At the Bottom of the Well: The Tel-Tsaf Excavation

Photos and Text: Meredith Price

Between the 4:30 a.m. wake-up call, the 10-hour workdays in 40 Celsius temperatures, and the slow, laborious process of sifting through 7,000-year-old soil, many people wonder what attraction volunteering for an archeological dig holds. But it's not only the long, hot days deterring potential volunteers; since the outbreak of the intifada, many students from abroad are afraid to travel anywhere in the Middle East, and government funding for archeological endeavors has been cut nearly in half.

"Before the second intifada, about 70 percent of our volunteers were from abroad and about 30% were Israelis. Today, the percentages are reversed. We dropped from about 80 volunteers a year from abroad to about 12," says Professor Yosef Garfinkel, who specializes in biblical archeology at the Institute of Archeology at the Hebrew University, and is the director of the excavations at Tel-Tsaf, one of the sites sponsored by the university.

But we're making do," he smiles. "In some ways, it's better because those who are willing to make the trip are really dedicated and passionate about archeology." Despite the hard work and the terrorism, hundreds of volunteers still donate their time, sweat and tears every summer to uncover ancient ruins in Israel. And for the vast majority of them, the rewards are well worth the effort.

At the site of Tel-Tsaf, perched high above the Jordanian border, over 40 volunteers have been working with archeologists from the Institute of Archeology on a six-week excavation to prove a new theory that a Middle Chalcolithic period did, in fact, exist. The archeologists are hoping that an investigation into this period will help answer questions about the significant gap between the Neolithic and Chalcolithic periods.

The Middle Chalcolithic period (fifth millennium BCE) represents a virtual archeological vacuum. Little is known about why or how societies transitioned from the small, agricultural settlements that characterize the Neolithic period to the increasingly larger villages and more complex social organizations indicative of the Late Chalcolithic period. The understanding of this era is so poor that many archeologists and scholars cannot even agree on whether to classify settlements as Neolithic or Chalcolithic.

At the Tel-Tsaf excavation, Garfinkel is joined by three of his PhD students and one student who just submitted his final PhD thesis. Perhaps most noted for his work at Sha'ar Hagolan in northern Israel, where Garfinkel discovered architecture, streets, courtyards, houses, a well, artistic pottery and an unprecedented number of goddess figurines at the ancient site. The high number of female figurines found there indicates that they were used in ritual ceremonies, perhaps in connection with the belief system of the 8,000-year-old Yarmukian culture. But without written documents, theories about the figurines remain speculative. Artifacts from this excavation are currently on display at the Metropolitan Museum in New York and the Louvre in Paris. A new exhibit on the goddess figurines has recently opened at the Israel Museum in Jerusalem.

AFTER OVER 10 years at Sha'ar Hagolan, last year marked the beginning of a new archeological adventure for Professor Garfinkel. He chose the Tel-Tsaf site to investigate the Middle Chalcolithic period because it was inhabited during only one time period, eliminating cultural contamination from other eras. In addition, when one of Garfinkel's predecessors, Professor Ram Gophna of Tel Aviv University, conducted small-scale excavations in the 1970s, he found a rich variety of well preserved pottery, flint, animal bones, mud brick walls and botanical remains in the area.

Beneath the Tel-Tsaf shade structure that covers 300 square meters of earth, a group of hard-working volunteers slowly loosens the dirt in small layers with trowels, fills buckets of soil to be sifted for important materials, occasionally brushes the earth to look for emerging walls or installations and keeps track of the volume of dirt taken from each square.

"This site is full of surprises," says Garfinkel. "The round installations that we found could be silos, but we weren't expecting to see them here," he says, pointing to the mud brick walls of a large, round structure emerging from the earth as the dirt around it is chipped away. "In addition, we found two almost complete goddess figurines made of clay, one next to the other. This is a complete shock."

"To be honest, we didn't know what to expect when we started here, since so little is known about this period. But we did know that pottery matching the patterns of three sites in Jordan had been found here, and the obsidian here indicates that trading was taking place," he says.

Along the border below the tel's ridge, a white road snakes along the twisting Jordan River, and a thick fence topped with curling barbed wire deters unwanted crossings. An occasional army truck rolls by, full of young soldiers patrolling the area. A large machine gun protrudes from the back of the convertible jeep, but as quickly as it appeared, it is gone, fading into the thick trail of dust it leaves in its wake. The border between Israel and Jordan is quiet and peaceful. The volunteers have nothing to worry about on an archeological dig in the middle of nowhere.

"The biggest incidents we've had so far are a scorpion sting and a spider bite," says Garfinkel. In fact, aside from the occasional pesky insect, sore joint or blistered palm, the biggest danger volunteers face at the site is dehydration or heat exhaustion. Stryofoam coolers full of water are placed in every corner, and at 30 minute intervals, everyone is reminded to drink.

"I'm the water woman," says Lee Oz, an Israeli-American student from Jerusalem who is working on excavating the well, a second site of the Tel-Tsaf dig a few hundred meters away from the village. "I worry about everyone and make sure they are drinking every half hour."

The well, situated to the south of the main excavation site, was actually uncovered by an army bulldozer that was digging the road along the border. "We were lucky to find the well intact," says Garfinkel. "It tells us a lot about the social environment of the civilization. If you read biblical stories, you realize that a lot happens around the well. Jacob and Rebecca met there, for example. They didn't have cinemas or television and the women were relatively secluded, so meetings at the well were common."

