WHEN I WAS SEVEN YEARS OLD, MY MOTHER GAVE ME A book called The Walls of Windy Troy. It was about Heinrich Schliemann and his search for the ruins of ancient Troy, written just for children. After reading it, I announced that I was going to be an archaeologist. Later, when I was in junior high and high school, I read John Lloyd Stephens’s Incidents of Travel in Yucatán and C. W. Ceram’s Gods, Graves, and Scholars, which cemented my desire—the stories of finding lost cities in the jungle and uncovering ancient civilizations were mesmerizing. In college, I declared my major in archaeology just as soon as I could and, when I graduated, my mother again gave me the book about Schliemann that had started it all fourteen years earlier. I still have it in my office at George Washington University today.
I’m not alone in being fascinated by archaeology; it’s pretty clear that a lot of other people are as well. This is evident by the success of the Indiana Jones movies and in the burgeoning television documentaries that air almost every night on one channel or another. I’ve lost track of the number of times that someone has said to me, “You know, if I weren’t a _____ (fill in the blank with doctor, lawyer, nurse, accountant, Wall Street financier, etc.), I would have been an archaeologist.” Most people, however, have little or no idea what’s involved. Maybe they imagine searching for lost treasures, traveling to exotic locales, and meticulously digging using toothbrushes and dental tools. It’s usually not like that at all, and most archaeologists are nothing like Indiana Jones.
I’ve been going on archaeological expeditions almost every summer since I was a sophomore in college—more than thirty field seasons in all, over the past thirty-five years. Because of where I’ve worked—primarily in the Middle East and Greece—most people consider me to be an Old World archaeologist. But I’ve also excavated in California and Vermont in the United States, which is considered the New World in archaeological terms.
I’ve been able to participate in a variety of interesting projects, including Tel Anafa, Megiddo, and Tel Kabri in Israel; the Athenian Agora, Boeotia, and Pylos in Greece; Tell el-Maskhuta in Egypt; Palaiokastro in Crete; Kataret es-Samra in Jordan; and Ayios Dhimitrios and Paphos in Cyprus. Most of those are sites or regions that almost nobody except archaeologists has ever heard of, except perhaps the Agora in downtown Athens and Megiddo in Israel, which is biblical Armageddon. I can tell you for a fact that digging at those sites is nothing like in the movies.
People often ask me, “What’s the best thing you’ve ever found?” In response, I tell them, “a petrified monkey’s paw.” It happened on my very first overseas excavation, during the summer after my sophomore year in college. I was digging at the Greco-Roman site of Tel Anafa in the north of Israel on a project run by the University of Michigan.
One day, about mid-morning, it was getting really hot and I was starting to worry about sunstroke. Just then, my little patish, or digging hammer, hit an object at such an angle that the piece flew straight up in the air, turning over and over before it landed again. While it was still in midair, I noticed that it was green and thought—in a bit of a daze because of the heat—“hey, it’s a petrified monkey’s paw!” By the time it landed, I had come to my senses: “What would a petrified monkey’s paw be doing in northern Israel?”
Sure enough, when I examined it closely, it turned out to be a Hellenistic bronze furniture piece in the shape of the Greek god Pan—the one with horns on his head who goes around playing on the double pipes. It would probably have been attached to the end of a wooden arm of a chair, but the wood had disintegrated long ago and so only this bronze piece was left where I was digging. It was green because the bronze had turned that color during the two thousand years that the piece had been lying in the ground, waiting for me to find it. We carefully brought it out of the field, drew it, and photographed it, so that it could eventually be published. I didn’t see it again for almost thirty years, until I just happened to run across it in a museum at the University of Haifa, where it was on loan from the Israel Museum in Jerusalem.
But then, in 2013, our team digging at the Canaanite site of Tel Kabri in northern Israel found something that trumped even my petrified monkey’s paw. I’ve been codirecting the excavations at the site every other year since 2005 with Assaf Yasur-Landau of the University of Haifa. Each season has brought new surprises, but this was entirely unexpected, for we uncovered what turned out to be the oldest and largest wine cellar yet discovered in the world, dating to about 1700 BCE—nearly four thousand years ago.
It was in June, during the first week of our season, when we came upon a large jar that we nicknamed Bessie. It took us almost two weeks to uncover her completely and find that she was lying on the plaster floor of the room. By that time, she had been joined by what turned out to be thirty-nine of her friends—for we found a total of forty jars, each three feet high, in that room and in the corridor just north of it.
Even though the jars had shattered into dozens of individual potsherds, the soil that had seeped inside had filled up each jar, so that they still had their original shape. We initially thought each jar would have held about fifty liters of liquid. We have since been told by our conservator, when he started to reconstruct them, that each one would actually have held more than one hundred liters, which means four thousand liters in all.
