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The city of Mareshah is mentioned five times in the Bible and was a very important city in the pre-Christian era. In this period residents lived on the summit of the flat-topped hill. By the time of the Greek period, they lived on the side of the hill and in the Roman era they built a city on the plain. Our excavations this year were in the Greek period on the side of the hill, so most of the items we found were about 2,200 years old.
During this time residents cut blocks of stone out of the limestone layer beneath the ground. The cavities thus formed were used for preserving water in cisterns and for industrial work like olive presses, corn mills and dovecotes. In later periods people actually lived in the caves. There are more than 3,000 known caves and archaeologists will be occupied for a long time to come excavating them. For the last two years our Diggings group has been involved in these excavations. This year 17 tour members chose to stay for an extra week after the tour to work as volunteers on our dig. Of this group, only four of us were men. The ladies' ages ranged from mid-20s to 74 and they all did a marvellous job.
One puzzling feature of these caves is that most are almost filled to the brim with debris. Some of this debris is from human occupation and we found a large number of intact oil lamps, perfume jars, bowls and plates beside the usual accumulation of broken pottery. Some of the debris is from soil washed into the caves over the centuries, but mixed in with all this are many blocks of stone.
Israeli archaeologists are not sure how these stones got there. Obviously heavy rains could not have washed them in. Some suggest it was vandalism but that is not very plausible. My conclusion is that they were deliberately thrown there after the majority of residents vacated their houses and moved into the Roman city.
The plateau, known as the hills of Ephraim and Judah, is a very stony area. Top-soil is not very deep. Beneath that, the limestone is anything up to a kilometre in depth, so with a scarcity of wood, most houses were built out of limestone blocks. It cost nothing more than a lot of hard work to dig the blocks out and shape them. The result was a network of underground caves. There is also an abundance of loose stones strewn around the surface and these stones have ever been a bane to farmers. Unless the stones were removed, ploughing was almost impossible. In order to make ground available for planting crops farmers had to gather these stones and use them to make a wall, or toss them all into a heap in one place.
Reference to this practice is made in Isaiah. Speaking about Israel, God said, "My well-beloved has a vineyard on a very fruitful hill. He dug it up and cleared out its stones, and planted it with the choicest vine. He built a tower in its midst." (Is 5:1, 2) Stones that were gathered could have been used to build the tower that was occupied during the fruit-growing season to prevent thieves from stealing the grapes. Jesus also referred to this problem when he spoke about "the sower who went out to sow... Some fell on stony places" (Matthew 13:3,5).
My view is that this is what happened at Mareshah. When the houses fell into disuse, the farmers wanted to clear the ground for farming, so they dismantled the stones and deliberately threw them into the caves. In many cases the caves are so filled with stones and debris that there is barely room to crawl around between the debris and the ceilings of the caves.
This year the Israeli Antiquities Authority allocated us cave number 1, not very far from the hilltop on which Mareshah was built. Much work had already been done in this cave that actually consists of many caves branching out from the entrance. David Coltheart worked with half the group in one cave while I worked with the other half in another nearby cave. Between our two groups we made a lot of interesting discoveries. In fact we found more artefacts this year than any preceding year we have been working at various sites in Israel.
Actually, finding artefacts is not what archaeology is all about. We are digging up the past, recovering history, and broken pieces of pottery can tell us just as much as a golden vase, but of course it brings a lot of satisfaction and excitement for the volunteers when they find a beautiful object 2,200 years old.
The debris has to be scraped into plastic buckets, keeping a watchful eye out for man-made objects that go into separate buckets. When all the buckets are full they have to be transported to the surface where we sieve the contents for small items that may have escaped the diggers' attention. All these objects then have to be scrubbed with a nail brush to expose any writing or marks that may provide us with information.
The most effective way to get the buckets to the surface is to form a chain gang and hand them from one to another till the surface is reached. This is hard work but not as difficult as it may sound, first because we only two-thirds fill the buckets, and second, by keeping the buckets moving, the momentum from one to another relieves much of the weight. Anyway, both the ladies and the men worked marvellously and the buckets soon reached the surface.
Our veteran volunteer was Norma who at the age of 74 did a great job and cheered us with her happy disposition. She was rewarded by finding a lovely large bowl as well as many important pottery pieces. She also helped in uncovering a two-metre-long slab of stone that still has us mystified. It was standing on its edge almost leaning against the side of the cave. It was irregular in shape and when cleaned it had some markings on it which may have had some significance, but we are still at a loss to explain why so much hard work was put into cutting this stone smooth on both sides, but so irregular in shape. By the time we finished we could see the top of another such slab of stone beneath that one.
Dale was the volunteer who seemed to have the magic touch. Dale is a modest girl who seemed rather embarrassed by her finds but she seemed to strike it rich, including a shapely perfume jar and a small jug that would have been about the size of the "vessels" in which the five wise virgins brought some extra oil for their lamps (Matthew 25:4).
Ennio distinguished himself by digging himself into a hole. Normally we frown on anyone digging a hole. Excavation should be done a layer at a time all over the locus, but working in a cave is rather different, so when Ennio found a large strange object he kept on digging - and just about buried himself. And what did he find? Another hole! It seems that the cave we were in had another cave beneath it, but we had to leave that for someone else to explore. What he did find was a jar handle stamped with the name of the owner in clear, legible Greek letters.
And then there was the little pottery man used to adorn some treasured jug, and the neat Greek inscription incised with raised letter into a piece of pottery. As it was partially broken it could not be read but it was all very interesting.
David Coltheart's group worked in the adjacent cave. Unlike ours, their cave had a man-made series of step curving down one side. As they worked their way down, they were mystified by huge lumps of clay that appeared to have been dumped at the bottom. One theory is that this cave may have been the storeroom for a pottery nearby and that the clay was kept here until needed. It was Katherine's job to expose this huge pile of clay before it was photographed in situ before being demolished. Next to the pile of clay, she also found a perfectly preserved clay perfume bottle and other pottery items.
At first it appeared that the steps had reached the bottom of the cave, but as Godfrey dug around the base of the bottom step, he found at least two more steps leading further down. Around those steps he found an array of several complete dishes and bowls, and the broken remains of others, some of which will be restored from the pieces.
Vicki was delighted to retrieve a virtually intact plate in her portion of the cave. Known as a "fish plate" to archaeologists, the wide, open bowl was typical of this area in the Hellenistic age. Highlights of a dig always include the discovery of oil lamps. Perhaps even more so than household pottery, a lamp is a valuable dating clue. Because lamps were often decorated with designs or figures, sometimes quite elaborately, a lot of information about the origin of the lamp can be deduced from it. David Coltheart found one such lamp. In fact, this year's dig found parts of several lamps as well as three that were complete. One lamp was found, not in the cave but by Jennifer who was on the surface doing the sieving!
The dig was not all work! One afternoon was spent looking around some of the other caves at Mareshah, many of which were used as burial tombs. Another afternoon we piled into the two minibuses we hired for the week and travelled to the Mediterranean sea coast to explore the ruins of ancient Ashkelon with its Middle Bronze Age gate and the dog cemetery. Another site we visited was nearby Lachish, made famous by the Assyrian siege depicted so graphically on the Lachish Reliefs that are now in the British Museum. And yet another afternoon, some of the group explored the colourful stalactites and stalagmites in the Soreq Cave.
We are thankful to our volunteers for making the 2006 dig yet another successful project. If you would like to join us next year, please write to us at Diggings, PO Box 127, Toronto NSW 2283 or email editor@diggings.com.au
DKD