Garfinkel hopes that the intact vessels found at the bottom of the well will answer questions about why a well was necessary when the village was located so close to a river. "The domestication of water is another mystery. Perhaps the well was necessary because it provided a clean water source and it was more convenient, but we don't know yet."

Ariel Shatil, a third-year archeology student from Jerusalem, is in charge of the excavations at the well. "We think there was a market near the well because we've found lots of pottery and beads in the area," says Shatil. "We also found grinding stones here and animal bones, but no mud bricks, which might mean that this area was without architecture."

EXCAVATING THE well provides another important way to understand the social organization of this lost civilization, as archeologists can compare the findings from the village in their data analysis and look for similarities and differences among the discoveries.

J. Rosenberg, a dig architect originally from England who has been in Israel for 20 years, is making a scaled map of the site. "My drawings will help them find patterns and make sense of what they are seeing here," he explains as he surveys and measures every nook and cranny of the square excavation.

According to David Ben-Shlomo, a PhD student at Hebrew University who recently submitted his thesis, the patterns that emerge are of critical importance to understanding the building structures and their functions. "One of the problems you run into on an excavation is creating patterns where none existed before, or digging up the walls with everything else and missing them completely," he says. "Another problem is with mixing finds from different areas and confusing the data."

One of the reasons that volunteers without any previous experience or background in archeology are welcome to help with such precise work is that the head archeologist and students oversee much of the labor and freely answer any questions that might arise at the site.

"I had no idea what I was getting into, and I don't know how I would have felt about it if Yossi and David and the other students weren't always here to answer my questions and explain what to do," says Alla Campbell.

At 60, Campbell is the oldest female volunteer on the dig, and perhaps traveled the furthest, as she came all the way from Birmingham, Alabama to join the dig. Campbell, a nurse, was given the task of unearthing a human skeleton found in a corner of one of the squares near a fire pit. The skull was separated from the body and the bones had been burnt, but the archeologists do not think it was a cremation because of the flexed position of the leg bones.

"The skeleton was probably a burial that a later family did not know about. They might have built a cooking pit next to the bones and burnt them accidentally, but carbon dating will tell us more about the time periods and help solve the mystery," says Garfinkel.

ARCHEOLOGISTS IN Israel are in a constant quandary about any human remains that are found, as the rabbinate often insists on taking them for a proper burial in a Jewish cemetery, despite the fact that they could not have been Jewish 7,000 years ago.

"It's really ironic that the rabbinate is digging up new bones and removing them from Jewish cemeteries if the person wasn't Jewish enough, but they want the old ones who could not possibly have been Jewish to be properly laid to rest," says Garfinkel.

For Campbell, carefully brushing the human bones to determine their position and parts has been educational. "The whole experience has been a wonderful learning process. Israel was not on my list of places to visit, but I like new and different things and this has certainly been fascinating," she says. "The evening lectures were particularly helpful for understanding the history and time period, and I have a much greater appreciation for the work archeologists do, now that I've been here myself."

The daily excavations include breaks every two hours for coffee, breakfast, and watermelon to give everyone a chance to rest before their return to Kibbutz Kfar Ruppin at 1 p.m. After lunch, the finds from the day are washed and then separated by the archeologists into groups. They divide the bones, flint, beads, pottery shards, stones, shells, clay objects and figurines into boxes and bags. Later, a specialist in each area will examine the data and draws conclusions.

In the evenings, a lecture about the site itself or archeology in the region entertains the volunteers who can still keep their eyes open, and for those with extraordinary energy, the kibbutz itself is home to an international bird-watching center, and nearby Beit She'an exhibits archeological ruins where human habitation goes back 7,000 years, to the Neolithic period.

The majority of the volunteers are young and Jewish. Many of them want to spend the summer in Israel doing something constructive, but a few non-Jewish volunteers also take part in the excavation. "Some days are really fun and exciting because you find cool things, but other days you just want it to be over," says Elyse Rothman, who combined her birthright israel trip with the archeological dig, and is earning academic credit for her participation.

According to two of the veteran archeology students at Tel-Tsaf, archeological digs always attract interesting people. "Last year, we had an 80-year-old American army priest looking for biblical scrolls at Sha'ar Hagolan, and another guy thought that one of the other American volunteers was an undercover CIA agent who had followed him from Canada," says Ariel Vered, a B.A. student in archeology at the Hebrew University.

"All of life is like an archeological dig, and people who join us are usually looking for something different to do," says Shatil.

Reuven Montefiore, a civil engineer from Ramat Hasharon, started studying archeology at Tel Aviv University after his retirement. "I came for the emotional sensations surrounding the dig," says Montefiore. The 67-year-old retiree who joined the excavation also found time to practice tai chi in the evenings on the kibbutz. "I'm not doing this for the degree," he says. "I am interested in the context and of how much a project like this can tell us about history and unknown places and time periods."

The mysteries surrounding the excavation are a large part of the attraction for many volunteers. Yet according to Garfinkel, who plans to excavate at Tel-Tsaf for at least four more years - provided he continues to retain funding - the questions are far from being answered. "Between the massive walls, the fire pits, the odd circular structures, the figurines and the many buildings we've found at this site, I'm afraid we have raised more questions than answers right now," says Garfinkel. "But I hope to prove through this excavation that a Middle Chalcolithic period existed, and I hope that we will be able to solve the increasing number of mysteries as time goes on."