Israel

Tuesday, July 11

It was just before dawn when I arrived at my newly assigned site: the church. The Sea of Galilee and Tiberias are in the distance. The building is the standard basilica style, with a central nave and two side aisles supported by columns. The side chapel is off to the left, out of the frame. Notice the plaster still clinging to the walls. These would have been painted in antiquity. 

My mission today was to clean as many tessera as possible. These are the individual stones that make up a mosaic. In this church, the entire floor is a mosaic which means hundreds of thousands of tessera. Think of it like a million piece puzzle where you must scrape 1500 years of dirt from each one-inch square. My tools were a sponge, a scalpel, and six hours of time.

The work was peaceful in a sense, because I could tune out everything else and only focus on one thing. It was the first time since I’ve been here that I lost track of time. I was surprised when the coffee break was called.

If you recall yesterday, I spoke about the excavations in the side chapel. They removed the remaining three feet of dirt and stones. They didn’t find a sarcophagus, but they did find another mosaic with more inscriptions. In many ways, inscriptions are better than a burial since they tell the story of the church. We should be able to see the whole thing tomorrow. This is the only area where we sifted dirt to not miss any small pieces. This is the sifter at sunrise.

It’s difficult to properly describe the vastness of this place and the amount of work left to be done. As an example, it will take four weeks to fully uncover one small insula. There are hundreds of structures from public buildings, to churches, to homes, to tombs: easily another 50+ years of work. Here’s a photo to illustrate the point. This is the decumanus maximus again, the main thoroughfare. The team exposed the street itself, which was buried under meters of debris. However, both the left and right sides still need to be excavated. Based on other Roman towns, it may be shops. However, no one truly knows until everything is removed. And it takes time…lots of time. Does anyone want to move some rocks?

When you walk through museum-perfect displays in the future, quietly give tribute to the many archaeologists who spent weeks carefully mapping, digging, documenting, conserving, and sweating to produce that result. And, as my mother reminded me: "Tribute due to those who orginially laid the floor."

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