Archaeology vids Tell el Hesi, Part A, 31m 720p30

In this video, we'll take a look at the excavation of the site known as Tell el-Hessi. It proved to be a very influential excavation and occurred quite early in the sequence of significant excavations in Palestine. You'll see several maps of Palestine locating Tell el-Hessi in order to help you get acquainted with it. Here are some major features. Incidentally, this particular map is a relief map that you can see outside the Flora Archaeological Center in the Ashland Seminary main building. So we've located here, we've got the Jordan River with the Sea of Galilee at the top and then the Dead Sea towards the bottom there in blue. Notice flowing into the Dead Sea from the east is the Arnon River. I've labeled this because you will often be able to identify this feature on maps. It doesn't have a particular connection to Tell el-Hessi except that you'll see that Tell el-Hessi is roughly on the same latitude as the Arnon River. So if you open a map, many maps will not label Tell el-Hessi because it's an ancient site. Modern maps will not label it, but if you're wondering where is it, you will be able to locate the Arnon River flowing into the Dead Sea. And you should be able to locate Gaza. And here we're not referring to Gaza Strip, the Long Territory, but the primary city of Gaza, which as in ancient times, so in modern, will still be recognizable. Tell el-Hessi is located alongside a perennial source of water, very significant for surviving as a human. So you see the last point there on the left is that it's on the west bank of the Wadi Hessi, hence its name. Here's Google Earth. Once again, you can see the depression of the Arnon River flowing in from east to west to the Dead Sea. The shape of the Dead Sea is a little different than you see on the previous one. This would be more the biblical times. And there's been some desiccation and you can see also some structures in the lower part of the Dead Sea. I think that has to do with harvesting some chemicals from the shallows. But Tell el-Hessi, according to Google Earth, is located at the Yellow Pin. This sketched map comes from a journal article in the Biblical Archaeologist, a useful journal, co-authored by Fargo and O'Connell. Fargo, and perhaps O'Connell as well, was involved directly in a second series of excavations. Excavations began in 1890 under Sir William Flinders Petrie. And then they were resumed about 80 years later in 1970. They continued until 1980. The report that's journaled in this particular article is dated 1978. So there were still a couple more seasons of excavation in that latter portion of digs. By now you've probably located the red circle indicated by the blue arrow. Within that red circle is a star and the caption to the map indicates that this is the author's way of locating Tell el-Hessi. Why didn't they just spell it out? Probably because it's so crowded because of their intent to display the drainage pattern along the coast. Notice in terms of reference points that along the Mediterranean coast, below the blue arrow, you do see modern Gaza listed. Once again, that's a helpful way to locate Tell el-Hessi. The span of this particular sketched map is too narrow to include the Dead Sea. So we just have the coastal plain. Notice the statement, and perhaps you've been reading it over by now, what I've printed off to the right. I found this very interesting, not in terms of what they discovered, artifacts or eras of human habitation, but rather what would have been the ancient significance of a site like this. Let's not miss it. So they note that it's too far inland to have direct influence of the Via Maris. What is the Via Maris? This is the way of the sea. It's not labeled on this particular map, but if you can imagine what is otherwise known as the Coastal Highway. This is an ancient coastal highway. It would have been closer to the coastline and running basically from Egypt right up through Palestine to points north. When we get to about the Mount Carmel range, I believe it jogs inland to the east a bit. That's beyond what's shown on this map. So they're saying Tallahassee is too far into the elevation that begins to rise approaching the hill country to have real direct influence over Via Maris, the Coastal Highway. However, this comment teaches me that, as you might presume, that Coastal Highway had some routes then that would be spurs or that would turn off from the coast and head towards the hills. They call it a branch here. And one was in the vicinity of Ashkelon. You see Ashkelon labeled in this map above the blue arrow right on the coast. So they're saying Tallahassee could have had some influence, some oversight over a branch road coming off of the Via Maris. Towards the close of this paragraph, they point out that Hesse was, as they say, well placed to control this route. Its position on the eastern edge of the coastal plain allowed Hesse to assert control over the southern approaches to the Shephelah. And that's the territory rising in elevation into the hill country to the east. Incidentally, you'll notice that sometimes Hesse is spelled with a capital H with a dot under it. That's the more formal spelling. Sometimes it's spelled without, depending on what resource you've had. I've tried in most of this presentation to use the formal spelling with a dot under it. That means there's a rough breathing Hesse, sort of like a CH. Now we'll turn to several pictures of the actual site, pictures and diagrams, to get ourselves acquainted with the layout and where various probes and excavations took place on Tallahassee. To help us appreciate some of the useful resources, please notice that this comes from the New Encyclopedia of Archaeological Excavations in the Holy Land, a multiple volume work. It does provide us a wonderful synopsis of the excavations at various sites. It's not limited to information