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| Earning UO Credits |
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Excavating an Ancient City
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| UO senior Annie Caruso |
Last summer, Annie Caruso and Peter Calley spent several sweaty weeks sifting through sand in Tel Rehov, five miles south of the West Bank. Both UO seniors and Judaic Studies majors, Caruso and Calley said the dig helped set the stage for their academic futures.
Calley is writing an honors thesis on the excavation and will also receive credit for his three-week trip. Caruso’s five-week trip earned her credits for her other major, anthropology.
Caruso said she first learned of the excavation while researching Dr. Amihai Mazar, a prominent Israeli biblical archaeologist, whom she was considering as a mentor for graduate studies at Hebrew University, the institutional sponsor of the excavation.
“I wanted to meet him as an undergraduate and gain specific experience in the area in which I hope to complete graduate research: Near Eastern archaeology of the late Bronze and Iron Age periods,” Caruso said.
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| Ancient pitcher found at Tel Rehov. |
No stranger to archaeological excavations, Caruso has dug in Oregon, the Caribbean, and Micronesia. The 22-year-old Eugene resident had aspired to study archaeology in Israel since she was in elementary school.
Despite her prior archaeological experience, Caruso felt unprepared, from a methodological perspective, to begin her graduate research. Tel Rehov helped train her eye to the specific architectural features and artifacts common to Iron Age archaeology of the eastern Mediterranean, she said, and she’s now able to recognize a mud brick wall, the floor of a room, an artificial pit, or a household stove.
“At first, I couldn’t even visually differentiate the bricks from the soil,” she said, “but by the end of the dig, I could tell a brick by the noise my trowel made when I scraped across it.”
The Tel Rehov dig was eye-opening for Peter Calley as well.
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| Calley holds a 3,000-year-old artifact. |
“The most incredible realization was that I was excavating a city that was over 3,000 years old,” he said. “When an artifact was recovered I knew that I was one of the first people in over three millennia to see it and touch it. That was truly amazing.”
Both Calley and Caruso prepared for their trips by studying the culture and religion of the region, as well as Modern Hebrew, in the UO’s Harold Schnitzer Family Program in Judaic Studies. The program, established in 1998, is interdisciplinary and offers a comprehensive undergraduate curriculum in the history, religion, and civilization of the Jewish people, as well as courses in Hebrew language and literature.
Despite all their preparations, Calley said one element in particular still took him by surprise: the heat.
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| "At first, I couldn’t even visually differentiate the bricks from the soil, said Caruso, but by the end of the dig, I could tell a brick by the noise my trowel made when I scraped across it." |
“I knew that it was going to be very warm but I have never experienced a place that was so hot, even at night,” said the Corvallis native. “We had to finish our work by noon— which meant that we started at 5:30 a.m. every day—so as to be back at our kibbutz before it became next to unbearable.”
Calley is planning to apply to Oxford University in England to pursue a Masters of Theology degree in Hebrew and Jewish Studies next year.
And, though Caruso’s long-time dream of studying archaeology in Israel was fulfilled this past summer, her curiosity hasn’t been quenched. She’s also applying to graduate programs and aims to earn her doctorate in Near Eastern studies here in the United States.
But that doesn’t mean she’ll be putting away her traveling shoes. This spring, after spending a month in Europe, she’ll return to the Caribbean to assist with a dig on the island of Carriacou.
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Copyright © 2004 University of Oregon
Updated June 1, 2004
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