So I guess I can tell you a little more about yesterday's find than I thought when I wrote yesterday's post. No pictures yet, but I can share with you that the item I found was a limestone building-stone that bore, on its plastered surface, a painted image of a woman's face. And not just any face, either, but the face of the goddess Tyche, or "Fortune." It was easy to tell it was her, because she's wearing her characteristic corona muralis, or "wall-crown"--a crown which, instead of having points along the top of it, has a series of zig-zags like the walls of a city. That's why she was the patron-- the specially adopted deity-- of many cities in Roman times.
Here she was, maybe ¾ life size, painted in red and yellow on the white plaster covering this stone! It's not a complete portrait, but most of her face is present and about half of the crown. And the artistry is simply stunning, just beautiful work. The eyes are so vivid it's amazing.
I can hardly describe what a huge shock it was to see her. I turned over a stone like a thousand others and couldn't help crying out, "It's a face!" Of course we instantly called Doc Schuler, who took one look and instantly called Arthur Segal, who's the head of the whole Hippos project. Both of them were ecstatic. Doc Schuler, in fact, was visibly moved; the portrait seemed to have quite an emotional impact on him.
To some extent I think that was because the image is so well-done, but mostly because a human image of any sort is just the kind of thing archaeologists dream about finding. The power of a face is automatic: one glance and you feel a sense of connection, across 13 centuries. I was thinking about that later. If this was a painting of anything else-- an animal, a building, a scene in nature-- it would only have a fraction of the power that a human face has. It could have been something far more significant, archaeologically or historically speaking, but it wouldn't have the instant drawing-power or emotional impact of a face. Isn't that true?
The painting came to the surface about 7:15 yesterday morning. The rest of my work-day was consumed by that find--mostly, painstakingly and gingerly combing through the surrounding area looking for more bits of painted plaster that might help Eva, the head conservationist, reconstruct a bit more of the portrait. Arieh the ceramicist helped me for quite a while on this project; I learned some helpful tricks from him since I hadn't done such delicate work before.
Arieh, Russian-born ceramicist at the University of Haifa who works with the Concordia team.
There were lots of plaster bits, and because we didn't finish collecting them yesterday, I returned to that task first thing this morning for another hour. The problem is, these bits are tiny, and not side by side or connected to each other, but strewn through the dirt, facing at all different angles. They must have broken off the stones they were attached to, as those stones fell in the earthquake, landing all over the place in this part of the square. You can imagine what a job it was to collect them!
Two of these plaster bits have paint on them, one with red and one with yellow. Can you spot them? (There's nothing to give you a sense of scale in the picture, but each plaster fragment is about the size of my smallest fingernail.)
It was a little disappointing to hear, yesterday afternoon, that few if any of these fragments seem to be from the portrait itself. They may, however, have come from other parts of the same scene, which was obviously painted upon many plastered stones, not just this one. It just so happened that this was the only stone to retain its fresco intact, by landing in exactly the right position-- flat to the floor, a couple of cm above it, and upside-down-- for its plaster and paint to survive. All the other stones that carried other parts of the scene probably just deteriorated over time. In fact, we pulled out plenty of deteriorated limestone blocks that bore no traces of anything significant, not even paint of any kind, throughout this whole area. Talk about the "accidents of history"!
Once I finished searching for these last bits of the fresco, the rest of our team moved into this part of our square and got to work. The first task was to remove all of the dirt that had earlier been piled on top of the opus sectile marble floor (a black-and-white diamond pattern) to protect it, so photos could now be taken. This was a lot harder to do than I expected, because the floor isn't even close to flat, making it tough to know where the "fill" ended and the floor itself began. I don't think we damaged it significantly by uncovering it, but it certainly was challenging work.
If it was wet, you could see the black-and-white pattern in these diamond-shaped floor tiles very well.
That done, the next and more interesting task was uncovering the mosaic floor that surrounds the fountain-fed pool. We were dying to know so many things about this floor, which had never before been exposed. What shape it was in? Were any sections damaged, and if so how badly? Was it just plain white squares, or patterned? If patterned, what was the design? Did it contain any images, or was it only geometric designs? Most of all, would it have an inscription?