about excavations. It could also talk about other aspects of archaeology in Palestine. A piece of information that I found helpful here, several things. Notice, for one thing, the orientation. The caption says it's a general view looking northwest. So I would encourage you to begin to build a mental map and just think, OK, if I were in something like a square, I'm at the base of the square, I'm looking north and tilted to the west, and that gives me this view. We'll have other, slightly different views in subsequent photos. Here's another item to watch for. Notice that this is called, this would be called the Acropolis. In other words, there is a broad field of excavation within which there's a promontory or a raised portion, the Acropolis, the high zone. So this photo here shows the slope and also the Acropolis, which is just one portion of the overall acreage. It's about 25 acres with a four-acre Acropolis. Those dimensions will vary depending on which resource you read. Some describe the overall territory of Tallahassee as even larger, but most of them talk about it being a 25-acre area with a four-acre Acropolis. Acropolis would just refer to the very upper portions of the elevation that you see here. Also interesting to me here is the evidence of excavation. Notice the palm tree in the lower left and look just above the palm tree, and you see some rectangular indentations. That's evidence of excavation. Also, notice what the vegetation looks like. Admittedly, it's black and white, but you can see the lack of grasses across that region. I see it looks like there's also some structures, maybe some long sticks or poles that reach across part of those excavations. You'll see a different ground surface in subsequent photos. Finally, I found it interesting to learn that this Acropolis, which was artificially elevated, the height of it grew as the ancient inhabitants piled more and more dirt on over the centuries, which raises the question, where is virgin soil? We're told that initially the height of this elevation, this raised portion, was 17 meters, and virgin soil, as they dug down, turned out to be sand dunes. There are dunes around here and there in this region. So this particular promontory started out, virgin soil, as 17 meters above the fields beyond, in the territory, in the surroundings. 17 meters, and it was a sandy surface, not a rock outcropping. And then notice the last sentence there in the notes. Over time, they added an additional 21 meters. Think of a foot, if you're thinking metric conversion. My goodness, one meter is three feet, roughly. So about 63 feet, that's like six stories of dirt, were added over time as people wanted to keep re-inhabiting the Acropolis. Same shot, making sure that we notice where the excavations are located. Those are not all the excavations. More excavations took place on top of the mound, but these are visible from the general view. Here's another view. Obviously, either the top of the mound has been carved down, and I think there was some of that that took place, because the earlier photo clearly was earlier in history, in time. Notice all the grass that's accumulated, and then notice in the blue oval that we've highlighted in the lower portion, do you see those rectangular indentations? I'm fairly confident those correspond to the same rectangular indentations that you see in the earlier, much earlier photo. My guess is that this photo that you're seeing now, the black and white, was snapped probably pretty close to either during or the conclusion of the second campaign, which ran from 1970 to 1980. And then this photo is much, much later. This I picked up on the web. I haven't designated credit to the site, but it's one that you could probably find, too, if you just put in a web search for Tal Hesi. Here we're looking north, and we still can identify the Acropolis, although it doesn't look as significant here. The Acropolis is located, as you'll see later on, in the northeast corner of the overall 25-acre zone. Now, through Google Earth, we've got a vertical, top-down view. If mentally you're trying to imagine where did the previous photo with the profile shot, where does that fit in the vertical, the aerial photo? This transition, going from profile to aerial, is one of the skills that we're going to cultivate during our study of archaeology. So this Tal Hesi combination of shots and sketches is going to be a good primer on learning how to orient, because that's going to be very valuable, at least I'm finding it very valuable, in getting a sense of what did they find, where, and so forth. One of the things we can point out is that the forested area in the upper right, in this modern Google Earth photo, that is bordered on the left of the forest. You see a vertical green zone. This shows us where the actual wadi, the waterway, would run. And that's the wadi, or the waterway, known as Hesi, from which this mound has derived its name in the modern appellation. You'll see later on where their attempts have been made to try and locate it in the biblical list of place names, and they're not entirely certain. So at least we have that piece of orientation. By the way, this photo is oriented with north at the top. You can see some modern roadways that have cut through, and initially it can be difficult to grasp where exactly is the Acropolis and where have been the excavation zones. From this photo you can also see evidence of current agriculture, and that was an issue that was in play at the times of even earliest excavation. All right, on the left, that same Google photo. On the right, a new sketch, and this gives us the elevation plan, and also it records some of the excavation history. Notice that in the upper right of the sketched map, the elevation climbs in the green circle from outer edge about 110 meters, and then up to 140 meters towards that narrowest portion towards the