Exploring the Roots of Western Civilization
By Oded Borowski

Spending one’s summer moving dirt in the hot sun and dusty environment, with an assortment of insects and other creatures like scorpions and snakes for company is not what most people would consider enjoyable, especially when one needs to wake up at 4:30 a.m. Unlike many colleagues who spend their summers doing research in air-conditioned libraries, in the last 35 years I have chosen to spend my summers excavating the remains of ancient societies. My work took me to several sites in different parts of Israel, but my main research is concentrated at one site located northeast of Beersheba at the western edge of the hill country overlooking the coastal plain. Presently, the site is named Tell Halif, the Hebraized Arabic name Tell Khuweilifeh, which means “the mound of the little Calif.” As for its biblical identification, I am among those who identify it with Rimmon, mentioned in Joshua 15:32 as part of the inheritance of the tribe of Judah and in 19:7 as belonging to the tribe of Simeon.

I have worked at this site off and on since 1976 and to those who might worry if much is still left to explore, I can assure that we have only touched the surface, so to speak. Although it is relatively small, the site contains over 21 strata (layers of occupation) and sub-strata beginning around 3500 B.C.E. to the present, and with the help of modern-day methods, much can be learned with little dirt removed. Tell Halif is located next to Kibbutz Lahav where I was a member in the late 1950s to the early 1960s, so working there is like going back home.

Last summer was the first field season of a new phase of research, which I direct. During the previous phases, the expedition lived in a tent camp and had its own facilities such as showers and a kitchen-dining room. Last summer was the first time that the expedition stayed in kibbutz accommodations. Unlike most other projects, we don’t hire paid workers, but rather, use volunteers who are seeking academic credit or are seeking adventure in a labor-intensive working environment. Most of the financial support for the project comes from these participants, many of whom were Emory students participating in study abroad programs.

One of the reasons I keep returning to the site is my wish to further explore the remains of a particular stratum (layer), the end of which is dated to the end of the 8th century B.C.E. The fortified town of that period was within the boundaries of the Kingdom of Judah and it was destroyed in a military campaign as the sling stones, arrowheads, and other military paraphernalia indicate. The sudden destruction of the houses caused most of the household items to be preserved on the floors. Houses that had a second story collapsed and had their contents buried and preserved. The material recovered from these structures is dated to the end of the 8th century B.C.E. when, in the year 701, the Assyrian king Sennacherib attacked Judah, under King Hezekiah, and its neighbors and caused significant damage as recorded in the Bible and in his own records.
The materials recovered from these houses can teach us a lot about daily activities and how space was utilized. We learn about diet, the economy, and trade connections with other regions. Much of what we discover has to do with the circumstances of the final days of the town. The inhabitants were prepared for a long siege as evident from the large number of storage jars which held grain, oil, and wine. We know that their diet included meat (sheep and goat), grains (wheat, barley, lentils, etc.), fish, grapes, and other fruit. They made wine and grew olives and pressed them for oil, and because they had large numbers of herd animals, they most likely had a variety of dairy products.

Some of the major occupations at this site were spinning and weaving. This is evident from the large number of spindle whorls and huge caches of loom weights. Other weaving tools made of bone suggest that the Tell Halif weavers were engaged in pattern weaving. The source of wool and hair were the sheep and goats, the bones of which have been recovered from almost every location. These animals were not only a dietary source, but also a source for other by-products that made Tell Halif a textile-manufacturing center.

We know something about their cultic rituals through the different clay figurines we recovered that depicted the deities they worshiped. Other objects related to their cult practices include vessels for libation and incense altars. In one of the houses, we discovered a house shrine that was most likely active until the fall of the town.

In later periods, other inhabitants of the site mined its ruins for stones to be reused in their buildings; a cheap and quick way of obtaining building materials. They also dug pits that they used for storage, most likely of grains. These activities hamper our work of recovery because they not only destroyed certain architectural elements that were preserved after the fall of the town, but introduced later material into earlier strata. However, this makes our work interesting because we deal with a three-dimensional jigsaw puzzle that needs to be resolved in order to make sense. The more we manage to clarify from these ruins, the more we know about the history of the inhabitants of this land and about our own history because the roots of Western civilization are buried deep in this region.

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Oded Borowski is a professor of biblical archaeology and Hebrew and director of the program in Mediterranean Archaeology in Emory’s Department of Middle Eastern and South Asian Studies.