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I Volunteered for This?! Life on an Archaeological Dig
shoveled, brushed, and lifted pieces of pottery out of
the dirt. Someone came by to map and catalog something. We watched with numbed disinterest.
The heat shimmered and I noticed great beads
of sweat coursing down the back of one of the men
who was picking. The ground was hard; it wouldn’t
break up.
The pace slowed and conversation began about
the weekend. Several people were checking into a
local hotel. They talked of air conditioning, ice, sleeping late, and no sand. Others were going to
Jerusalem, Haifa, Tiberias. They were concerned
about the necessity of arriving at their destination
before public transportation ceased for the Jewish
Sabbath which starts at sundown on Friday.
Mary Remole
“Buses! The buses are here,” someone yelled.
Relaxation on a dig is wherever you can find it.
Instantaneously, our energy level increased. Tools
were put away for the day. The afternoon was before
us. Some boarded the bus for the ten-minute ride to
camp. Others walked the three kilometers along the beach, stopping to plunge into the cool of the sea, washing their
bodies of dirt, sweat, and fatigue.

At camp bedlam reigned. 130 people needed to wash at the few shower stalls or at the long washing troughs in
the one hour before the 2 p.m. main meal. The more enterprising among us used the public showers at the beach below
the camp.
Later in the afternoon we swam, played backgammon, wrote letters and slept. In the slowness of the afternoon we
developed friendships while talking about where we had been in Israel, and where we wanted to go at the end of the
four week session.
Several of us from the Minnesota group had grand designs to go scuba diving in the Gulf of Eilat, along the Sinai
coast. We would rent a van, pack ten people into it and camp along the way. Then someone mentioned that the price of
gasoline had just been raised to $3.50 a gallon thereby personalizing Israel’s 120 percent inflation rate. No matter, we would
take the bus.
“Ice cream, who wants to go get ice cream?” someone asked. It was time for the daily trek to the local ice cream
parlor. Seven of us set off to stuff ourselves with creamy mountains of calories, nuts, and whipped cream. Kate and I,
coffee addicts, found a new craze: iced coffee. We doled out our dollars rationalizing the expense of an added scoop of
ice cream.
Our small group separated when three people picked up the local bus to Tel Aviv. Four of us remained talking in
the shade of the sidewalk cafe. “The neatest thing about this experience,” remarked Becky Levitsky of Los Angeles “is
our friendships.” You wake up in the morning and of course you hurt, but people ask how you are; they care.”
We slowly walked back to camp, thinking about that last remark. We paused at the barbed wire fence that encircled the camp protecting it from local thieves, and waited for the guard to unlock the gate. Becky was right, I thought.
For those of us who were not professional archaeologists, the long weeks of hard work had forged friendships; the group
had melded into a tight, close-knit community. For many, these friendships would be the most important find of the dig.
At 5:00 we had pottery class during which we learned how to sort through and interpret the dozens of seemingly
inconsequential fragments we had picked up earlier in the day. The instructors confidently sifted through our morning’s
labor, singling out the important pieces, discarding the rest.
“I’ll never again pick up every small sherd,” said Pam Girod of St. Paul, Minnesota, after seeing eight hours of
painstaking work reduced to a few minutes of skillful interpretation.
After class, some people ran along the beach in the cool of the evening while others ran to grab cameras. A contemporary version of an ancient evening ritual was about to commence on the cliffs of Sidni AN. At precisely sundown,
a dozen camera shutters clicked in unison as the sun sank into the ocean.
At the evening lectures, some of the questions about the day’s work were answered. Mandatory for those who were
“digging for credit,” these after dinner lectures provided the background for what had been found on the tel. Even though

© 2006 Biblical Archaeology Society

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