center of the green circle. There's a lot of dots there. Those are probes from the Petrie excavation in 1890. All the dots indicate where they have not done a clear cut scraping away of soil, but rather digging down for a probe just to see what we can find here and see if it's worth further extended excavation. So the green zone represents the Acropolis. We learned earlier that it's in the northeast region of the overall Tallahassee Territory, so that fits. A couple of other features we want to locate. The cyan blue arc is one of our clearest points of reference from the sketch to the Google map. You can see the cyan arc is a depression, and indeed that was a drainage, a natural drainage depression, where moisture would run off the elevation, the hill, Tallahassee, and would run down into the wadi. So that helps us realize that we've got the photo and the pencil sketch in proper parallel orientation. Direct your attention please to the yellow arc that's in the lower right. Now that would correspond to the yellow arc in the lower right of the Google photo. Notice that in the pencil sketch we have some straight lines with some right angle changes. This indicates a wall that the excavation reports refer to. Similarly in the yellow square or rectangle, there are several probes by Petrie, and also you'll see towards the bottom some of those probes are connected with a line, and that indicates part of a wall, and the excavation report says that this wall, although they have not clearly connected between the yellow square and the yellow arc, they believe that there was a perimeter wall that was continuous across there. I find it interesting to study the Google photo in these respects, because as you look at some of the irregular markings in the soil in the Google photo, you can appreciate that these may indeed correspond to earlier excavations. Now admittedly there's been additional weathering and erosion, so that the crispness of the excavation rectangles is not as clear now as it would have been back in 1980, the end of the campaign, but we can still see some evidence of that in the Google photo. Next we're going to focus our attention on the lower portion of the green circle, just between the top of the blue arc and the lower portion of the green circle. On the right we have the same topographical sketch, on the left it's the Google photo but we've zoomed in, so please orient yourself, the green circle is still in roughly the same place, and now direct your attention in the left picture to the irregular markings in the soil in the blue square. That would correspond in the right to the portion below the green acropolis proper. Again, pay close attention to the topographical lines, so you can see that the acropolis ascends there particularly on the northeast side fairly steeply, and then below the green circle you can see that the lines broaden out, so it's a more gentle slope, but it's still ascending, going from the bottom to the top, ascending, again with that jagged erosion line or water course, it's not a permanent water course, but you can see the drainage zone. Based on this orientation, I believe that the photographer of the black and white photo that you saw earlier was standing approximately at the red circle, sighting along the red arrow to the northwest. One other point of comparison we can make as far as evidence of earlier excavation, Google Photo, again direct your attention to the left hand photo, and now look at the blue square, the blue shaded square that overlaps the yellow arc. Notice within that the white rectangular shapes. I believe then based on the topographical map that this corresponds to the blue square on the right. That yellow arc then is where they discovered some city walls, and so there were some probes, the dots are Petrie's probes, and then there were some more substantial excavations later on to reveal the wall, and that's I believe what we see in the Google map with the white kind of smudges, the light tan smudges just inside the yellow arc and also the rectangles. You can see those rectangles a little more clearly here. I believe these were rectangular diggings to expose portions of that wall. Hopefully now with that somewhat of a guided tour you can look at this map and say, oh, I know where the Acropolis is, I can't tell the elevation from this view, but I know that that upper right zone just inside the blue turf where the wadi would be, I know that that's the hill and that smudging below that is excavation, and then when we come to the finger, that brownish finger, you know that that is a drainage depression, and then based on the topographical map it climbs up as we approach from that drainage depression. As we approach the yellow arc we're actually going uphill again. Incidentally, my understanding is that's what's called the Lower City. You'll see the literature talk about excavations in the Lower City, that's in the region of the yellow arc and across that latitude, as opposed to the Acropolis and the slopes approaching the Acropolis. As indicated earlier, the approximate territory is 25 acres, especially including that Lower City with the northeast corner Acropolis spreading across roughly 4 acres. The statement in the paragraph I found informative as to building materials. Here's the situation. For the most part, architecture within Israel was composed of stone. This is going to be a lot more durable and clearly distinguishable from soil surrounding it as there's accumulation. Contrast that to Mesopotamia, where mud brick is used a lot, and also Egypt, although there's certainly stone construction within Egypt. My goodness, you look at the enormous pillars in the temple regions up the Nile of Karnak and Luxor. Phenomenal stone construction, and pyramids also, right? Stone, not mud brick. What's unusual at Tal Hesi is that there wasn't evidently a lot of stone conveniently available, so they