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I Volunteered for This?! Life on an Archaeological Dig

1993 Excavation Opportunities
Old Stones, New Friends

By Kenneth Gewertz

llene Perlman
The varied faces of Ashkelon. David, an Ethiopian Jew, helps excavate the ancient city
along Israel’s southern coast.

In a summer of sweaty, dirty, demanding volunteer work, one particularly arduous morning stands out. We were dismantling a Persian-period wall at Ashkelon. My job was to work the stones free with a pick and then carry them in my arms
over a treacherous terrain of balks, pits and trenches. That was the first time I paid much attention to Denis and David.
They were as different as could be. Denis was 17, a blond-haired, blue-eyed Ukrainian in jeans and a T-shirt. David
(pronounced dah-VEED), a dark-skinned Ethiopian, was about 60. He dressed in shorts, battered ankle-length dress
boots, an oxford shirt buttoned to the neck and a green wool cap. But they had two important things in common: Both
were Jewish, and both were olim—recent immigrants who had come under the Law of Return, which welcomes any Jew
in the world to live in and to become a citizen of Israel.
The wall we were pulling apart was the last remaining component of what appeared to be a fifth-century B.C. residential structure in Ashkelon’s upper-class neighborhood. The wall had been described, measured, drawn and photographed, and now it was time for it to come down.
The staff was eager to get down below the Persian-period remains to the Philistine period underneath—that’s where
the action was. In other sections of the dig, excavators had already encountered evidence of the 604 B.C.E. destruc-

© 2006 Biblical Archaeology Society

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