Boom! Half the team leaves

Boom! Boom! We heard the explosions roll over the lake about lunchtime Saturday.

Six missiles fell on Tiberias (tih BEER ee oss), a small city we can see about 15 kilometers* across the Sea of Galilee.

In Tiberias, the explosions hurt three people and damaged some buildings.

“That’s too close,” muttered Mark Schuler, our dig leader.

Five hours later, our team’s students were on a bus going to Jerusalem.

They will stay there three nights, we hope out of range of any missiles. And then they will go to the airport in Tel Aviv to fly home. For them, the dig is over.

Nine dig volunteers decided to stay. We think the place we are staying, Kibbutz En Gev (kih BOOTS en GEV ), is safe.


MORE MISSILES

What’s the fighting about? It’s a long story. A group called Hezbollah (Hez boe LAH) thinks that Israel has taken land unfairly.

Since July 12, Hezbollah has fired hundreds of missiles into Israel from Lebanon (LEB ah non), the country north of Israel. Israel is fighting back with bombing in Lebanon.

We think Hezbollah shoots rockets at cities, not at small communities like En Gev where we are staying. “Now it will be quiet, I hope,” said Shlomi, a grandfather riding his bicycle at En Gev Saturday.

At 6 p.m. Saturday, however, booms came across the lake again as more missiles hit Tiberias. A few more people were hurt.

By 8 p.m., our student diggers were in Jerusalem. It’s lonely without them. But tomorrow morning we’ll go back up the hill and keep digging.

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JESSICA’S EGG

One of the students who has gone to Jerusalem is Jessica Meyer.

Jessica was brushing soil out of a mysterious clutch of pots July 13 when she saw something she could scarcely believe.

It was at the very bottom of a big bowl under some potsherds. Jessica lifted two broken pieces of pottery — and there it was.

“Glenn,” she said, “I have an eggshell.”

Glenn Borchers, working nearby, wasn’t sure he heard her right. “An eggshell?” he asked.

“Yes,” said Jessica. “An eggshell.”

She carefully pulled the broken white shell from where it had rested for nearly 13 centuries.

Jessica nested it gently between two dust masks to protect it. Now it’s in our lab.

We may send it to an expert for testing. Perhaps a test will tell us exactly how old it is. That would give us a date on the living area where Jessica was digging.

The type of pots Jessica found are called Ummayad (ooh MY add). That means a Muslim family was living right across the street from our church.

Someone in that family put an egg in a big bowl one day. And there it stayed until Jessica found it.




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BYZANTINE BIFFY

Today was a sad, scary day as the dig ended early for our 11 students who left for Jerusalem because of the attack on Tiberias.

We hope we can have some fun and laugh again soon, as we often do at the dig.

A few days ago, for example, Darryl Schmidt saw Linda Miller sitting on a stone structure as she cleared dirt from a wall.

The structure was three stones standing on edge and arranged in a square shape. We didn’t know what it was — but Darryl named it our “Byzantine biffy.”

The church we are digging is from the Byzantine (BIZ ann teen) period. That is the time in history when the Roman Empire’s capital was at Constantinople (con stan tin oh puhl) in what now is Turkey.

“Biffy,” of course, is a slang word for toilet.

Later that day, in the same square, Linda found a coin.

Finding coins is important. We can usually tell how old a coin is, and finding it where someone dropped it helps us get an idea how old a building is.

The coin, about the size of a dime, was covered with tarnish and impossible to read. We will ask an expert to clean it and tell us more about it.

Darryl, meanwhile, came to a quick conclusion. The retired St. Paul, Minn., police officer, says his Byzantine biffy — must have been a pay toilet. — Marc Hequet


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*To change from kilometers to miles and to make other metric conversions, you can use this site from the state of Washington: www.wsdot.wa.gov/Metrics/factors.htm

** CE means “common era.” It’s the same as A.D., which means “in the year of our Lord.”

_______

Marc Hequet writes about Concordia University’s excavation at Hippos and other digs as well. Students, teachers and families are welcome to make use of the material as part of a curriculum. Contact Marc with questions via mhequet@sprintmail.com


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WHAT DOES THAT MEAN?

Kibbutz (kih BOOTS) is a certain kind of community in Israel where people own property together as a group.

Potsherds (POT sherds). Broken pieces of pottery — bowls, cooking pots and other vessels that people used. Pottery is made from clay and lasts a long time. We can learn a lot even from its broken pieces.

