On the dig

I'm living at the Ginosar Kibbutz right on the western shore of the Sea of Galilee (which is really a "lake"). We're just slightly north of the city of Tiberias.

Every morning we crawl out of bed at 5am, dress in our oldest clothes and head out to the bus. By 6am, we're already on the site of ancient Bethsaida -- the hometown of the disciples Peter, Andrew and Philip (see John 1:144) and the place where a blind man was healed with spit (see Mark 8:22-26). It's also the area of the ancient kingdom of Geshur (mentioned several times in the OT) and from where David got his wife Maacah, the mother of Absalom (see 2 Samuel 3:3). We are able to find remnants of of a New Testament era town, and then further down into the hill underneath we find parts of a town from David's time around 1000 B.C.


We collect large and small hand picks, trowels, brushes and piles of plastic buckets from the locked container on site. We use many black buckets for loading with dirt that we carefully dig out, and a red bucket just for our "treasures". Some of these special finds we notice in our digging -- others are found as the buckets of dirt are sifted. We inspect larger rocks to see if they have been specially shaped with tools. If not, they are just discarded.

The most special finds are inscriptions in rocks or scraped onto pottery and coins because coins help a lot with dating what we are finding. Our group has a "coin dance" when a coin is found! The most common finds are pieces of broken pottery. We find these "shards" by the thousands because pottery utensils were used in every household, and the fired clay vessels are virtually indestructible -- that is they are easily shattered, but the broken pieces don't rot or disintegrate. Special pottery finds include rims and handles of vessels which are enough to give the archaeologists a guide to the era in which the vessel was made as the archaeologists have a pretty good feel for the change in fashions in jugs and clay bowls over the centuries. Also, more expensive glazed pottery shards are special treasures.


At 9am, we stop for breakfast: cornflakes and milk, bread and jam, and the ever present tomatoes and cucumbers. It's a wonder that Israelis don't look like tomatoes or cucumbers! I'm not really a cucumber fan, but working in these temperatures, sucking the juice out of a tomato is very refreshing. We work in the mornings (under shade cloths) because it gets up to 44 or 45 degrees C by the afternoon.

Then it's back to the dirt again. Sunscreen and sweat make the fine dust stick so we look pretty grubby. Then suddenly there's a yell -- it's "Popsicle break" time -- a very popular part of the morning. By 12:30 we've packed up again and headed back to the bus. Two of our team are assigned each day to washing the finds and they're also loaded onto the bus.


We go straight to lunch in the workers' dining room at the nearby hotel -- they wouldn't let us in the main restaurant (although we do go there for dinner in the evenings). Then it's a shower and a nap during the hottest part of the day before "pottery reading" time at 5pm. All our finds are sorted and catalogued and carefully photographed along with a precise record of the location of the find. (Every day the depth of each part of the dig is carefully surveyed and plotted on a new map.)

So having this experience, along with watching and talking with the American and Israeli archaeologists is just a fascinating experience. (By law, an Israeli archaeologist has to direct the dig.) I've learnt so much. And I even manage to fit a little Hebrew learning into my spare time, although we are always fighting tiredness.

I can't add any photos yet, because I'm paying by the minute for Internet time here and it's quite expensive. But I'll try to update this entry mid-next week when I'm back in Jerusalem.