September 2011, Archaeological Digs

Of Stones and Bones and Ancient Thrones

Sun, Jul 31, 2011

By Jeff Leach

On a morning in July, in the quiet semi-darkness that precedes the break of dawn, I looked out over the stone walls of the Middle Bronze Age palace complex at Tel Kabri in northwestern Israel and began one of the more interesting vacation activities I’ve ever engaged in--participating in an archaeological dig. A contracts attorney by trade and a lover of antiquity by temperament, I had volunteered to leave my air-conditioned office in Northern Virginia to spend a week digging in the dirt with an international team led by Dr. Eric Cline of George Washington University and Dr. Assaf Yasur-Landau of the University of Haifa.  I had come to Tel Kabri with spade in hand, an introduction to archaeology and Hebrew under my belt, and a desire to be part of this adventure into the past.

I first met Eric (who, incidentally, has just won the Biblical Archaeology Society’s “Best Popular Book on Archaeology Award” for the third time, this time for his book Biblical Archaeology: A Very Short Introduction) at a Smithsonian Associates lecture some years earlier, just after he had re-opened the excavation at Tel Kabri and was speaking on it.  One of the most fascinating aspects of Tel Kabri for me and for others are the fragments of painted frescoes that have been discovered at the site, which appear to connect Tel Kabri with Minoan sites like Akrotiri in Santorini and with Knossos in Crete, where I lived when I was a boy.  To dig at a site in the land of the Bible that appeared to have Minoan links of some kind was, for me, the best possible way to fulfill a lifelong desire to participate in some way in digging up the ancient past.

Tel Kabri, a mound with a history of human occupation stretching back through a dozen cultures to at least the Neolithic, sits today among the trees of an avocado grove on an Israeli kibbutz not far from both the Mediterranean Sea and the border with Lebanon, yielding its secrets slowly over decades of painstaking excavation.  Of the three main areas being excavated, I joined the team of students assigned to D-West, under the supervision of a charming and humorous graduate student named Nurith Goshen, a woman who is well-versed in Bronze Age material culture and who knows her way around a pottery sherd.

Our work began each day at 5 a.m. to beat the Mediterranean summer heat.  We loosened the soil with pick-axes, removed it from the digging area, and slowly exposed walls and steps, pathways and plaster, and the detritus of people long gone.  As we came across interesting finds--pottery sherds, bone fragments, loom weights, Neolithic stone implements--we saved them for later cleaning and study.  In the afternoons, we washed our finds (largely pottery) and relaxed, and in the evenings we gathered for interesting lectures on relevant archaeological subjects by Eric and Assaf.

It takes some imagination to scan the wall outlines at Tel Kabri and try to visualize what it must have looked like in its heyday.  Most of the site is still covered over by centuries of accumulated dirt.  All non-durable materials, such as wood, cloth, and foodstuffs, have long since been removed or rotted away.  Many of the walls were built of mud brick atop stone bases, and the mud brick gave way long ago, collapsing multiple stories together. 

From patient excavation of the structures, however, an understanding emerges--a small house built at one stage is later sacrificed to a larger building from another.  From small finds we can construct the picture in the puzzle piece by piece--a loom and a tradition of weaving from a loom weight, the consumption of fish and pigs from fish bones and a pig jaw, a tradition of collecting, processing, storing and distributing food items--perhaps olive oil--in caches of shattered pottery.  And in the mud bricks themselves, made from local clays, countless small Neolithic blades remind us that Tel Kabri was a thriving hub of human settlement long before the palace builders of the Bronze Age erected their first wall.

Walking among the stones at a site such as Tel Kabri is like going back in time 3,600 years to a period when small city-states dominated the Levant, when ancient Israel was still in the future, and when Akkadian was the international lingua franca.  To dig in a site like Tel Kabri is to fire the imagination.  Who were these people?  What were they like?  What sort of culture and economy did they have?  What connection was there between this site and the palace complexes of the Aegean?  Was the artist who painted the frescoes here a student of the artist who painted the walls of Akrotiri in Santorini?  Was there a stone throne buried somewhere, like the one at the palace complex of Knossos?  How did it all end before it was covered over and forgotten?  What lessons does it hold for us in our own culture?

Fascinated as I am with language and historical documents, I kept hoping as we dug to find the archives--maybe a stone chest with baked clay tablets in Akkadian cuneiform that would give us insight into this place--who they were, what they traded, who their allies and enemies were, even something so basic as what they called this place.

As Assaf pointed out to me one day, however, all histories are slanted by the humans who write them.  The material remains, however, speak with no agendas, although we must listen more closely and patiently to what they have to tell us.  An excellent point--but I’m still hoping for that archive.

In any event, my experience at Tel Kabri was a rich and rewarding one, providing me with valuable insights into the practices and methods of archaeology, the chance to meet some wonderful people, and a glimpse into the lives of an ancient Mediterranean culture that probably in some small and indirect but real way helped to make us who we are.  I recommend it for anyone with a love for the past and hankering for adventure.

For more information on Tel Kabri, including how you can help support this important excavation, please visit http://digkabri2011.wordpress.com/.