constructed with mud brick. Now, when you're excavating and you have a mud brick wall, and then you have accumulated mud and soil next to it, sometimes they're telling us it's kind of hard to distinguish. I hadn't thought of that issue before reading this, so I found that rather informative. Now let's move to the question, where in the Bible might this be referred to? What's the correlation? Here's what happened. C.R. Condor, and supported by Petrie, who said, I think you've got it right, back in 1890, they initially thought that this is Lachish, a frequently referred to, or substantially referred to, site in Israel. Now, they based that in part, I found this fascinating, on the writing of the Christian Bishop of Caesarea, in his work called Onomasticon, which means names, dating to 4th century A.D. And if you look up the description there, he gives some reference points about how many miles from this site and along what road, that's where Lachish is. And they said, well, that's about where we are. Later on, that was found to be not as reliable, that is to say, this is probably not what Eusebius intended. Instead, a mound that goes by the name Tel Ad Duir, a little bit northeast of Tallahassee, is a more reliable location for Lachish. So they said, if not Lachish, what? Maybe Eglon, a Canaanite site that is known in the Bible. But when we look at the Biblical description of Eglon, it seems it should be further east, further up the hills. So, final analysis, we're frankly not sure what Biblical city this is, as yet. Maybe something else will turn up. Now let's turn our attention to who it was that excavated the site, what were the institutions that supported them, what were they connected with, and when did those excavation campaigns take place. As we mentioned already, Sir William Flinders Petrie was the first excavator of this site. He spent six weeks in 1890, supported by Palestine Exploration Fund, which is British, and you can see the assessment by Valerie Fargo in her article of how significant his work was here. A little bit of background, Sir Flinders Petrie, a British individual, spent the bulk of his archaeological career in Egypt. In fact, he was taking a break virtually, going to Palestine, settling on Tell al-Hassi as something worth excavating. He actually surveyed around a bit and then settled on this as being a good place to invest his efforts. He did that for six weeks. He will come back to Palestine later on in his career, but he cut his teeth, as it were, in Egypt and he winds up applying his skills that have been refined in Egypt to Palestine. Which skills? Well, the awareness that these mounds of habitation tend to distinguish the eras of their various populations by strata. So you dig down a ways and then you can have an identifiable transition, perhaps a period of vacancy or maybe a destruction layer, and then dig down further and it would be a different population, different era. He also connected it with the kinds of pottery, the level of refinement, the decorations. Sometimes you can tell that these are imports. As you'll see later on, there would be some Greek imports and Persian imports, even at Tell al-Hassi. So ceramic chronology, that helps you identify what era a given stratum should be tagged as. Now the region of that 25 acres where Petrie concentrated his effort was some in the lower city and now you'll recognize on that Google Earth picture that means the lower portion of the photo, not because it's lower in the photo, but because that's lower elevation. And then also he concentrated some efforts on the slopes of the Acropolis. Why didn't he work on the summit as much? He did some probes up there. You'll recall the dots up on the Acropolis. He didn't do as much real excavation up there because someone was farming it. Well, as we hear this, we begin to get a picture of some of the real obstacles that archaeologists encounter. And so Petrie has to work his excavation around the prior claims of local inhabitants. Something that Petrie introduced then for Palestine excavations was illustrating the pottery, particularly showing and they're called section drawings. What they mean by that is cross sections. Here's an example of that. Admittedly, what you see on the right is not coming from Tell al-Hassi. It's a picture I took from Kathleen Kenyon's book that you see referenced on the left. And this is from her extensive work in Jericho. But I like this because it shows you what they mean by cross section. Take a look, for example, in the upper left at that saucer type dish. You're getting a profile view. You can see that in the right half that there's a little pinched handle there. But then notice that the perimeter sketch line is thick on the left and thin on the right. On the right, it's giving you a profile. The left half is giving you basically an x-ray view of it, a cross section, so that you can see that the ceramic, the clay material itself, is thicker at the middle of the outer wall and then grows thin at the bottom and a little thin at the upper lip. Number eight I find interesting. Over on the right, this is a picture, isn't it? Dotted lines for the handle. They're saying we think the handle was about like this. Evidently, it was broken off. But notice the bottom of the picture. Do you notice how the thick line actually goes up a bit in the center of the bottom? They're telling us if you look from the outside, it's a flat bottom, but if you were to tip it up, there's an indentation on it. Petrie is the one we have to thank for teaching us to not only sketch the profile of an artifact, a ceramic artifact, but to convey to the person looking at our sketch how thick or thin were the walls. This tells us the level of refinement, the skill of the potter, information of this sort. That's what we mean by a section sketch or a cross section. Here are a couple of snapshots of Sir William Flinders Petrie.