Amateur Archaeologists Get the Dirt on the Past

FOUR families, with members ranging in age from 5 months to 40-something, stood in a semicircle around Yoav Bruck, a 31-year-old Israeli and our archaeological guide for the next three hours. In an effort to define a “tel,” Mr. Bruck recruited a 12-year-old volunteer and collected five baseball caps from his audience, which he stacked on the boy’s head.

“So after the New York Yankees were all killed off,” said Mr. Bruck, lifting the cap off the smiling kid underneath, “the Michigan Wolverines built a new city and settled here. And after them, the Toronto whatevers came and built a city on top of the rubble left by the Wolverines. And so on.”

A tel, we learned from his demonstration, is a hill created by different generations of different civilizations living and rebuilding in the same spot. Over time, the level on which the city is built rises, forming a mound, or tel.

We were at Tel Maresha, in the 1,250-acre Beit Guvrin National Park, which lies in the Judean plain an hour southwest of Jerusalem. Everyone in the group had signed on to become an archaeological excavator in the three-hour Dig for a Day program, run by Archeological Seminars (972-2-586-2011; www.archesem.com; $25; $20 for ages 5 to 14), a company started 25 years ago by Bernie and Fran Alpert, archaeologists and Chicago natives.

There are approximately 5,000 caves around Tel Maresha — less than 10 percent of which have been excavated — and remains from the Hellenistic period, roughly 2,200 years ago. About 1,300 feet above sea level, the ground here is chalky and soft, and early on, people began to dig caves, which they used as quarries, burial grounds, storerooms for animals, workshops and spaces for raising doves and pigeons. Many of these caves are linked by an intricate underground network of passageways.

There are three phases of an Archeological Seminars dig. Typically, a guide will first take a group of as many as 20 people down into a cave, where they will participate in an excavation. With shovel in hand, they spend the next 45 minutes digging through the dirt (remember to wear clothes that you don’t mind getting dirty), searching for pottery shards, bones, glass and the occasional piece of metal, often coins.

Aitan Magence, a 13-year-old from Toronto, found a metal piece from a broken dagger, and his 11-year-old sister, Ahava, found a piece of glass — both rare finds. “We could see the excitement on their faces, and they seemed to appreciate what they were doing,’’ said their father, Jeremy Magence, who had done the dig the previous year with his wife but decided to come back again as an entire family. “And the fact that our youngest child got to dig in the dirt without complaints from his parents was pretty special for him.”

During the dig, all finds are placed into one of the red buckets provided, and all dirt is put into the black buckets, which are eventually hauled by the diggers out of the cave and dumped into a giant sifter to search for any finds that were missed. Our group yielded lots of pottery shards; a piece of charcoal; chicken, pigeon and goat bones; part of an oil lamp; and the base of a tear-shaped bottle. The group looked tired and dirty, but satisfied.

While most archaeological excavations require hundreds of thousands of dollars, Mr. Alpert said, this one is unusual because it is self-supporting. “We have the people working and paying for the work, which has proven itself archaeologically and from a tourism standpoint,” he said. “That’s why we are able to dig for so long.” The Maresha excavation is licensed by the Israeli Antiquities Authority, and reports are submitted each year to evaluate its scientific contribution.

“This is the ultimate chutzpah,” said Ian Stern, another of the company’s three owners, who has a doctorate in archaeology and emigrated to Israel from New Jersey (the third owner is Asher Afriat, a historian and native Israeli). “We are providing the public with an active educational experience, while they do the work. Their money underwrites the excavation and is used for all the follow-up of putting the pottery together, registering and photographing the finds, and writing the scientific reports.”

The room our group was excavating is called E.R. (surrounding rooms have names like Shrek and John Malkovich), and is officially locus 68 in cave complex 169. Archeological Seminars has been digging in this cave for the last six years and estimates they will take as much as five more before reaching bedrock. When asked if the bounty of finds legitimately dates back to over 2,000 years, Mr. Bruck said, “This is the Holy Land, not Disneyland.” Maresha, he said, has yielded one of the largest bodies of pottery in the world.”

Although our dig took place on a mild, springlike day, the busiest time of year for archaeological digs is summer, when the temperature in Israel can easily reach into the 90’s. But underground in the caves, it remains comfortable year round, from the mid-60’s to mid-70’s. Most participants are high school and college students on school and summer tours, but the mix of historical, educational and hands-on activities makes it an ideal activity for families.

“The dig was one of the highlights of our trip,” said Danny Feder, a real estate investor visiting from New York City with his wife and three children. “Being engaged with the land beats sitting around a pool, and the kids got more out of it than any other type of sightseeing.”

The first phase of the dig makes people comfortable in the subterranean environment, preparing them for Phase 2 — the crawl. Mr. Bruck cautioned that some of the passageways through which we’d be crawling for the next 30 minutes were quite narrow and that if we suffered from claustrophobia, we could wait at the cave’s exit. With that information — and after some calming yoga breaths for myself — the group stepped one by one down into the cave. Lighted by Shabbat candles stuck into the dirt along the walls, the cave curved and narrowed as we followed one another down through holes that were once storage vessels for olive oil, and along the ground through openings just big enough to squeeze through. Maneuvering through this network of passageways gave us the sense of what a cave is like before it’s been excavated.

The third and final phase takes the temporary archaeologists into a completely excavated cave to see what the end product of their labor will look like. In the finished caves, some with ceiling heights of up to 60 feet, there are olive oil presses, water cisterns and pigeon coops.

Before leaving, each group is taken to a large, open tent set up with benches and a table housing a selection of finds. The large majority of archaeological finds is pottery (“The plastic of today,” said Mr. Bruck), and 65 percent of the pieces are ultimately discarded. But first, each find will go through a cleansing process and then be sorted and subdivided by width, color, shape, size and profile (anything with a base, rim or handle). They are then pieced together with a water-based glue, and archaeologists hope the results will shed light on the life of the Idumean people.

On a previous dig, a 12-year-old girl found a shard with writing that was eventually found to be part of a marriage contract from 176 B.C. Exiting the tent, diggers approach a giant pile of pottery shards. These are the finds designated to be thrown away, but instead, Archeological Seminars offers every would-be archaeologist a chance to take a piece of the dig home.