Introduction
Most of us have a very pollyannish impression from popular media of what practical archaeology consists of. Most of what the media presents is photos of smiling workers holding up finds, workers “working” in the excavation, carefully dusting off a small area with brushes (!).
If you’ve ever done archaeology as a volunteer grunt, as I have, you know how absurd this image is. The purpose of this note is to shine some light on the reality of life as an archaeology volunteer, just in case you’ve ever entertained the notion of volunteering yourself.
The Schedule
My experience is volunteering in Israel, specifically Jerusalem. Dig “seasons” there are typically in early summer (June). Even though it is not the Negev, Jerusalem can be HOT in in late June.
So, the idea is to start early and quit early to avoid the oppressive afternoon heat.
That means starting at 6:00 am, and typically, after a 10:00 or so lunch break, wrapping up by 1:00. Both before (5:30 AM) and after, tools must be retrieved from/returned to their storage location down the hill adjacent to the site. Not a big deal first thing in the morning. In fact, there was something strangely serene about my walk to the site in the quiet of the early light, usually accompanied by a rooster or two announcing the morning. But putting the tools back in storage at the end of a full day of work was more than challenging. All anybody wanted was to get back to their rooms for a shower and a chance to sit or lay down to regroup.
I was staying at a tourist hotel in the Old City. Part of my daily rate included Breakfast and Dinner. The problem was that they didn’t begin serving breakfast until 6:30 or 7:00 am, after I was already at the site.
So, I tried to work out a system with the hotel kitchen staff in which they would provide a box lunch “breakfast” consisting of a hardboiled egg, a piece of fruit, and some pita and give it to the front desk the night before so that I could pick it up on my way out.
It was a great plan. Often, however, it failed and the desk had nothing. So, when it did, I would let myself into the kitchen and forage for items appropriate for breakfast and lunch. Sometimes that worked. Sometimes I’d be interrupted by staff arriving early and they’d help me forage. If I couldn’t find sufficient sustenance, occasionally there would be early street vendors selling their “Jerusalem Bagels” on my way through Jaffa Gate Plaza on my way to the dig site on Mt. Zion.
If all else failed, I sucked it up until the lunch break and then went up to the café in the Church of the Dormition for a sandwich and a glass of the best iced coffee in Jerusalem.
The Work
There are many jobs that need to be done on a dig site. The more skilled jobs are recording data locating specific significant “finds” in a ledger; taking the elevation data on the location of those finds, and ultimately evaluating their significance. Typically, that’s the job of the dig leader or an area supervisor. The site itself is subdivided into “squares” (typically 5m X 5m areas) each of which has a “supervisor” – an experienced proto-archaeologist (perhaps an archaeology graduate student, or an experienced layman). And to be fair, some supervisors are high-output diggers in their own right, not merely administrators.
Then there are, potentially, sifters. Often, debris from a dig can be dry or wet sifted in an attempt to recover all significant objects (beads, shells or shell fragments, jewelry fragments, etc.) that may have been overlooked in digging. Your site might also have a “floatation” process in place. In this process you mix select samples of soil (e.g., from an oven or press or refuse dump) in water to break the soil apart potentially exposing hidden finds that float on the surface, such as seeds, or small shell fragments. The material that sinks can also contain useful objects such as small metal or bone fragments. As you might expect, this job is similarly undemanding physically.
Those are the “white collar” jobs at a dig site. The blue-collar jobs are digging, using pickaxes to loosen the soil, and Turia[i] (a square hoe) to rake the loosened soil into buckets.
During the soil breaking and “hoeing” process, the worker must constantly be on the lookout for significant debris in the soil. Significant debris includes coins, glass fragments, bone fragments, any pottery fragments (sherds) or any stoneware or textile fragments.
So, the identified “significant debris” are placed in individual containers by type for that square for that excavation depth, and the remaining soil pulled into the buckets for either sifting or disposal. But somebody’s got to get the buckets of soil from wherever the excavation is happening, possibly meters below the modern ground level of the site, up to that level.
That operation is pure “grunt work”, sometimes involving a chain of people at different levels to lift buckets up to the next level until they reach ground level. Then, at ground level, the buckets need to be transported to a location where they are dumped into large plastic mesh bags called “sandbags” that are large enough to hold 50 or so buckets of material. These will be mechanically lifted and taken to a disposal site.