Andrew Koh, our associate director at Kabri, was able to test the sherds, using organic residue analysis to determine what had been in the jars. Most came back positive for syringic acid, which is found in red wine; a few came back positive for tartaric acid, which is found in both red and white wine. We have little doubt, therefore, that they had all once held wine, with most of it being red wine and some white. That’s approximately six thousand bottles of wine, in today’s terms. Of course, the wine is now long gone, except for the residue left within the fabric of the jars, but I am often asked what it might have tasted like. Since we don’t yet know for certain, I simply answer that it has an “earthy taste” now.
Close-up of wine jars, Tel Kabri
Our discovery, and the article that we subsequently published about it in a peer-reviewed journal, made all the papers, including the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, and the Washington Post, as well as the Los Angeles Times, and Time, Smithsonian, and Wine Spectator magazines. We have since uncovered four more rooms, with seventy additional jars, and are looking forward to more seasons of excavation at this interesting site.
Discovering a wine cellar from ancient Canaan was certainly not what my seven-year-old self ever expected to find when I decided to become an archaeologist. But that’s the beauty and excitement of archaeology—you never really know what you are going to find. My nonarchaeologist colleagues at George Washington University think it is the greatest joke in the world to ask “What’s new in archaeology?”— because, of course, everything we dig up is old. Archaeology keeps surprising us, however, even at sites and places that have long been known. For instance, it now turns out that the site of Troy is at least ten times larger than previously thought; the prehistoric Chauvet cave paintings in France are older than we supposed; a Maya site in Belize completely hidden within the jungle was located using remote sensing; and the site of Tanis in Egypt has been hiding in plain sight all along. In each case, the news was unexpected.
Additional announcements of other new finds and hypotheses appear daily, in a pleasurable never-ending deluge that seems to come faster all the time. For instance, on a single day in early June 2016, media reports about archaeology included stories about a new expedition searching for Dead Sea scrolls within the Cave of Skulls in Israel; the discovery of four hundred wooden tablets in London with Latin written on them; two-thousand-year-old military barracks from the time of Hadrian uncovered in Rome; whether a Canadian teenager actually discovered a Maya site in Mexico or not; the opening of an exhibit of five hundred objects from ancient Greece in Washington, DC; new remote sensing being done on the Great Pyramid in Egypt; and the fact that the blade on one of King Tut’s daggers is made of iron from a meteorite—which gave rise to the wonderful, although not entirely accurate, headline in the New York Post: “King Tut’s dagger came from outer space.” Within a week, they had been followed by an announcement of new archaeological discoveries beneath the jungle canopy in Cambodia, accomplished with new remote sensing technology.
The good news is that there are lots of new discoveries being made, perhaps more quickly than ever before in the history of archaeology; the bad news is that it means that parts of this book may already be outdated by the time it is published. For instance, all the stories just mentioned plus others relevant to topics that we will discuss later in this book were breaking news as I was finishing up the draft of the book, but others will appear while this book is in press and after it is out.
It is truly an exciting time to be an archaeologist, but I also want to address throughout this book some of the more dubious claims about various finds that are occasionally made in television documentaries, media reports, online personal blog pages, and elsewhere, because it can sometimes be difficult for the general public to distinguish the real discoveries and discussions by professional archaeologists from claims made by pseudo-archaeologists. Each year there are enthusiastic amateurs with little or no training in archaeology who go searching for things like the Ark of the Covenant or places like Atlantis. Their searches can make for compelling stories and good documentary video fodder, but they muddy the water so that real scientific progress is obscured. Some of the claims are so outrageous that in 2007 I published an op-ed article in the Boston Globe with the title “Raiders of the Faux Ark.” There I warned the general public about being duped and called upon my professional colleagues to investigate such claims when they are made.
Many people, encouraged by pseudo-archaeologists, cannot accept the fact that mere humans might have come up with great innovations such as the domestication of plants and animals or could have built great architectural masterpieces such as the pyramids or the Sphinx all on their own. Instead, they invoke alien, or sometimes divine, assistance to explain how these works came to be, even though there’s no need to do so. It’s gotten so bad that we’ve now added to our tongue-in-cheek archaeological axiom, quoted at the front of this book, “six stones is a palace built by aliens.”
Perhaps the most compelling reason to write this book now, however, is that the world has been witnessing an assault on archaeological sites and museums during the past several years at a level and pace previously unseen. Deliberate looting and destruction of antiquities has taken place across much of the Middle East, from Iraq to Afghanistan, Syria, Libya, and Egypt, linked in large part to the recent wars and uprisings in those regions. But looting of ancient sites is not limited to that area; it is a worldwide problem, stretching from Greece to Peru, threatening our unique human heritage on a scale never seen before. Already back in 2008, one reporter described the scale of the destruction as “almost industrial,” writing: “Looters attack ancient sites with backhoes and small bulldozers, scraping away the top layer of earth across areas the size of several football fields. Then, guided by metal detectors—coins often give away the location of other goods—they sink shafts to extract anything of value.” The same wording was used again in 2015, when the head of UNESCO warned of “industrial scale looting in Syria.”
