Excavating Shikhin

Shalom! As-salamu alaykum! 

Welcome to the 2022 excavation of the ancient settlement of Shikhin. It lies just north of Nazareth and today is situated in a nature preserve. 

It's possible that Jesus passed through or even spent time in Shikhin, as it was near his hometown and populated from the Persian period (roughly 400 BC) through the Hellenistic and Roman periods before its decline and abandonment in the 300s AD.

We excavate in an olive grove, taking care to dig around the trees and their roots. 

Playing in the dirt in my group's 4x4 meter square.

Now that we've uncovered the dirt and rocks that have accumulated on the surface of our squares during the two years of hiatus due to COVID, we have begun excavating in earnest. This means that we are finding an abundance of sherds, or broken pottery fragments. Once a day or so the members of each square meet with our director for Pottery Reading. 

We soak the sherds overnight and then scrub off the debris the next day. This task falls to whomever is assigned to Pottery Washing on a given day. We dry them in the sun and then present them to our chief archaeologist. He rummages through them, looking particularly for "diagnostic" pieces such as a rim, base, spout, or handle that indicate what sort of vessel the fragment came from (a bowl, cooking pot, storage jar, etc.). 

By contrast, "body sherds" are simply pottery pieces from the body of a vessel; they don't tell us much about their origin and therefore are not very interesting. The great majority of our finds are body sherds.

He can also tell us the period of some of the more diagnostic fragments. On this day it was mostly "Middle Roman," which includes Jesus' lifetime.

A bucket of body sherds that will be discarded. We only keep diagnostic pieces, especially if they tell us something new.

Archaeologists have been working at Shikhin since 2012. 

These are some of the squares that were excavated in previous digging seasons. The string and orange tape have just been set up as an important precaution! 

A few days ago one of our volunteers, a retiree in his 60s, was walking along the balk (the one-meter-wide strip between two squares) when the wind caught a large soil sifting screen he was carrying and knocked him several feet down and onto rocks. He broke a hip and is currently recovering at the Nazareth Hospital. 

Speedy Recovery!