Thankfully the job went quite quickly, both because the floor was in good shape and because the only part we have access to right now is fairly small. More of the floor is hidden beyond the edge of our square, buried under 2 metres of rubble. But what we can see is gorgeous, including many different colours of tessarae (the little cubes of stone) that make up a fairly complex geometric pattern. No images of animals, plants, or people. No inscription. But wow!--what a stunning floor, all the same.
Detail of one end of the mosaic.
Overview of the mosaic. I wonder what the design is like as it continues beneath the baulk?
And that was about it for the day. Doc Schuler took "official" photos of every nook and cranny of the site while the rest of us went on an hour-long walking tour of Hippos. The highlights were of course seeing what the University of Haifa people had been working on all season. Some of them uncovered more of the city's enormous and very well-made basilica. Its excavation began a couple of years ago and isn't finished yet. Other Haifa people excavated a steeply sloping area next to the city's north wall. Another group did the same next to the south wall; I think the structure they were working on was a military bathhouse. A fourth group worked on the odeon, the small but jewel-like theatre that our Canadian group had been shown by Arthur Segal on their last day on-site. After welcoming these colleagues to our site many times during the last couple of weeks, and enjoying their appreciative "oohs" and "ahhs" over the columned hall and pool-and-fountain, it was great to see what they'd been working on too.
Tour and photos done, we set up our bucket-line in reverse. Some days ago we used this system to haul most of the rubble and dirt out of ZZ-99, the area with the marble black-and-white floor. Now we filled up our buckets from the soft dust of the road up top, and passed them down into the hole, one by one, to carefully cover up both this marble floor and the new mosaic floor we'd just spent so much effort digging down to, and exposing. We then also covered up the pool as well as we could, given the limited materials and short time available.
The covered-up floors and pool. We'll see how well the pool covering lasts--the goal is to keep it protected until next summer's dig.
If this seems crazy to you, there's a double purpose behind this madness. First: to protect the floors from accidental cave-ins, as well as the winter rains that can apparently do significant damage to delicate surfaces. Second: to keep tourists from damaging the floors (and pool) until they can be properly conserved. When they're properly treated, ancient mosaics can withstand normal tourist traffic with no problem. But without stabilization, proper coatings, and so forth, they can also disintegrate very quickly from careless use.
And that's it, I guess. The 2010 dig season is finished. We gathered up all our gear and equipment, storing the "permanent" items in the old barracks and carrying the rest down to the kibbutz with us on the bus. We lunched, showered, claimed our clothes in the season's last laundry free-for-all, napped, and started packing for tomorrow's flights home. The last item on our collective agenda before we leave at various times tomorrow is dinner tonight at the kibbutz' "fish restaurant."
The columned hall, viewed from the south. Almost everything you see in this hall (which is on the right-hand 2/3 of the photo) was excavated in the last four weeks.
"The chamber of the pool" (its probable official name) from the north. Pretty much everything in this picture too, beside and beyond Doc Schuler is standing, came to light since 1 July.
After all the intensity of the past four weeks, it's hard to believe the dig is done. Our bodies are thankful, since many of us have started to pay the price of all of this heavy exertion in the last few days. Our emotions are thankful in many ways too, for the prospect of getting back home. But as you might expect, there's a kind of deflating feeling that goes along with this ending too. No more small finds--not to mention big ones! No more practical jokes, kibitzing, clowning around, story-telling. And most of all, perhaps, no more reflecting on Jesus' ministry in the region where it took place, and on the life of the earliest churches in the place where one of them formed and sustained its collective life for at least four centuries.
We'll take home with us, though, memories of all of this--and a changed perspective. And when all is said and done, that's enough, and even more important than all the spectacular copper decanters, glass jars, reconstructed pots, mosaic floors, and portraits of Roman goddesses that have ever come out of the ground.

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