The most exciting finds from Shikhin in the past few digging seasons have been lots of lamp fragments as well as lamp molds and a kiln for firing them.
This shows that lamps used to be produced here.
All of these are broken fragments of lamps that we found in one day! They have been cleaned and set out to dry.
Miss Kay is a classy Southern woman in her 80s who has been coming to Shikhin for years. She is the artifact registrar.
She was my seat mate in the front of the van, and I can testify that she is spunky and has a great attitude even at 4:30 am.
Someone in another square has just found a lamp mold, and here our directors Drs. James Strange and Mordechai Aviam are examining it.
They promise ice cream to anyone excavating a find like this, and the volunteer involved made sure they remembered!
A few days later we uncovered an almost completely intact lamp.
Isn't this exciting?
A local archaeologist who is also an artist fashioned his own modern copies of the lamp molds.
He also constructed a kiln by copying the design of the ancient one found at Shikhin.
He asked the volunteers to make several hundred lamps using the molds. Here volunteer John, a retired professor of music composition and cello, is creating a little oil lamp from the mold.
We brought our new clay lamps to the artist's home where he fired them in his kiln. It worked!
Finally, this picture shows lamps that were found at Shikhin in previous years. They are from the Roman period.
Notice the beautifully intricate designs.
No comments:
Post a Comment