Let the Digging Begin!
Today, Sunday, June 14th we officially inaugurated our 2009 excavations at Mt Zion. There was an air of excitement as our little band of six staff and 30 dedicated volunteers, gathered to clear the site of its winter foliage and wash. Our team this year is drawn from around the world with members from the United States, the UK, Russia, South America, and a half dozen other countries and regions. Our team threw themselves avidly into the first day’s work, even in the blazing heat of the middle of June. The site looks transformed in appearance even after one day–and we have four weeks to go! We truly are expecting great things this year, including descending down in to well preserved intact rooms and chambers from the 2nd Temple destruction of Jerusalem by the Romans in 70 CE.
We are the only academic dig in Jerusalem in the past 30 years, offering a field archaeology school with full academic and scientific methods and oversight. We are also committed to preserving, not destroying, all levels of habitation in Jerusalem, the spiritual capital of the Western world, whether Turkish, Crusader, Arab, Byzantine, Roman, Jewish, or Canaanite. Our site, situated on the slopes of Mt. Zion, the highest peak of the “seven hills” of Jerusalem, has the advantage of sloping down to the south east and thus preserving a chronological record of “Jerusalem through the Ages.”
I have mentioned in previous posts that it costs a minimum of $90,000 to run a dig for a season, and given our recession, and a freeze in state funding through UNC Charlotte, we have less than half of what we need. I have had several people write and ask–why is archaeology so expensive? I can tell you it is not the wages paid to our students–they get none, but actually pay to dig with us–plus all their expenses. It is not the salaries of the staff–there are none. Most archaeologists sacrifice their time and energy as a labor of love and commitment to the field. It sort of gets in one’s blood. The costs almost all have to do with the logistics of soil moving and disposal, especially in an urban area, vehicle rentals, supplies and materials, tools and equipment, storage and curation of artifacts, and scientific tests. Even $90,000 is a lean budget and does not include conservation and post-excavation costs as explained in this report.
For example, today we had a large earth moving front loader with a fleet of trucks lined up to remove one meter of modern garden fill around the parameters of our site. Five days works comes to $10,000, and that is just the beginning, as we will have multiple truckloads of soil removed over the next four weeks, as we carefully dig back through the the stratigraphic layers.
I hope readers of my Blog will consider joining our Web fund drive. I think the only way to fund archaeology during the recession is to take it to be people. We have raised nearly $10,000 with 91 contributers just in the past couple of weeks, but our drive seems to have stalled a bit since June 11th when I left to travel over here to Israel. Please join us and be a part of this historic and exciting endeavor by going directly to the Dig Mount Zion and “Pitching In” at any amount. You can also follow our progress there.
