The Foreign Service Journal, February 2010

34 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 across a tiled tunnel leading into the side of the hill, probably a ven- tilation or drainage shaft. Digging below and around it, we found hun- dreds of small Roman-era coins. We also uncovered fortifications that include one of the best Roman- engineered defensive structures in the region. This past summer, the group I was working with came across an unexpected find: an actual theater (odeon) long thought to be some- where on the site. Outside my imme- diate experience, the years of digging have also uncovered Hellenistic Greek buildings, a Roman forum and Byzan- tine churches. An International Flavor Who else volunteers for the teams? Over the past four years, international volunteers with Haifa University’s group have included Canadians, other Americans and Mexicans, as well as in- dividuals or teams frommost Western European countries, including Spain, the U.K., Germany, Italy, France, the Netherlands, Scandinavia and Bel- gium. There have also been volun- teers from Russia, Japan, Serbia and Turkey. Besides the volunteers, there have been separate teams of students and instructors from the University of Warsaw in Poland and Concordia Uni- versity in St. Paul, Minn., who work on other sections or functions in the Hip- pos/Sussita area. A typical Haifa Uni- versity team will mix Israeli students and foreign volunteers under the im- mediate direction of an Israeli graduate student or a newly minted Ph.D., with the supervising archaeologists hovering nearby and often joining in the labor. Languages from all over the world will be heard at a work site, prominent among them Hebrew and Arabic from Israeli students and Spanish, Russian, English and French from volunteers or new immigrants to Israel. Typically, a team will use English or Hebrew as the work- ing language, depending on its makeup. Housing for the volunteers is basic. We sleep three or four to a room in kibbutz youth hostel quar- ters, each with a refrigerator and air conditioning. There is a wait for the two showers per building and the bathrooms after returning from the dig each day. We eat in the communal dining hall with kibbutz members. A Typical Day After a rude awakening at 4 a.m., we dress quickly, shaking out steel- toed boots to remove any insects that have taken up residence overnight; pack bags with work gloves, first aid supplies and water from the refriger- ator; grab wide-brimmed hats; and head for the parking lot. As work begins onsite at sunrise with tools supplied by the university, we make sure a tarp is positioned over the work area — temperatures reach the mid-90s by the time we leave at noon, and there is no shade on the hill — and hear the work plan for the day. The sound of axes and hoes working away at earth and stone usually fol- lows, with a quick formation of bucket brigades when enough pails are filled at the bottoms of the neat rectangular square pits laid out by the senior ar- chaeologists. The deeper you go, the farther back in time you travel: that is the rule. Work stops temporarily when some- one finds a particularly interesting pot- tery shard or, less frequently, a coin or figurine—or when someone shouts “scorpion,” and everyone evacuates a trench until the critter is found and tossed away. A half- hour breakfast break comes at 8 a.m. after the arrival of an all-terrain vehicle with basic kibbutz food, which is eaten on the porch of one of the two abandoned Israel Defense Force buildings left from before 1967. Restrooms are non-existent; if the need arises, you walk far enough away F O C U S Languages from all over the world will be heard at a work site, prominent among them Hebrew and Arabic. Prof. Arthur Segal of Haifa University gives an impromptu seminar on classi- cal theater architecture to foreign vol- unteers and Israeli students at Hippos. Ken Stammerman stands atop a Roman fortification on the edge of Hippos’ de- fensive walls.