(the kibbutz- [Thank you Tony K])

So every morning I awoke at 4am. I thought this would be a difficult thing to adjust to, but really it may have been the easiest. My eyes popped wide open before the alarm even went off and –wham- there I was. Still in Israel. Still going to work my ass off that day. Still overwhelmingly content.

Christina (my friend, roommate, constant companion) makes fun of me because like an idiot I would feel the need to shower every morning. This is entirely ridiculous because in an hour and a half I would be covered head to toe with filth, but still, it woke me up, becamse part of my routine and I couldn’t not. The Kibbutz folk have this amazing contraption, which I wish I had taken a photo of (but is that weird? Too much? Taking pictures of the bathroom?) which was this 3 paneled shower thing that essentially folded in on itself when you were through with the shower, like an envelope. The drain and shower nozzle were normal but when you were through you could simply fold in the doors almost flat and essentially double the size of the bathroom. You use a squeegee to get any excess water from the floor (the drain/shower/bathroom is all one flat floor) but it works amazingly well and I cannot believe I have not seen the design before, especially in small lofts/apt’s in America, I’m thinking especially in NYC.

SO, I would take a shower and then put on the kettle and sit on the small porch, as the sky would tinge pinkish and the 5 gajillion birds would begin to awaken. Nescafe, a few pieces of fruit…. I would pack my backpack with a huge bottle of frozen water, peanut butter crackers (essential and golden I could have sold those suckers to people who were not as prepared), sunblock spf 560, bug spray etc. Christina would go through the rather harrowing process of waking up Finnigan, her six year old son- a real trooper on the dig but somewhat, shall we say, less than happy to wake up at 5am. From 4:30-5:20 I would watch the last few innings of whatever baseball game happened to be playing on ESPN International. How psyched was I to watch the Sox/Yankees games?! It’s a little disconcerting to watch the games, knowing their live and be drinking coffee in the wee hours, meaning I felt like I should have a beer in one hand and a hot pretzel in the other like normal, but eh- at least I got to watch them.



The bus was there promptly at 5:30 am and after we loaded on the bins of breakfast provided by the kibbutz, we made our way down Route 90 and onwards down Route 87, which frames the Sea of Galilee, passing Capernaum, the Mount of Beatitudes. A few moments later we pull into the site of Bethsaida. Home. The Pope visited here, many, many pilgrims come during the day and film us and thank us. It’s a little surreal. I still don’t know how to imbed stuff behind cuts because I am lame like that, so I won’t go into it in crazy detail until I do so I won’t bore those of you who have no interest (and clog up your screens) but suffice to say, the site is amazing. I feel so fully invested in the discovery of the city, it crawls under my skin and hangs out, waiting for me to revisit. I just want to know, to find, to unearth and discover… the city lies waiting. So much left to dig. It’s like a stupid Librarian Turned Archaeologist afterschool special only without Noah Wyle and ridiculous hijinks*.




So do you want to know what happens on a typical day on a dig? If so read on…

You disembark the bus. You dash madly for the toolsheds and grab anything you can find. Digs are notoriously under funded so the basic tools for doing the job right are ridiculously scarce. You grab gross, cracked, filthy kneepads and thank the Knee Gods because you got some; you covet buckets like they were tickets to a David Bowie concert, you grab pickaxes and shovels, handpicks and brushes. Scavengers… that’s what you become first thing in the morning. You load up your arms with whatever you can carry and scurry to your area, triumphant or (more often) not. Then it’s down to business. Glamour. Fame. Indiana Jones style. Um… no. You spend your hours picking and brushing and filling endless (and I mean ENDLESS) buckets of dirt that then get hauled up the sifters, sifted in the 98 degree blazing sun, dump and repeat. Some things you find down in the sites, most are found during sifting. I’ll go into a few more particulars later (when I learn to imbed, help>! Can someone answer my call? I have never learned to do this properly) but there comes from sifting: agonizing backaches, numerous bruised foreheads and egos (me) and pottery; lots and lots and lots of pottery. Sherds galore. Mounds of pottery. Some of which is cool and most of which Rami takes one look at and chucks to the side. Most of the discarded pottery becomes the floor on which we eat breakfast at the site.

