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Monday, July 17, 2006
Archaeological Tourism
From the New York Times:
Amateur Archaeologists Get the Dirt on the Past
We were at Tel Maresha, in the 1,250-acre Beit Guvrin National Park, which lies in the Judean plain an hour southwest of Jerusalem. Everyone in the group had signed on to become an archaeological excavator in the three-hour Dig for a Day program, run by Archeological Seminars (972-2-586-2011; www.archesem.com; $25; $20 for ages 5 to 14), a company started 25 years ago by Bernie and Fran Alpert, archaeologists and Chicago natives.
There are approximately 5,000 caves around Tel Maresha — less than 10 percent of which have been excavated — and remains from the Hellenistic period, roughly 2,200 years ago. About 1,300 feet above sea level, the ground here is chalky and soft, and early on, people began to dig caves, which they used as quarries, burial grounds, storerooms for animals, workshops and spaces for raising doves and pigeons. Many of these caves are linked by an intricate underground network of passageways.
There are three phases of an Archeological Seminars dig. Typically, a guide will first take a group of as many as 20 people down into a cave, where they will participate in an excavation. With shovel in hand, they spend the next 45 minutes digging through the dirt (remember to wear clothes that you don’t mind getting dirty), searching for pottery shards, bones, glass and the occasional piece of metal, often coins.
Read the rest of the story here.
One interesting quote from the story that I found amusing:
"While most archaeological excavations require hundreds of thousands of dollars, Mr. Alpert said, this one is unusual because it is self-supporting."
Most digs cost hundreds of thousands of dollars?
Posted by Will at July 17, 2006 10:13 PM in Anthropology