I've been somewhat remiss, not giving credit to major contributors to the excavation. We are indebted to Hanan Shafir, who has ably photographed the excavation for a number of years. The pictures on this web site or either mine or supplied by our good friend Barney, but they are not of the quality that Rami needs for his reports & publications; these are supplied by Hanan. We are also indebted to geophysist Paul Bauman who in 1995 took aerial pictures of Bethsaida, helped by myself & Judith. Paul has also, over the years, conducted GPS as well as other technical surveys of the site. See one of his pictures that I used on the week 4 page.
The mollusk pendant found in A west tells
an interesting story. The inside meat was used to make the "imperial
purple" that was
originally
only allowed to be wore by the Roman royalty. It afterwards spread to
the the rich citizens and the purple dye remained quite expensive. See
this informative article about the mollusk and the use of the dye -
http://www.mmdtkw.org/VPurple.html.
An interesting piece of Phoenician glass
was also found in A west. The colors were obtained, commonly, at
any rate, from metallic oxides. The ordinary blue employed is cobalt,
though it is suspected that there was an occasional use of
copper.
Copper certainly furnished the greens, while manganese gave the brown,
which shades off into purple and into black. The beautiful milky white
which forms the ground tint is believed to have been derived from the
oxide of tin, or else from phosphate of chalk. It is said that the
coloring matter of the patterns does not extend through the entire
thickness of the glass, but lies only on the outer surface, being a
later addition to the
vessels
as first made.
Week 6 was an exciting week for Barney's crew. The
iron age
krater
(typically a
mixing vessel) t
hat Barney reconstructed
over the last 2 years was brought back to the site, to the storage room
where it was found in 1999, crushed & broken when the upper floor
crashed down on it when the city was razed in 732 bce. What an
exciting event to see the vessel returned to the spot that it sat,
complete, almost
3 millennia ago !! Great work Barney !!
In addition, Barney's crew found many
pieces of iron age pottery vessels during the excavation of
the storage room
during week 5. The pieces were brought to the kibbutz & a
reconstruction lab was set up in the "dormitory" where Ben & Josh
spent
much of their free time putting the vessels back together.
The beautiful large iron age vessel is only missing a few small pieces &
is being stored in the Bethsaida offices in the Yigal Allon museum.
Super work guys !!
This, the end of the 6th week of the excavation marks the completion of the 2009 season. Many thanks to the very professional staff of Rami, Kate, Elizabeth, Toni, Hanan, Carl, Charlene & Aaron (I hope that I'm not forgetting anyone). All the volunteers, first timers & returning veterans, deserve the highest praise for the quantity & quality of work that they performed. Have a good year & we hope to see you back here next season.
Link to all the pictures I took this season - CLICK HERE
Note : Interesting archaeology blog - http://archaeologydigs.blogspot.com/
Human interest - http://www.communitycorrespondent.com/kptm/, search for Judith Schwartz