic boomtime for the port city. Phoenicians, Persians, Greeks, Egyptians and Jews lived side by side, […]