Awakenings: Resurrecting Dormant Digs

By Ken Gewertz

Gazette Staff

Some ancient cities are buried twice.

The first burial takes place over centuries, as buildings are razed by war or earthquake, as debris accumulates and sands shift, transforming a once bustling town into an innocuous mound of earth.

The second burial takes place after archaeologists discover the mound or "tel," and begin their excavations -- uncovering the crumbling mudbrick foundations, the stone carvings, the tarnished coins and jewelry, the incised clay tablets, the painted pottery shards -- and then, as a result of delay, or illness, or untimely death, fail to publish their results.

A surprising number of archaeological excavations end up as "dormant digs," collections of neglected artifacts and yellowing notebooks gathering dust on warehouse shelves. Data that might have changed the way historians think about the past never enter the realm of scholarly debate, and years of back-breaking labor and keen deduction come to nothing.

"It's a plague that afflicts archaeology," said Lawrence Stager, the Dorot Professor of the Archaeology of Israel. "A great many archaeologists prefer digging to publishing. Many of them also overestimate their longevity and underestimate the amount of time required to write up their findings."

Stager estimates that for every month of digging, archaeologists must expect to spend a year of processing and research before the basic data can be properly presented. Many archaeologists, especially in the past, have ignored this formula. As a result, many potentially valuable digs have been buried a second time.

Now a program exists that promises to give these twice-buried sites a second chance to bring their findings to scholarly attention. The Shelby White-Leon Levy Program for Archaeological Publications, based at Harvard, provides grants to support research on significant archaeological fieldwork in the Aegean or Eastern Mediterranean that has been terminated in the past and is still unpublished. Researchers may apply for up to three years of support, but their work must result in a publishable final report.

Leon Levy and his wife Shelby White are philanthropists who have for many years funded the archaeological excavation at Ashkelon, Israel, which Stager directs. They founded this new program in response to complaints by archaeologists about dormant digs and the waste of valuable data they represent.

"This program has received the greatest praise of any I've heard about in archaeology. No one doubts the significance of what Leon Levy and Shelby White are doing," Stager said.

The program began in 1996, and already 13 projects are under way, based on digs in Israel, Jordan, Crete, and Cyprus. The director is Philip King, who teaches archaeology at Boston College and is a research associate of Harvard's Semitic Museum, which serves as the program's administrative center.

"This program is unique," King said. "I think it will become even more important as government funding for archaeology continues to decline. It really does fill a major vacuum."

Many of the first 13 grants have gone to young scholars --recent Ph.D.'s and Ph.D. candidates -- and Stager, who sits on the board that selects grant recipients, said that he would like to continue this trend.

One such young scholar is Aaron Brody, who earned his Ph.D. degree from Harvard in 1996 and is now a research associate at the Centre for Maritime Studies at Haifa University in Israel.

Brody is working on Bronze and Iron Age material from Tel Akko, an ancient coastal site near the modern Israeli city of the same name, about 12 miles south of the Lebanese border. Israeli archaeologist Moshe Dotan began excavating the site in 1973 but gave up in 1983.

Akko is mentioned once in the Hebrew Bible and several times in Egyptian texts and is believed to have been inhabited by a branch of the "Sea People," invaders from the west who descended upon the eastern Mediterranean in the 12th century B.C.

Another group of these sea-borne invaders were the Philistines, who came originally from Greece and are known in the Bible as enemies of Samson, Saul, and David. Recent archaeological discoveries at Philistine sites such as Ashkelon have shed light on the nature of these people and their relations with Israel and other ancient peoples.

The Sea People who inhabited Akko were the Shardanu, who probably, like the Philistines, came from the Aegean and migrated by sea to the island of Sardinia, which takes its name from these early settlers. Much less is known about them than about the Philistines, and Brody hopes that data from Akko will not only enlarge our knowledge of the Shardanu, but also shed light on the large-scale migrations that characterized life in the Mediterranean world during this era.

"I'm very excited about this project," Brody said. "It's believed that the Sea People conquered cities all up and down the coast, but the sites to the north haven't been extensively explored."

Brody said that the material from the dig, which has been stored at the University of Haifa for more than 10 years, presented something of "a data-management nightmare at first," requiring countless hours of work to sort through the thousands of artifacts, notes, maps, and drawings.

"There are built-in frustrations," he said. "I can't work in as refined a manner as I could if I had control over taking the material out of the ground. Also, the methodology has changed a great deal since this excavation began, so I'm coming at it from a different perspective."

But on the whole, Brody is grateful for the opportunity to work with primary materials, particularly since the Akko site relates to his Ph.D. dissertation, which focused on religious beliefs of the seagoing Phoenicians and Canaanites.

"This is important material and it deserves to be published," he said. "And when that publication appears, it may bring up further questions, which may stimulate new excavations."