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MEANWHILE, ELSEWHERE

Vikings were beginning to build their fast “long ships” in 700 CE as the Muslim family was living across the street from our church. The Vikings, who lived in what now is Norway, sailed their long ships to raid the coasts of Europe. They eventually used the ships to cross the Atlantic Ocean to North America.

In North America a people we call Mississippian (MISS iss IPP ee an) built cities and earth mounds in the Mississippi River valley. Our name for their biggest city is Cahokia, in present-day Illinois. Nearly 40,000 people lived there. The world’s biggest earth mound is there — 30 meters high, its base bigger than base of the Great Pyramid of Egypt.

Kanem (KAHN em), a small kingdom near lake Chad in central Africa, about 700 CE began to grow into an empire that lasted until the 1800s. Kanem covered parts of what now are the nations of Cameroon, Chad, Libya, Niger, Nigeria and Sudan.

War and pottery

What is eerier than an abandoned dig?

When no one else is around, a dig is silent. You can almost see the people who lived there long ago. You can almost hear their voices echo from the stones.

What is even eerier? I’ll tell you what: An abandoned dig where the buckets are still filled with dirt and the tools are still lying around where the diggers dropped them.

I found such a dig July 12 at Tel Kedesh (tel ked ESH), about 70 kilometers north of our dig at Hippos.


LEAVING IN A HURRY

The Tel Kedesh diggers left in a hurry that day. Someone told them that Hezbollah (hezz boe LAH), a group that wants to fight, was launching missiles into northern Israel.

Hezbollah is angry because it thinks Israel has taken land away from people unfairly. It wants to fight — even though other people want peace.

Israeli Defense Forces responded to the missile attacks with air strikes into Lebanon (LEB ah non), the country to the north of Israel.


CALM LEADERS

I heard explosions as I drove toward Tel Kedesh. I thought it was target practice. But then I saw soldiers guarding the highway.

I went to a place called Ramot Naftali (ram OAT naff tall EE) to find someone who could guide me to Tel Kedesh.

I think her name was Jill. She greeted me and said she was about to drive to the dig.

Jill drove ahead of me in a white van to pick up the Tel Kedesh workers. She was leaving early to get them because of the fighting.

On the way to Tel Kedesh, about three kilometers from Ramot Naftali, soldiers stopped us on the two-lane highway going toward the Lebanese border just five kilometers away.

Jill must have told them about the little grey car following her, the one I was driving. She drove on. The soldiers waved me through.

The Tel Kedesh diggers were waiting for us — tired from a hard day’s work and curious about the explosions. Jill loaded her van and we returned to Ramot Naftali.

There, dig leaders Andrea Berlin (left) and Sharon Herbert calmly went about their business — washing pottery. After all, Sharon and Andrea had been through this before.


PERFECT DIG

Sharon was Andrea’s teacher in 1981 when someone drove a bus to their dig not very far away and said war was going to happen.

Sharon ordered her diggers into the bus and they returned to where they were staying. There they could wait in bomb shelters if they wanted to.

War didn’t happen. But Sharon did what she thought was safest. And the decision to leave the dig early on July 12 was also for the safety of the team.

Half an hour after leaving the dig, Sharon and Andrea sat in the shade scrubbing pottery.

They have dug at Tel Kedesh since 1999 because they want to learn about borders: How did people think about national boundaries 2,300 years ago? Their Tel Kedesh site has a big government building close to such a border.

In fact, Tel Kedesh turned out to be perfect — even though Andrea was looking for something completely different.

Andrea wanted to study ordinary village life. When she and Sharon found a pile of pots and weaving weights, they thought they had the perfect dig.

Wrong! What they found were pots and weaving weights dropped outside the back door of a big government building as it was under attack in 144 BCE.


BORDERS MAKE A DIFFERENCE?

Andrea and Sharon told me all this as they quietly in the shade at Ramot Naftali. They washed pottery and chased flies away. Everyone was safe.

Andrea and Sharon said they had found that sometimes borders matter — but sometimes they don’t. When people work together, says Andrea, borders make little difference.

After a while the explosions had mostly stopped. Andrea said she thought it would be all right for me to go to Tel Kedesh and take some pictures. Her diggers were tired and ready for lunch and a nap.