Oh, Breakfast! I forgot to mention this…
Breakfast is at 9am. This is about 3 hours after you have been digging, hence my-could-have-sold-for-50-shekels-peanut-butter-crackers. It is set up under simple tarps near the pottery washing station. Generally it consisted of two categories:
ALWAYS: tomatoes and cucumbers, hard boiled eggs, cereal and weird kinda thick fresh unpasteurized milk from the kibbutz cows, unflavored Greek yogurt (in which you dumped a variety of condiments [I was known to throw in coffee to give it flavor]) bread.
REVOLVING: fruit (usually fresh watermelon or cantaloupe), mystery meat slices (generally made from whatever was leftover from a variety of dished served at dinner), cheese (no meat and cheese on the same day, keeping Kosher y’all!), Nutella (WOO!!!) and a few times; jam. The kibbutz fed us very well, considering we were 50-72 starving fiends who were completely blinded by hunger when it came time to eat. I don’t think I have ever, EVER, craved hard-boiled eggs as much as I did there. In fact, I cannot remember the last time I ate one at home but at Bethsaida, I was known to sometimes creep down to the breakfast shed (also the office, also the storage of special finds) and have an egg or so in somewhat secret. I sorta have access and special privilege since I am a returning digger, higher on the gravy train.
The of course Rami makes his one kettle of Turkish coffee steeped with savory cardamom and we descend upon it like locusts, those of us coffee starved and oblivious to the fact that it is 98 degrees out.



The Sifters look vaguely menacing. Someone eventually tied red and white ribbons on the sides to stop us crazed, dehydrated, exhausted, stupid sifters from whacking their heads aginst them seventy times a day- it didn't really help)

You then trudge back to the work areas, sated and somewhat content. People say the productivity drops about 50% after breakfast but I would wager it’s more like 75%. As the sun rises higher in the sky and your full belly begins to get in the way of picking and digging and sifting. You begin to wane. Your thoughts are consumed with the Coming of the Popsicles, scheduled at 11am. You begin to hallucinate the Popsicle Messenger running up the lane. Someone (usually Christina though I went once to indulge in a little AC) drives down to Benny’s, a small Arabic restaurant and picks up 50-60 popsicles and then hauls ass back to the site before they melt. They then have to run, scamper, climb, slip and fall to all of the sites as weary, hot and crazed diggers yell out “Popsicles, Over here, Now, Me, I’m DYING”. You can only imagine in your mind all of the inward insults they hurl your way and it really is one of the most stressful jobs of the dig.



After popsicles, people are toast. They dig half-heartedly, trowels barely make it into the buckets, people stop to listen to the Israeli fighters zooming overhead, look at the view of the Galilee. Anything but buckets and finds. At 12:22 pm promptly, the tarps are lowered and the Finds are brought to the pottery washing area and the filthy, bedraggled and dazed diggers make their way to the bus where David, the horrified TourBus operator tries to blow the filth off of them before they board.

Back to the kibbutz for lunch and…

Flights overseas don’t bother me… flights wedged, cramped and annoyed next to two men Obama-bashing loudly next to me for hours overseas, do. Also non-vegetarian putty-like pasta slathered in salted red sauce. Also, my Happy Sack (slippers, sweater, toothbrush, toothpaste, lotion and headband)- banished to the very deep recesses of the overhead bin, not to be found until landing. I thought I was brilliant to pack it until it was buried during the hustle of boarding.

Meeting Christina and her son Finn in Atlanta was pretty awesome though; reunited friends. That and seeing a few trickles of would-be Bethsaida bound folks on board. Landing in Tel-Aviv was typically a little nutty; the passport control officer thought I said I was coming to Israel on a Date, not a Dig, and was appropriately bewildered. We then chuckled as to who would merit such a journey, she stamped my passport and I was off to meet the group. Some poor souls headed to Bethsaida had already spent over eight hours in the airport. I paid 16 shekels for a crappy diet coke, my last soda of the trip.

We boarded and Finn (who is six) insisted on sitting in the back of the enormous tour bus so immediately we looked antisocial. He, of course, conked out ¾ of the way through the 2+ hour drive to the kibbutz while we attempted to keep him awake by saying things like “Look, Israeli cows, Look Checkpoints and snaking lines of traffic we get to sail through because we are on a tourbus, Look Kosher McDonald’s!”
Arrival at Kibbutz Ginosar was worth it. 85 degrees, slight breeze, buffet dinner. I had curried potatoes, beet coleslaw, hummus with homemade crusty bread, mound sof green and black olives, a dill cucumber salad, fresh tomatoes, thick Arabic coffee.

After dinner Christina and I checked into our triple room at the Inn and wandered down to the nighttime view of the Sea of Galilee. Grace, beauty, calm rippling black waters, the shimmer of Tiberias on the opposite side… and the bugs. My WinterWuss skin was not prepared for mosquitos so we hoofed it back to the hotel bar for a couple of tall goldstars. We met Gerry from Kansas City, a fellow digger, and introduced him to the Sam Adams of Israel, chatted for an hour or so and then ambled back to the room where we proceeded to watch a Made for Television movie on Ted Bundy and Anne Rule showing on the hallmark channel, one of the few channels we got.

