THE 5 QUESTIONS YOU’RE ASKED AFTER A DIG
By Cecelia Chisdock, FOA Dig Scholarship Recipient
For the last eight years, ASOR members and donors have funded
dig scholarships for students and early career scholars to participate in archaeological fieldwork. Last year (2017), The Friends of ASOR contributed funds for an separate scholarship to send an additional student into the field.
Cecelia Chisdock, the 2017 recipient of the Friends of ASOR Excavation Fellowship, reports about her experience excavating at Tel Kabri. The Friends of ASOR enabled Cecelia to have this experience, and we hope to raise funds for an additional scholarship in 2018. Keep an eye out for an appeal during our upcoming fellowship drive, March Fellowship Madness, for an opportunity to help send more students to the field!
Over the summer I went on my first excavation to Tel Kabri in northern Israel, a site most famous for the wine cellar in the Bronze Age Canaanite palace. I dug for three weeks, doing everything from pickaxing a plaster floor to articulating some incredibly crumbly pottery and everything in between. The experience was amazing, and when I returned home I noticed a few questions I got from almost everyone who knew I went on this trip, here are some of them:
1. How was your vacation?
If there is one thing everyone understands (even those who don’t know archaeology past Indiana Jones) is that archaeology is fun, so it’s hard to explain that your “vacation” was actually for your job, or in my case for credit to graduate (and hopefully experience for a future job). When I broke it to them that I was up every day at 4:00 in the morning, and pickaxing before I even ate breakfast, they were a little shocked. Of course, I have to re-emphasize that it was still amazingly fun, even if it was not quite a relaxing vacation!
2. Why did you sleep for 14 hours (or days)?
This goes hand in hand with the 
inevitable vacation question. Most friends and family think it’s all fun, and it is, but it’s also enough to give you blisters and 6 new chiropractor appointments.
3. Did you find anything exciting?
My friends who I kept in touch with despite the 7 hour time difference know my varying degrees of excitement for what I was digging up on any given day. “Wow pottery in the back dirt!” turned into “More pottery in the back dirt…” and then into “Wow pottery from the wine cellar!”. I was always very excited to find any kind of bone, no matter how small or fragmented. But it really varies, while I would be most thrilled to tell everyone about the cute little sheep femur or piece of charcoal, some might think the pottery or the architecture was the most exciting!
4. Did you get to keep anything? / What did you bring home?
Everyone from your mom to your 
friend from middle school thinks you get to keep what you dig up. The concept of looting seems a little more extreme than just brining a tiny piece of pottery home, but it’s all the same to most who excavate. Bring them back some keychains, magnets, or a Buffalo Bills shirt in Hebrew (like I did), but no one is bringing home gold coins, ancient figurines, or the Ark of the Covenant. Even Indiana Jones said it should be in a museum!
5. What was the culture like? Was there running water? Cars?
Archaeology, being the study of the remains of past peoples/cultures is associated with everything ancient, so I wasn’t very surprised that I got this kind of question. But archaeology takes place everywhere, including modern industrialized nations like Israel and the United States. Of course, there were cultural differences (tipping was the hardest to figure out on our weekend trips) but unlike what some people thought we didn’t need to ride horses down dirt paths and cook all our food on a fire. We got Pizza Hut delivered, rented a car for a Dead Sea trip, and took a nice bus to dig every morning. We could dig up things from a time without indoor plumbing, but luckily we didn’t have to live with it!
Author Bio: Cecelia Chisdock is junior at George Washington University studying archaeology and biological anthropology. She is most interested in bioarchaeology and hopes to work with ancient human remains in the future.
Visit the Friends of ASOR Webpage to find our more about FOA.
Visit the Tel Kabri Website to learn more about the dig.