I drove to Tel Kedesh. A soldier on the highway waved me through. I climbed the windy tell. Two buckets were still full of dirt. Tools lay about.

Sharon and Andrea and their team planned to be back the next day to use those tools and then put them away for the season — and to keep studying what divides people. — Marc Hequet

Saving the big ugly

It's big, it's ugly and it eats dead animals. Israel and other nations are trying to save the griffon vultures that live near our dig at Hippos and in other places.

Saving the griffon is hard to do because the big bird flies freely from one country to another.

The pale 25-pounder is scary — three feet tall with a wing span of up to nine feet.

But it is no match for pollution, poisoning and shooting. Pesticides, destruction of nesting sites and fewer food sources hurt it as well.


ON VULTURE’S WINGS?

Vultures are probably the “eagles” of the Bible. “Yep, we are borne on vulture’s wings,” says biologist Linda Whittaker of Jerusalem — quoting the book of Exodus.

Linda thinks the writer of the ancient book meant vultures because the griffon in flight is “more impressive than the local eagles,” she says.

Thousands of griffons filled Holy Land skies in 1880. But by 1950 only 1,000 male-female pairs remained — and now there are only about 50 pairs.

If one nation protects the griffon, as Israel has, farmers in another country may still shoot or poison it. Griffons nest from Spain to central Asia. But numbers are dropping all across its nesting range.

The griffon in Israel feeds mainly on dead cattle. But shepherds think it steals lambs and may shoot it. Griffons also suffer from eating the carcasses of a jackals or other animals poisoned by a ranchers.

“With a bird that can cruise from Galilee to Turkey and back in a week,” says Linda, who works for Israel’s Nature and National Parks Protection Authority, “poison is a tough one to control.”


DEAD ANIMALS

Vultures love dead animals. Their fights over carcasses are actually a form of cooperation. It pulls the corpse apart so all the vultures can share.

Griffons nest high on cliffs and hatch one chick at a time. Parents take turns sitting on the nest and feeding the baby. At three months, the baby bird flies a little and finally leaves home month later.

The young vulture may fly a long way. One flew to to Turkey, about 500 kilometers. It stayed away for a year and then returned to Israel

Linda sees hope for the big birds. “Getting farmers to stop setting out poison seems to make a difference,” she says.


ODDBALL FAMILY

One oddball vulture family included Yehuda and Dashik — both males. They raised three chicks together in a zoo.

Dashik has moved on to Tel Aviv University, where he now has a female mate. Yehuda is still in a Jerusalem zoo — and is still unusual. He has not one but two female mates.

Who could love a vulture — aside from another vulture? Ancient Egyptians worshipped vultures.

And not everybody thinks they’re ugly. Linda calls them “absolutely beautiful.”

What does the world lose if it loses the griffon? Vultures are part of nature’s cleanup crew. The griffon, ever the symbol of death, now faces the end itself.


MEANWHILE, BACK AT THE DIG ...

Archaeologists work with what they call squares and balks (bawks).

A square is an area marked off by the leader for excavation Sometimes it’s square — exactly the same length on all four sides — but not always.

Diggers remove soil and rocks from their squares a few centimeters at a time. They try to keep the whole square level as they go down.

This helps them see walls, artifacts, bones and other buried things. If a bone is near the top of a square, it is probably recent. If it’s deeper, it’s from long ago.

Archaeologists leave balks between squares. These are walls of dirt that show layers of soil that help you think through what’s going on with the square. For example, if you see a layer of rocks and then a layer of clean soil, you know something happened just there.

Balks are also useful for diggers to walk across as they dig — if you’re careful!

In this picture, we see diggers removing a balk from the street outside our church. North Eastern Church Avenue is open again!





WHAT DOES THAT MEAN

Extincton. When the last of a certain kind of animal dies.

Artifacts are tools, weapons and other goods.

Wing span. The distance from the tip of one wing to the tip of the other.

Pesticidesare poisons that kill bugs, weeds and other living things people don’t want around.

Biologists (By OLL uh jists) study living things.

Carcasses (KAR kuhss ess) are the bodies of dead animals.

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CAN YOU DIG IT?

How far is it from the Sea of Galilee to the Turkish border?

If a griffon vulture stretched out its wings in your room — would it fit?

Where demons ruled?

People who study the Bible say the idea of demons came from a place not very far from our dig at Hippos.

