WEBVTT
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[SPEAKER_00]: Welcome to Lee Sewing, an Eden Project podcast.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Telling you a bigger story of a greater love.
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[SPEAKER_05]: We're excited today to have a couple of guys in the studio with us to talk about archaeology.
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[SPEAKER_05]: That's awesome.
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[SPEAKER_05]: The first one is from the Pillar Seminary in Omaha, Nebraska.
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[SPEAKER_05]: His name is Dr. Scott Booth.
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[SPEAKER_05]: And he has been digging at a place in Israel called Alville, Batma, Akha.
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[SPEAKER_05]: Nice.
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[SPEAKER_05]: And what's cool about that?
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[SPEAKER_01]: It is quite possibly the most significant archaeological site in Israel.
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[SPEAKER_05]: Okay, cool.
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[SPEAKER_05]: We'll hit pause on that and we'll come back to that statement because that's intriguing.
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[SPEAKER_05]: And then the other guy with us is John Harmon, who is a doctoral student at Southwestern Seminary in Fort Worth, and also has been doing archeology for about ten years, right?
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[SPEAKER_06]: Yep.
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[SPEAKER_06]: Doug for the first time at Till Dan in, in, in, then I've kind of cut the archeology bug.
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[SPEAKER_06]: and Doug at Rehove and Gezer, and then I've been digging it, I fell bait my cost since, twenty thirteen, I think, about twenty fourteen.
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[SPEAKER_05]: Basically, you guys are the ones to talk about archaeology.
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[SPEAKER_05]: And so, let's start like this, just a very simple question.
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[SPEAKER_05]: What is archaeology?
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[SPEAKER_07]: The real question being, are you Indiana Jones?
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[SPEAKER_07]: Yes.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Yes.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Yes.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Yes.
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[SPEAKER_01]: That's exactly what we do.
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[SPEAKER_07]: Yeah, you can't see him, but he does have an Indiana Jones hat.
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[SPEAKER_07]: So I'm not on the thread right now.
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[SPEAKER_05]: The whip is in the car.
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[SPEAKER_05]: Nice.
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[SPEAKER_05]: So yeah, for people who are like, yeah, I know that term, I know archeology, but like, I have no idea what you guys do.
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[SPEAKER_05]: What what does archeology and what does that look like?
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[SPEAKER_06]: Well, I think most broadly, it's just the study of humanity's past.
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[SPEAKER_06]: And particularly, it's the past as represented in material culture.
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[SPEAKER_06]: And so it enables us to see beyond just what the text would tell us of more of what life on the ground looked like and how people lived and how they worked, how society function.
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[SPEAKER_05]: So it's kind of like a lot of ways, it's like a doorway to the past.
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[SPEAKER_06]: for digging this stuff up and pulling it out of the ground we're able to see like oh this is this is what it was like for them to live in the first century and what everyday life was and what they valued and yeah exactly because text whether it's the Bible or or another historical text only really tells us what the author wanted to focus on and a lot of the times they're not concerned about the nitty gritty of daily life
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[SPEAKER_06]: and who the neighbors were, who the next city state over the top next to everyone else.
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[SPEAKER_06]: And so it allows us to get a lot broader picture of ancient society.
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[SPEAKER_05]: If you're talking about it from a place standpoint, it's the thing that kind of sets the stage so that the story can, we have the story, the narrative, but it's the thing that sets the stage to help us understand.
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[SPEAKER_06]: Yeah, I think that's a good imagery.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, cool.
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[SPEAKER_01]: There's some background to it that I think is helpful to see you can understand archaeology and then I think some of the pitfalls of using it and or abusing it.
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[SPEAKER_05]: So down that same train of thought, archaeology is a fairly new discipline.
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[SPEAKER_05]: Yeah, isn't it?
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[SPEAKER_05]: So talk to us about a little bit of the overview of the history of it and how did it become the discipline that it is today.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Okay, so typically that discussion kind of begins in the last hundred, hundred and fifty years, but like it has a richer history than that in the West dating back to Renaissance and before when they started having this big antiquities portion, they wanted to go see stuff.
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[SPEAKER_01]: And then also even in the east, there are Islamic scholars who are interested in it prior to the Ottoman Empire and pretty cool stuff.
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[SPEAKER_01]: But I think what's important for the beginning of it, especially in the West, and it's kind of like surge of archeology that happens in the late eighteen hundreds and nineteen hundreds.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Early nineteen hundreds, it's text driven.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Which means like you read about all these cool cities and you want to go find them and dig them up.
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[SPEAKER_06]: Yeah, right.
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[SPEAKER_06]: Whether it's the Bible or Homer.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, yeah, it doesn't matter.
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[SPEAKER_01]: You want to go, you know, there's nothing malicious.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, right.
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[SPEAKER_01]: You want, like, oh, there's none of that.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Go find Nineveh.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Let's go see what you're wanted like validate to text or even understand the world of the text.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah.
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[SPEAKER_01]: What were they in?
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[SPEAKER_01]: Right.
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[SPEAKER_01]: But the the issue is it's really driven by some textual investigation.
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[SPEAKER_01]: So at that point, it's even understood as kind of
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[SPEAKER_01]: the hand maiden, right?
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[SPEAKER_01]: It's not its own discipline.
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[SPEAKER_01]: It's serving some other need which in this case is the study of tax.
