On Friday a bullet casing was found on Tel Akko. This is not the first bullet to be found, and our expert, Dr Nick Pumphrey of Baker University says that he thinks it’s a British bullet; possibly a 303 from a Lee Enfield rifle. When the bullet has been cleaned this will become clearer. Jewish forces were trained by the British, and some had weapons that they had acquired in various ways, from the Mandate soldiers.
When you think of an archaeologist, what do you think of? A brawny man with a whip? A scrawny professor type? Basically people who are obsessed with the past and are very removed from reality? Not quite. Here at Tel Akko, we are leaping into the future with some cool tech that will not only benefit our search to understand the past, but will also lead to other applications in fields completely unrelated to archaeology. For the past few weeks I’ve been working on 3D photogrammetry. Every morning, before sunrise, a few of us go out to the tell to take pictures. Each day, we will be assigned a square which we then take pictures of from all angles.
We then take the pictures and put them into a program called AgiSoft. In this program, we take all of the photos and cover up all of the elements that we don’t want in the model, like shades, poles, or rope lines. The program then takes all of the photos and aligns the common features that it can then make a three dimensional model of.
Honestly, the computer does most of the hard work, but there is a little human effort that goes into making 50-some photos become a 3D representation of one of our squares. Most of my personal struggle comes from orienting the model. You would not believe how often I orient a model completely upside down and think it is right side up!
While the struggle can be somewhat frustrating, learning this program has been a lot of fun and given me a lot of opportunities that normally would not have happened. Seeing the sun rise up over the Mediterranean is one of the most beautiful sights I have ever seen. I may have to wake up a littler earlier and my day might be a little longer, but the mornings are peaceful and the results of all of our efforts are amazing. Like many things, it takes a village, and making these 3D models is no exception. It takes a lot of effort from our tiny team, and I really am trying.
By June Weber…Welcome to MM2 better known as the Garea. A previously unexcavated square, we started to dig total archaeology style this 2016 season. We have recently dug ourselves out of “the Danger Zone” which was the disturbed territory and into the Early Hellenistic Period which is stratum A-3. Out of our exciting finds we have found a scarab beetle from Iron II period and our little shell floor which we like to call “Shelly Ann.”
In this non-Dothan square, which to some extent has not been dug with backhoes, we are hoping to reach a Persian strata by the end of this season. Under the guidance of our fearless leader we have been moving at a steady pace, despite the constant dirt sifting that has been undertaken, which of course is a necessary part of an archaeologists repertoire. I have recently betrayed the motherland by venturing into the surveyor’s territory, which I am sure someone else will blog about (no promises though.) However, the prodigal daughter has returned to her homeland, and thus has continued in the excavation of the best square, with the best Mediterranean breeze of course. We will continue our excavation and venture into the unknown underneath us, hoping to one day publish Dothan’s previous work along with the work done by Killebrew and Artzy.
My expectations for this dig, and Akko in general for that matter, were completely wrong. I thought that archeology in Tel Akko would mirror my past archeological experience at the San Martino Archeological Field School in Torano di Borgorose, Italy. I expected hours of troweling, sweeping and finding artifacts alongside close companions in a square that I would know like the back of my hand. Last summer, I spent every day in the same square, learning all of the unique features the architecture had to offer and intimately understanding the strata and history of my square. I got attached to that square—and I looked forward to having a square to call home again, but this time in Akko, unfortunately for me, I didn’t find a home for the first week and a half.
The first few days on the Tel were hectic to say the least. Whether we were moving sandbags or cleaning the Tel, it felt chaotic and almost foreign. Rather than a square, I was assigned to an area in which I floated between the squares, only changing course when my area supervisor told me to go somewhere else. As people started to excavate in squares that would become their own, I was still meandering around the Tel, doing odd jobs to seemingly pass the time. I found myself feeling jealous of my friends who were learning the intricate details about their respective squares; while I barely (and literally) touched the surface of the squares that I worked in. Even if I did feel connected to a square, like when I found a worked bone in NN20, it was fleeting since I would never return the following day. In reality, everything I was doing was important or at least a necessary step in collecting the data that allows us to understand what life was like thousands of years ago.
Even though I did not enjoy my time as a nomad on the Tel, there are definitely a few positive things that came along with the job (or lack there of). First off, I occasionally was filled in with brief histories of different squares. These short descriptions gave me a semi-solid background of the Tel, but even now my understanding of the Tel is far from complete. Another positive aspect of the floater life is having the ability to sample different activities, like learning how to trim a bulk or participating in survey. I’ve done survey for the past two days, and it is incredibly rewarding but exhausting (you essentially dig an average of six 40 by 40 by 40 cm holes throughout the course of the day under the hot Israeli sun). Now I know this last one is quite cheesy, but I met a lot of different people and made some great friends and memories through my various squareless adventures on the Tel.