Today we call this area the Golan (go LAHN). In the Bible, it’s called Bashan (bah SHAHN).

Long ago, people believed that powerful half-human creatures lived in this plain above our dig at Hippos. Some Bibles call these spirits “giants in the earth.”

One reason people thought giants or demons lived here is because of a huge stone structure just 16 kilometers* from the Sea of Galilee.

The stone pile’s name in Arabic is Rujm al-Hiri (ROO jum all HEE dee). It means “stones of the wildcat.”

Rujm al-Hiri is a rock structure 156 meters across. Long ago, people may have believed that only demons could build such a big rock pile.


GIANT CLOCK?

Archaeologists who have studied Rujm al-Hiri think it is actually a way to measure time.

Only once a year, on the longest day of the year about June 21, the rising sun lights up a certain part of this big circle of rocks.

It may have told people when to plant their crops.

We think that it was people, not demons, who built Rujm al-Hiri — about 3000 BCE**.

Long afterward, an important person was buried in the stone pile. But the body has vanished. So have the things buried with the person.

Archaeologists think grave robbers opened the tomb and stole everything — except a knife one robber dropped while crawling out.


HARD TO FIND

Rujm al-Hiri is hard to find. Our friend Marla Van Meter, a gardener at a nearby community called Kibbutz Afiq (kib BOOTS ah FEEK), showed us the way.

The area is in a firing zone for the Israeli army and is open only on the Sabbath — Saturday, the day when many people in Israel rest from their work.

Marla and her friend Avi drove us to this mysterious site.

You can still enter the ancient burial chamber and look out a kind of window. Hippos team member Rachel Roeske crawled right in.

Israelis call this place Gilgal Rephaim — “giant wheel.” Whoever built it — it certainly was a giant job. — Marc Hequet

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*To change from meters to feet and to make other metric conversions, you can use this site from the state of Washington: www.wsdot.wa.gov/Metrics/factors.htm

** BCE means “before common era.” It’s the same as B.C., which means “before Christ.”

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Marc Hequet writes about Concordia University’s excavation at Hippos and other digs as well. Students, teachers and families are welcome to make use of the material as part of a curriculum. Contact Marc with questions via mhequet@sprintmail.com


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WHAT DOES THAT MEAN?

Arabic (AH rah bik) is the language spoken by Arabs, many of whom live in Israel and elsewhere in the Middle East.

Demons. Evil spirits. Long ago, people believed demons caused sickness and other trouble.

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CAN YOU DIG IT?

Could you fit an American football field into a space the size of Rujm al-Hiri?

Are you strong enough to carry a rock that weighs 10 kilograms?

How many 10-kilogram rocks would you have to carry to make a pile of rock that weighs one ton?

Archaeologists think that the rocks at Rujm al-Hiri all together weigh 42,000 tons.


MEANWHILE, ELSEWHERE

In about 3000 BCE, Egyptians were using hieroglyphics (hy uhr uh GLIHF iks) — writing in which pictures stand for ideas and sounds.

More gold, a duck — and our story so far

In Israel the work week begins on Sunday — and at the dig Sunday was a big day.

Gold in the cistern. We began work on the cistern in the South Vaulted Chamber — and Cameron Heiliger, a student at Concordia University in St. Paul, soon found gold. (Photo by Andrea Chandler)

A cistern is a little like a tiny cave. People used cisterns for a very important reason — to store water for use during the dry season.

Entering a cistern requires hard hats, flashlights and a rope ladder.

Near this cistern we found a magic gold amulet last season. People wore the amulet to cure stomach ache. But the piece of gold Cameron found was part of a belt, not a necklace.

Was the cistern a kind of wishing well? Did people throw valuable things into it?

Or did the gold belt piece fall in by accident?

We don’t know.

What we do know is that before Cameron found the gold — he found a big spider!


Mosaic bird. Nancy Endicott found a beautiful bird in the mosaic (mo ZAY ik) on the floor of the church. The bird looks like a duck.

Nancy and the other mosaic workers have been carefully scratching centuries of hardened dust off the mosaic. They are looking for pictures and designs.

Church mosaics from the time of our church, about 500 CE*, often showed animals on the floor and lower parts of a church. Pictures of saints were higher up. A picture of Jesus was highest of all.

Nancy’s duck is the first image of an animal we have found in the little church we are excavating. The only other images we have are three crosses in the mosaic and a painting of a hand from inside the tomb under the altar.


