Dig Updates by our Staff members

What happened in previous seasons?

June 22 - 26, 2008 

The second week of our summer season (June 22-27) was filled with much excitement and accomplishment. Our team continued to bond, gain skills, and exude enthusiasm. As some of you know who have done a bit of archaeology, team members quickly become attached to given areas of an excavation and more or less lay claim to them, anxious to master all the features, tackle the interpretive problems, and advance the excavation efforts. Such was the case in our second week. Tremendous progress was made in three areas and many valuable artifacts were found,  including fragments of stone vessels, tops of pilgrim flasks, lamp remains, and large quantities of pottery.

It is always exciting to uncover a mosaic. Mosaics reached their full development in the Byzantine period and have become one of the hallmarks of classical archaeology in the Levant and Mediterranean worlds. Their development and history is quite fascinating. In previous seasons a patch of lovely colored mosaic floor of  Byzantine date (5th-8th century CE) had been uncovered and conserved by the Israel Antiquities Authority. Much of it had been destroyed by later building but we were anxious to trace it under the area of soil along its edge, which involved opening another square and removing two meters of soil. By all appearances it continued and was intact. Team members began talking on Sunday of how pleased they would be to reach their goal by the end of the week. The digging was careful but deliberate and enthusiastic, down through several loci or levels. On Wednesday the mosaic was uncovered and to our surprise it included a sump for drainage. It will have to be cleaned but we now have enough to really evaluate the floor and put it into the larger context. We celebrated the successful end of our task when the full mosaic was revealed and took lots of photos.

In our main open squares we continued to articulate and isolate the complex of walls and debris that appear to be Byzantine foundations over the walls of highly preserved Second Temple period rooms. This is clearly the most exiting area of our operations at this point but the whole week was spent doing selective removal until we could understand the complex of stones and walls. Our plan is to remove the entire Byzantine substructure (it was what supported our mosaic above) in the next two week session and we will at that point come down into the Second Temple remains. We are of course all eagerly anticipating that prospect.

On the north side in a different area the team came upon a floor and a robber`s trench and spent the whole week clearing it. Robber`s trenches are found frequently at complex multi layered sites and are the result of later people digging down into previous levels looking for stones to reuse. You can actually see the tunnels with their fill that are left behind. Once the trench was cleaned the floor was removed, and just on the last day of the week of digging two lovely coins in situ, were uncovered. A delicate bone hair pin was also spotted by our careful diggers who had become quite skilled at proper examination of sensitive areas. Such an item could easily be broken but we managed to remove it intact.

Over the weekend Gibson and I examined the coins (almost 100) found so far that had just been returned from the Israel Antiquities Lab after cleaning and made some preliminary assessments. There are some nice specimens from almost every period: hellenistic, Early Roman, Late Roman, Byzantine, Early Islamic, and Mediaeval. We eagerly anticipate the arrival next week of Prof. Warren Schultz of DePaul University (Ph.D. in Islamic History from the University of Chicago), who is a well known Numismatist. He plans to dig with over the next two weeks, along with his daughter Amanda, as well as examine the coins from the March season.

James Tabor

June 15 - 19

We just completed our first week (June 15-19) of the June/July six week season of the Mt Zion excavations. Things have gotten off to a very good start with great promise of things to come. Most of the team members have come for two weeks, so we will have another group arriving June 29th, and a third July 13th, but since some stay longer than two weeks there will be some valuable overlap.

Though we are outside the present Old City wall, in antiquity our area was not only inside the city walls, but was precisely at the center of the”four-square” city. This location presents an unprecedented opportunity to explore ancient Jerusalem ‘through the ages,” from the Iron Age down to modern times. 
Our group jumped right into our task with great enthusiasm and fervor. As with any excavation, the first day or two is devoted to cleaning the site. This includes debris that has fallen in, replacing sandbags, and removal of weeds and vegetation. After two days of hard, hot, and dirty work the site began literally to“gleam” in the sun, inviting us to begin the actual work of excavation. On Tuesday we began that work in earnest, picking up where things had left off following our four week season in March.

We extended  the previously excavated areas  and opened two additional areas. Half the team was thus removing modern layers while the other half began to work down through the Byzantine levels as well as removing the “fill” from the Justinian period. These ancient fills are extraordinarily rich with finds, including lots of coins, pottery, lamp fragments, glass, metal, bones, and broken stone vessels. The whole group gathered exitedly when the first coin was discovered; quite a lot of exitement was also raised by the uncovering of a nest of snake-eggs  just next to the Byzantine wall in one of the squares.

A highlight of the week was the arrival of Jesse and Michael Pinchas and their team to do GPR (Ground Penetrating Radar) work over the areas we have begun to examine. Their results offer great promise in guiding us as to our strategy in excavating what lies below, since they can give us 3-D imagery of subsurface structures. We also enjoyed visits from staff and students from the German School of Archeology and the University of the Holy Land. David and Patty Tyler of New York, who are doing fund raising for us, joined us for the first week as our guests and they were quite happy to pitch in for three days and get as hot, dirty, and tired, as the rest of us.

We know we are in a first century CE palatial residential area, likely inhabited by the wealth aristocratic and priestly classes. One could have looked out to the northeast from this site and see the magnificent Herodian Temple. Some evidence of that turned up in our digging this week with fragments of stone vessels, that signal a regard for ritual purity. Our field-trip on wednesday helped to put the whereabouts of ancient Jerusalem, including the location of our site, into perspective.  So there is much excitement ahead and our whole team, both staff and students, could not wait for week two to begin!
We hope many of you will join us in future seasons and whether you can come or not you can participate in our Web fund drive and do your part, small or large, to “Dig Mount Zion.”

James Tabor