Now I have found what I would call a “half-home” in the sense that I dig in PP19 that I eventually joined later on. However, I’m not expected to go there every day since I also participate in survey and conservation. I don’t get that exciting yet familiar feeling when I’m in the square about to start excavating, but I still enjoy it nonetheless. I love getting updates from my fellow square-mates at the end of the day, but I don’t feel the same square attachment as I did with my square on my dig last year.
It is okay that things are different here and I’m so fortunate that I have the opportunity to experience another archaeological dig. Overall, I cannot recommend the floater lifestyle but I can’t NOT recommend it either. All digs are different, so you will never know what you like until you get out there and try it. 10/10 would recommend going on an archaeology dig.
by Natasha Nagle
Throughout much of our existence, humans have stood in great awe of the natural processes through which their Earth was objected. The raw power available to these processes have inspired countless legends, myths, and tales behind some of the most influential schools of thought and religion the world over. Indeed, there is little more which has affected the course of human’s long history as violently, as unwaveringly, and with as much of an impact as the steadily altering progress of the climate and environment of the places in which we have settled. As a direct result, humans are as much a product of the landscape of our environment as we are of our varied cultural environments and the rich heritages from which they grew.
Within our history, we serve to record aspects of the history of the Earth itself, particularly through noting the direct effect of events such as earthquakes, tsunamis, and coastal movement upon the human populations who lived in the vicinity of their outreaching effects. This is done through the use of personal journals, administrative memos on destruction of property and subsequent rebuilding, records in the very stones of buildings and their maintenance, and even through interaction with our longstanding traditions and stories of peoples long past, all of which correlate to the only true personal connections we may have with them. Through the analysis of these methods, in addition to the utilization of the increasing technologies available to modern archaeology, we are able to learn about, and understand, how the more violent aspects of the Earth’s surface have affected our ancestors and their own personal views of the world in which they lived. However, there are oft many more geological processes and outstanding geological aspects which affect the people living in these areas long before and after the thought of immediate and swift danger passes through their concern.
Through recognizing these larger events, we are able to also focus upon the aspects of the geology and topography which affected humans in a slightly more subtle way, though arguably more so in the long run. An interesting aspect of this subtle influence resides in the characteristics of the bedrock upon which the ancients chose to build their cities, harbors, and contact areas. At Tel Akko, the bedrock is a type of sandstone, created through the fossilization of sand dunes, called kurkar. Kurkar has a medium to coarse grain size and is distinctive in its gritty texture and coral pink and white color, due to its composition of quartz and felspar crystals. Occasionally, the color can appear a slightly darker shade of pinkish red, on account of the presence of oxidized iron minerals included within the stone’s matrix.
These deposits run relatively parallel to the present day coastline, and, due to their deposition in the sandy areas of relatively shallow waters, serve to indicate the past positioning of the coastline in relation to the rest of the landmass. There are five periods of sand accumulation which are connected with the formation of the kurkar deposits along the coastline of Israel, approximately 140, 130, 90, 60, and 50 thousand years ago, thereby connected to the Late Pleistocene epoch of the Cenozoic. Darker colored clays which underly some of the sands were originally deposited around 9,000 years ago, and indicate the presence of coastal marshes. An additional interesting note is that the kurkar ridges along the Northern Israeli coast also contain fossil remnants of the Tethys sea, the precursor to the Mediterranean and formed during the breakup of Laurentia and Gondwana, such as a stony coral known as Cladocora Sp.
Throughout the ages, the kurkar bedrock has been of importance to the people of Akko for a number of reasons. Of course, the elevated portions of the bedrock enables the building of houses, industrial centers, fortifications, and outposts, among many other structures, all of which are able to be observed on Tel Akko itself. In addition, pieces of the kurkar, recognized as field stones, are also able to be used as building materials for walls in buildings or other structures. Yet another use of the kurkar is after having been crushed, it was used to level what would become a portion of a floor, in order that the plaster or floor makeup placed overtop would have increased stability and be more conducive to its incorporation into a home or public building.
Another use of the analysis and mapping of the kurkar ridges themselves is to determine where the edges of past coastlines lay. Throughout much of history, Akko existed as an important harbor site as it is one of the few easily and safely accessible harbors across the Levant’s Mediterranean coast. The existence of this harbor is validated not only through the identification of artifacts connected to the harbor and its extensive trade network, but also through the presence of these kurkar ridges and their locations, which indicate previous coastal ranges. Interestingly, the harbor itself went out of use during and after the Hellenistic period, on account of the silting up of the initial harbor, and which necessitated the movement of the harbor and the city of Akko to the current location of the old city to the west, though portions of the old coast are able to be viewed in correlation to these ridges.
Through analyzing the history of the stone itself, along with the uses which people have found for them, we are able to better understand how the geology of an area can intimately affect people, their movement and trade, and their center of life far and wide as well as closer to home. In this way, our history not just records our own past, but also helps us to better record and understand the past of our Earth and how we may better understand it while moving towards the future. Our Earth’s geology has affected each and every aspect of human history and will continue to do so far into the future.