Archaeologists have taken an active role in documenting and trying to prevent this ongoing loss of our heritage, but they are not the only ones responsible for taking care of the past. That responsibility lies with everybody. It is up to all of us to help save and preserve the remains and relics of long-lost civilizations. I hope that the material I have included in this book will remind us all of where we have come from and the fascination that it holds and will encourage a wide public audience to help protect our inheritance before it is too late. Not all readers will have the time or freedom to join an archaeological dig, but everyone can raise their voices in support of the archaeological process and our shared heritage.
It also is simply time for a new introductory volume, meant for people of all ages, from youngsters at the age that I once was, back when I read about Heinrich Schliemann for the first time, to adults and retirees who are new to the field of archaeology. In the past few decades, tremendous numbers of discoveries, as well as great advances in archaeology, have been made. These include Lucy, the partial early hominin skeleton at Hadar in Ethiopia, and the 3.6-million-year-old footprints at Laetoli in Tanzania; the spectacular prehistoric cave art at Chauvet Cave in France; the Cape Gelidonya and Uluburun shipwrecks off the southwestern coast of Turkey, with their cargoes of objects made in countries throughout the Bronze Age Mediterranean; the world’s oldest temple at Göbekli Tepe and the renewed excavations at the Neolithic site of Çatalhöyük, also in Turkey; the Terracotta Warriors in China; Ötzi the Iceman in the Alps; and the Moche in Peru. All these, and many others as well, are now presented here, in addition to discussions of the archaeologists themselves and the techniques that they have used to excavate those sites and make those discoveries.
In the pages that follow, we will trace the evolution of archaeology from its earliest beginnings to a highly organized, professional, and scientific systematic study of past peoples and cultures. Along the way, we’ll meet explorers and archaeologists including Howard Carter, Heinrich Schliemann, Mary Leakey, Hiram Bingham, Dorothy Garrod, and John Lloyd Stephens. These men and women, along with many others, discovered the remains of earlier people and lost civilizations, such as the Hittites, Minoans, Mycenaeans, Trojans, Assyrians, Maya, Inca, Aztec, and Moche. We will examine work that has been done in the Old World (from Europe and the United Kingdom to the Middle East and beyond), as well as in the New World (North, Central, and South America).
These are the archaeologists and discoveries that are the most fascinating to me and that I believe are among the most important in order to understand how archaeology has developed as a discipline over the years as well as to show how it has shed light on some of the long-lost ancient sites and civilizations. Readers will note that there are discussions of sites and artifacts in every chapter, including the “Digging Deeper” sections, and that there are some common threads found throughout, including the current problem of looting around the world; the hard work and physical labor that is involved in doing archaeology; the fact that archaeologists are searching for information rather than gold, treasures, or other rewards; and the improvements in technology that have allowed us to find new sites as well as to increase our knowledge of sites that were initially excavated long ago.
I’ve also added practical details and advice about how to do archaeology, for I’m frequently asked questions like
“How do you know where to dig?”
“How do you know how old something is?”
“Do you get to keep what you find?”
In answering these questions, I have included a number of examples taken from elsewhere, like Ötzi the Iceman and the Terracotta Warriors, but I also have drawn from my own fieldwork, ranging from Crete to Cyprus to California. In some cases, they can be held up as an example of what not to do on a survey or an excavation, including falling down a small cliff while surveying in Greece and, of course, thinking that I had found a petrified monkey’s paw on my first dig in Israel. This means, however, that my discussions will occasionally be very location-specific. For instance, we regularly use pickaxes to dig in the Middle East, whereas they are almost never used when digging on the East Coast of the United States, and so I have made an effort to note when the techniques that I am describing might be different in other parts of the world. I also have used BCE and CE (“Before the Common Era” and the “Common Era”) when referring to dates, rather than the “BC/AD” system that may be more familiar to some readers. The choice is not meant to offend anyone but simply follows the practice of most modern archaeologists and archaeological reports.
As a whole, the material in this book reflects what I have been teaching in my Introduction to Archaeology class at George Washington University since 2001, with my notes and lectures updated and revised each year to reflect both new discoveries and fresh thoughts on old finds. Another professor or author might well do it differently, as they are welcome to do, but the following discussions reflect my particular love and passion for the field, and some of my favorite stories and examples that I think serve as good illustrations. I hope that readers will find the material interesting enough to continue and read other, more detailed books about specific sites, time periods, and peoples.
At the very least, by the time we’re done, those who have read the whole book will know a lot more about a number of famous sites and archaeologists; will realize that there is no need to ever invoke aliens; and will be more knowledgeable about what is involved in doing archaeology. My hope is that it also will become obvious why archaeology matters and why we should care about preserving the past for future generations, for archaeology not only teaches us about the past, it also connects us to a broader sample of human experience and enriches our understanding of both our present and our future.
To be clear, the story of archaeology is really many stories of discoveries from around the globe (and even from space). But these stories and the people in them are united by one goal that links them all—the desire to understand the human story, from its deepest past to the rise (and collapse) of its civilizations. Taken together, they are our story.
