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I Volunteered for This?! Life on an Archaeological Dig
throughout the dig. Soon Larry Stager and Doug Esse arrived to give their expert opinions. Doug poured water from a
thermos on a fragment. Someone handed out a dental pick, another person a paint brush. The volunteers huddled around
with intense interest at the “porno workshop,” eager to get a look. Later, Larry turned down an offer by Penthouse magazine for an interview on the sensational finds.
One morning, a square supervisor I nicknamed the “deepest woman in Israel” treated my female recruits to a short
course on how they should swing the pickax and the rubber baskets called guffas. This supervisor had achieved the incredible feat of digging a shaft 60 feet deep under the ramparts of Tel Dan in northern Galilee. Her stories of a snake snapping
its coils over the workers’ heads at the bottom of the trench made the adventures of Indiana Jones seem tame. She
explained to the volunteers: “Women don’t have the upper body strength men have, so use what you’ve got.” She demonstrated that the secret is to use your hips.
More than one-third of the volunteers—young and not so young—dig to earn college credits. The others come from
a variety of backgrounds: There are homemakers, engineers, judges, armed forces veterans and members of the clergy,
to name a few.
As a square supervisor, I find this “wall-to-wall with people” existence particularly enriching. I feel I am an important link between the highly specialized professionals and the enthusiastic one-time diggers.
And what better place to live this experience than in Ashkelon, one of the most important maritime and mercantile centers of the ancient Near East; a city whose people, despite the bad connotation the Philistine name carries today,
were in fact sophisticated in the arts of pottery, small crafts and architecture.

© 2006 Biblical Archaeology Society

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