OUR STORY SO FAR

Your questions about the dig are welcome!

Gaye Jensen of St. Louis Park, Minn., asks this:

If people were buried under the altar of the church, does it mean they were priests? Were they hidden under the altar so no one could find them and harm their remains?


'CHECK BACK IN 20 MINUTES'

Good questions!

Here’s a long answer:

Archaeologists are scientists. Scientists make hypotheses (high PAH thuh sees).

A hypothesis is a clear statement that you can prove to be right or wrong.

At the dig, our hypotheses change all the time: “Here’s my hypothesis,” we say. “Check back in 20 minutes. We may have found something new by then that will change it.”

For now, our hypothesis is that our little church was built to shelter the tomb of a beloved old woman whose sarcophagus we found in 2002.

Her sarcophagus is near the altar in the southeast corner of the church, just next to the South Vaulted Chamber.

We opened her tomb in 2003. The bones inside, we learned later, were those of a tiny woman. She was 50-60 years old and had osteoporosis (os tee oh puh ROH sis). That’s a bone disease.

We don't know her name — but the church 50 meters** to the west of our little church has an inscription honoring someone named Antona.

Could the woman in our church be Antona? Maybe. We can't be sure.


BONE SQUARE

Her sarcophagus was opened long after her death. Someone moved her bones into a kind of square at the head end of the sarcophagus.

Exactly above the square of bones, in the lid of the sarcophagus, is a hole just big enough to fit a pencil.

People believed these bones had power to heal. Maybe people wanted to touch the bones with with a stick or wire to try to capture their power.

The bone movers forgot a few toe bones. We found them in the dust at the foot end of the sarcophagus.

Even after two of the three doors to the church were walled up with stones, people still visited the tomb of this woman.

The one church door that stayed open open leads to her sarcophagus. The mosaic floor between door and sarcophagus is all worn out. Other mosaic in the church is in better shape.

Why were the doors walled up? We don't know.

Invaders may have threatened the city of Hippos and our little church. Someone built a stone wall around the tiny old woman’s sarcophagus. The wall may have been built quickly. It’s crooked.

The doorjamb in this wall’s only doorway is odd. The door opened by sliding up — if it opened at all.

So it seems that people wanted to protect her — perhaps against harm from Sassanids (SASS ah nids) or Muslims (MUSS lims). Both invaded the Holy Land in the seventh century CE.


MORE BURIALS

Back to our hypothesis: Some time after the tiny old woman was buried in the church, three other people were buried there too — different tomb, same church.

These three share a coffin under the altar, the one from which we lifted their heavy sarcophagus on July 4. (See Raising a sarcophagus, Wednesday, July 05).

These three may have been members of a family that gave money to rebuild the church after some earthquake damage before the big earthquake of 748 CE.

We see clues about rebuilding of the church's north side, with stronger building as if to protect against more damage.

So there’s our hypothesis. Of course it may change.

The latest twist is that we now have found more bones in the altar tomb. And the altar tomb’s floor has a hollow sound when we knock on it. What’s down there?

So check with us again — in about 20 minutes. Here’s a picture of Glenn Borchers climbing into the tomb for more investigation, with Dr. Jay Anders helping.


CE AND BCE?

Here’s another reader question:Why do you document dates as CE and BCE?

We use Common Era (CE) and Before Common Era (BCE) to be respectful to our Jewish hosts in Israel and to our Israeli team members at Hippos.

Most members of the international team digging at Hippos are not Christian. So we use a dating system that doesn't refer to Christ. BCE is the same as B.C., which means “before Christ.” CE is the same as A.D., which is from Latin for "in the year of our Lord."

But our dating system we use has the same starting point as the one based on the birth of Jesus — the year 1. Actually, however, Bible experts now think Jesus was born a little before that.


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WHAT DOES THAT MEAN?

Cisterns (SIS turns). People dig cisterns to store water.

Mosaic (moe ZAY ik) is a floor, wall and ceiling covering made with 1-centimeter cubes of stone to create designs and pictures.

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* CE means “common era.” It’s the same as A.D., which means “anno Domini,” Latin for “in the year of our Lord.”

** To change from meters to feet and to make other metric conversions, you can use this site from the state of Washington: www.wsdot.wa.gov/Metrics/factors.htm