An early breakfast (challah French toast, fresh melon, olives and feta and coffee strong enough that I thought the spoon would stand) and people converged to board the bus to Bethsaida, about a fifteen minute drive from the Kibbutz. Rami (Arav, P.h.d.- Archaeologist in charge of the dig) introduced the site to those unfamiliar with it and went over basic protocol (no flipflops, drink lots of water, don’t walk through the landmine field adjacent to the site.) It was a marathon of sorts- I have never seen him talk that long. Everyone introduced themselves and then immediately forgot everyone’s names, I pitched off the rock I had wedged myself on earning Gash #1. I wandered down to the road to the ancient city, the area in which I toiled endlessly two years ago. Archaeological dig sites are a contrary force. So much left to do, yet so much changes. They had widened the road by another five feet in the two years since I had seen it. Right as we were finishing up the last time I was there, Rami was musing that the road may be wider so in a heat fueled last-day frenzy we dug an 8”x 8” by 9” scope and found paving stones at the bottom, proving Rami’s assertation that Bethsaida was, in fact, a city of considerable importance, having a road nearly twice as wide as the average size for the time.

They had also dug up the Syrian bunker where I used to hide my tools and had excavated an entire paved plaza up near the city gates, a space presumably used as a marketplace. Cranes and moved the bunker and the winter restoration crew had restored huge expanses of the outer and inner city walls.

Usually the first day comes with the decidedly unglamorous job of pulling mounds of weeds, clearing the sites to be opened but Rami talked so long we got to mostly wander and leave. Early day back to the kibbutz, which was probably a good thing for most who hadn’t adjusted to the time change. I was feeling pretty proud of myself- all Time Change Proof. Usually I merely tell myself over and over that it is the time it is when I arrive somewhere and I am able to trick myself into immediately adjusting. This lends a small swagger to my step when others were dragging. The trip home toppled me from this ridiculous throne of smugness as I spent over four days in a sleep deprived wonky state when I returned home and stupidly went right back to work.

Christina and I found our way back to the small market, tucked way back in the depths of the kibbutz, stocked up on Nescafe, treats and beer and had an impromptu gathering in front of our room for the few people we had met so far. Gerry and his mother, a powerhouse named Wilda, Gloria. We were reunited with Celso, a retired Brazilian banker living in Houston who so fell in love with digging that he has now gone on five digs and would be following this trip by immediately working on one at Mount Zion in Jerusalem.




It’s impossible to accurately describe the peacefulness of Kibbutz Ginosar; not just around the hotel that is housed on the grounds, but also walking around the community itself. Tucked on the Sea of Galilee, this place is tranquil but pulses with real work, unexpected art and palpable contentment. There is a large (expensive) hotel in one area, the smaller (and vastly cheaper) set of inn rooms (where we were housed) and the actual Kibbutz homes and farms. Ginosar also houses the Yigal Allon Museum, home to the so-called Jesus Boat. The museum also contains the primary labs and workrooms holding most the finds from Bethsaida that have not been passed on to the Israeli Antiquities Authority or that are ‘on tour’ overseas. It would have been called home had I gotten to do the pottery reconstruction work I was hoping to do last year, until the grant fell through.

Often, when I return from a trip, I get so wrapped up in the mundane and so dismally struck with the everyday, it is almost impossible to write about what I saw, what I did, what I enjoyed during a perfectly awesome overseas adventure.

This is one of those times.

I have been trying to tell people about it, but I get kind of wistfully nostalgic, like I should be eight months or a year from now. Unfortunately for me, that feeling set in the minute I disembarked in Atlanta, and quite possibly the minute I went through passport control in Tel Aviv. Such a finality... ugh.

Spending two weeks schlepping buckets of dirt and rocks, moving endless wheelbarrows full of rocks, sifting hundreds of batches of 1st century rubble... you would think I would have been done with it. Over it. Dreaming of iced coffees and Steve Colbert reruns. Nope. I met, to be horribly cliche, some of the the most amazing people; spent so much time with old friends, relaxed and huffed it, hiked and swam, drank and ate and watched some sunsets over the Sea of Galilee, cicadas twerping and the heat waning softly.

I also found a first century Roman Provincial coin that dated the floor my co-digger and I spent eight days unearthing. It looked like a slim, filthy disc of nothing. Just so happened that a coin specialist from the Israeli Antiquities Authority was at the dig that day and tentatively dated it for me.

Saw Akko, Zefat, Hazor, Masada, Tiberias... flayed my poor skin alive in the Dead Sea. Ate and ate and ate and ate... the kibbutz food seemed cleansing, detoxing. Didn't have a shred of meat, there was so much else to eat. Moonlight swims in the Galilee, everyone rocketing off of the dock- new friends, found old ones.

More later...