Archaeology, Take 2

We visited a real archaeological excavation. Thanks to our friends, Rich and Lisa, who told us about the National Park Beit Guvrin, we went to an ongoing, archaeological dig and found real things!

All around Israel, archaeological findings are everywhere and those locations are called 'tels,' like what we saw in Tzippori. But here at Beit Guvrin the materials from the civilization being excavated were 2,000 years old, during the time of the Maccabees.

Run be We Dig Israel, you get into the park and you pay extra to do the dig but, let me tell you, it is so worth it! There is a guide who gives you a thorough over view of what you are going to do, why you are doing it, what's been done before, what your 'work' will go towards, what the background is for this area. We went into a lighted cave. There are, apparently, 5,000 other underground excavation sites just like the one we went into but on this some hill in this park. They gave us all the tools we needed (bucket and shovel and our hands). Then we were told to go to work! We found pottery, bones, shells and charcoal. We believe that we were digging into a former kitchen. There were buckets for 'finds' and buckets for dirt. Then once are digging time was up, we had a bucket brigade to take all the dirt and finds up to outdoors. From the outside, we then sifted all the buckets of dirt and found even more stuff that got added to the investigation. This was not a free-ride tour; you really had to work!

As an added bonus we were shown another cave, one yet to be excavated. It was lighted by candles and there were pigeon holes, small cuts into the walls of the cave where birds were kept.