Two insights into this operation. First, the sandbags may be far away from where your square is lifting its buckets up. In that case, they have to be either loaded into a wheelbarrow and pushed (sometimes uphill) to the location of the sandbags and dumped into the bags, one by one, or sometimes hung on a zipline and pushed across to the sandbag area.
Occasionally you’ll see human chains used to pass the buckets one-by-one to the bag location. This process is continuous. There is no “Take A Break” announcement for your square or all squares. You just keep going.
Forewarned
All of this to say that an archaeological dig, for the common volunteer, is an exercise of strenuous exertion. It is not sitting on the bottom of an excavated area brushing the dirt off of a bone fragment (as is often portrayed in the media). It is, rather, breaking soil (or worse, a cistern 3-4 inches thick of concrete and plaster) with a pick, pulling that soil and debris into a bucket while bending over groping through it for any objects of significance, lifting 30-50 pound buckets up to the next level of the dig, sometimes in chains of people, transporting the buckets to either a sifting site or the sandbag depository site, and repeat. Typically, 6-7 hours a day in the 90+ or so Fahrenheit heat of highland Israel in summer.
Caveat
If you’re just a regular volunteer digger, don’t come if you don’t have the physical stamina and strength necessary to perform a full day’s worth of this hard work. Otherwise, you’ll be uncomfortable with the situation, and likely just in the way.
However, if you are unable to engage in strenuous physical work, there are some jobs, mentioned above, you might still do. The sifting and flotation operations are undemanding physically, as is the washing of pottery sherds. You should check with the dig coordinator before you volunteer to ensure that you’ll be able to do such a job (or one of the “white collar” jobs) before signing on.
The Payoffs
One of the significant payoffs from your time on a dig will be the discovery of a “find” yourself – something that hasn’t been seen or touched for 2000 years. It doesn’t much matter what the object is. It could be an oil lamp, a 1st century coin, a murex shell, a glass bead from a necklass or tesara pieces from what was once a mosaic floor.
Each find adds a bit more information to the context of who was living at that location at the time the find was deposited, what their material circumstances were, what they ate, and possibly what the political situation was in which they lived (e.g., war).
Of course, if you’re excavating a biblical site, you’re likely to be living in a totally different culture from that of your home. There will no doubt be sights to see in the arrea of your dig, likely a completely different diet, and residents living in a completely different culture.
Digging in Jerusalem was a special priviledge. There are so many sites to visit within walking distance: the Temple Mount, its Western Wall foundations and the thrown-down stones from the 70 AD destruction, the City of David, Hezekiah’s tunnel, the Pool of Siloam, the Pilgrim Road, Bethesda and St. Anne’s chruch[ii], the Church of the Holy Sepulchre and, of course, all of the Old City’s markets and the museums of the Jewish Quarter where you can walk through the remains of first century palatial homes destroyed in the Roman cataclysm.
The Shrine of the Book of the Israel Museum and its scale model of the 1st century city is walking distance from the Old City (or an easy light rail or bus trip). The Rockefeller Museum is close by the Old City too.
Standing outside the Zion Gate you are also see evidence of the city’s violent history as you survey all the bullet holes from the 1967 war in the stones of the city walls. In fact you’re be hard pressed to identify a city with a more violent history than Jerusalem’s. In addition to the ’67 war’s bullet holes, you will find arrowheads and various ballista from the numerous assualts on the city (e.g., the Assyrian assualt, the Babylonian destruction, the Roman apocalypse) buried beneath its ground.
If you get the chance to join a dig in Israel, do it, especially if you’re in sound physical condition. There are no comparable experiences that I’m aware of, especially for those who know the nation’s history and its biblical narratives. There is something quite powerful about finding and handling an ancient object, knowing the trials the people were suffering through when that object was deposited.
And, as a bonus, you’ll be in great physical shape when you’re done, as if you’d spent two solid weeks working out every day in the gym!
[i] Tools of the Trade – The BAS Library
[ii] If you’re ever in Jerusalem and have an hour to spare and have any appreciation for singing, you must stop by St. Anne’s. Its acoustics feature a 7 second decay. So, singing group after singing group (usually members of their church’s choir stop there to sing and enjoy the reverberation. The experience is ethereal.
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