The Foreign Service Journal, February 2010

F O C U S O N L I F E & W O R K A F T E R T H E F S A P ASSION FOR A RCHAEOLOGY 32 F O R E I G N S E R V I C E J O U R N A L / F E B R U A R Y 2 0 1 0 olunteers new to the archaeology site at Hippos/Sussita in Israel get their wakeup call at 4 a.m. on the first day of the dig season. Roused from their cots in the spare youth hostel quarters at Kibbutz Ein Gev on the Sea of Galilee, they dress quickly, wander sleepily out to the parking lot, and by 4:45 a.m. are on their way by bus up nearby Sussita Hill, to the side of the semi-paved farm road where the rocky half-mile path to the top of the hill begins. Before long, the 20 or so foreign volunteers will clam- ber up through a narrow rocky defile near the ruins of the ancient city gate with Haifa University professors and students and other teams from Poland and an American university. The path is lit by bright moonlight and leads on between rows of barbed wire hung with minefield warnings — a reminder that the site is on a hill that was just on the Israeli side of the ceasefire line between Is- raeli and Syrian forces before 1967. After assembling where a Roman forum once stood, the volunteers are divided into work teams led by Israeli students under the direction of the two veteran archae- ologists in charge, Dr. Arthur Segal, the dig director, and his deputy, Dr. Michael Eisenberg, from Haifa Univer- sity’s Zinman Institute of Archaeology. For the next four weeks, we labor at the site while learning the art and sci- ence of archaeology. The layers of the site at Hippos/Sussita span one thou- sand years of human history, from the time of the Seleu- cid Empire in the third century BCE, not long after Alexander the Great’s conquest of the region, to 749 when an earthquake buried the city, which was never again inhabited. Hippos (the Greek name for the city — Sussita is the Hebrew name) was one of the cities of the Decapolis, the 10 Greek-speaking cities to the north and west of Judea mentioned in the Bible. Haifa University and its Zinman Institute have sponsored the dig for the past nine years. There is an annual summer work season, with the re- sults processed and published over the remainder of the year until the new Hippos/Sussita season starts. The uni- versity issues a request for foreign volunteers every year in a notice in the Biblical Archaeology Review and at www.findadig.com . Other digs in the region do the same, and volunteers can choose a site that meets their interests R ETIREES INTERESTED IN “ STONES AND BONES ” WILL FIND PLENTY OF OPPORTUNITIES TO GO ON DIGS IN FOREIGN COUNTRIES . B Y K ENNETH S TAMMERMAN V Kenneth Stammerman was an economic-cone FSO from 1966 until 1994, when he retired as a Senior Foreign Serv- ice officer. He served in Tel Aviv (twice), Manila, Paris, Kuwait, Dhahran and Washington, D.C. When not dig- ging at archaeological sites in Israel, he teaches part-time at Indiana University Southeast and lectures on foreign af- fairs topics in Louisville, Ky.