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[SPEAKER_01]: And then you're like, oh, we should go find Troy and dig it out.
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[SPEAKER_01]: We should find in a van.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Figure out what's there.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Babble on it.
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[SPEAKER_01]: So it's driven by those inquiries.
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[SPEAKER_01]: And it's also driven by like, oh, we know that great empires were there, right?
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[SPEAKER_01]: We know that great empires were at Nenema.
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[SPEAKER_01]: So when you show up at Nenema, what you're interested in is finding those empires.
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[SPEAKER_01]: And so they were like literally tunnel through it.
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[SPEAKER_05]: This may be so sad.
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[SPEAKER_05]: Because tunneling through it is.
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[SPEAKER_01]: It was okay early on.
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[SPEAKER_05]: Yeah, but they're destroying a bunch of.
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[SPEAKER_05]: They're destroying when they do that.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, because what they're doing is their primary motivation is to understand their text better.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah.
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[SPEAKER_06]: And so you've got to get to the text.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Right.
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[SPEAKER_06]: And also if they get museum pieces.
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[SPEAKER_06]: That's true.
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[SPEAKER_06]: The institutions.
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[SPEAKER_06]: Yeah.
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[SPEAKER_06]: Yeah.
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[SPEAKER_06]: Yeah.
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[SPEAKER_07]: So if the motivation isn't trying to understand the text better, what's a pure motivation and archeology then?
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[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah.
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[SPEAKER_01]: The archeology spent some time trying to figure that out.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Okay.
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[SPEAKER_01]: So this is super broad paint brush stuff here.
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[SPEAKER_01]: So there are exceptions to everything.
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[SPEAKER_01]: We're going to say on this, because there's real early examples of people like collecting funnel data and all kinds of botanical data and stuff, even in the early night and hundreds.
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[SPEAKER_01]: But on the most part, you're looking for these big fines.
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[SPEAKER_01]: That's going to wow the public or something.
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[SPEAKER_05]: Did you need people to fund your dick?
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[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Yes.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Which side would plug here?
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[SPEAKER_01]: No, I'm kidding.
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[SPEAKER_08]: What would you rather wait?
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[SPEAKER_01]: Did I mention that Avela Malka is the most significant.
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[SPEAKER_01]: All right.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Anyway, needs big donors.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Yes.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Yes.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Anyway.
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[SPEAKER_01]: So archeology then turned it.
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[SPEAKER_01]: The archeologists were frustrated by this because the more they're in the dirt, the more they want to understand about what's going on with these people, right?
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[SPEAKER_01]: So a bunch of methodological questions came up, what do we do?
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[SPEAKER_01]: How do we do this?
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[SPEAKER_01]: And they start really doing a lot of internal investigation, like philosophical inquiries about like, how do we do this correctly?
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[SPEAKER_01]: And then you get stuff like stratification, like, like, hey, we should dig like flat.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Like we should follow.
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[SPEAKER_05]: So by stratification, you mean layers.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah.
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[SPEAKER_01]: They start figuring this out.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Or they start putting together ceramic sequences.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Right.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Who is that John?
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[SPEAKER_01]: That's Peter.
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[SPEAKER_06]: Yeah.
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[SPEAKER_06]: He dug an absurd number of sites.
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[SPEAKER_06]: I forget what it was.
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[SPEAKER_06]: But and he was a genius.
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[SPEAKER_06]: And I think mostly just by chance, he noticed that pots from different levels looked different.
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[SPEAKER_06]: And they seemed to be consistent from site to site.
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[SPEAKER_06]: And he came up with the idea of
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[SPEAKER_06]: We can look at the ceramics that paints and people are using and can use that as a tool for dating.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, like so like you go to one site, this is gonna be the stupidest thing, but like you go down to one site and you're like, all the pottery here is purple and then keep digging down and then it's red and then it's blue and you go to the next site and you start digging and it's red and he says, oh, wait a second.
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[SPEAKER_01]: I bet these folks lived with this and he digs down and it's blue again.
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[SPEAKER_01]: He's like, whoa, and he does a ton of these and now you can start building a picture
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[SPEAKER_01]: that's has nothing to do with the text, right?
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[SPEAKER_01]: So then, to get back to you original question like so, what is pure archaeology or pure motivation in archaeology?
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[SPEAKER_01]: I think that just want to understand the people kind of from the ground up.
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[SPEAKER_07]: So then the text is aside to help you, like identify, but it's not your driving force.
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[SPEAKER_01]: In that sense, the text becomes a tool, right?
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[SPEAKER_01]: Like to help you understand at least some perspectives about some of the things that happened to some of the people.
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[SPEAKER_07]: I see what you did there.
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[SPEAKER_07]: Some some some some.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, because when we think of the text and you think, oh, well, this is a big view of what happened.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Well, tell me from the Bible, for example, what was daily life like?
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[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Good luck.
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[SPEAKER_06]: also archeology becomes a text in itself and so you have the biblical text that gives one perspective and you have archeology that can potentially give like a broader perspective and then scholar who wants to recreate the history of the Bible or the history of the ancient world can draw on
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[SPEAKER_05]: written text and it's not just limited to the Bible I mean there are any of these texts that from that world so like to use the metaphor talking about earlier is this is like a stage that's being set but it's almost like a like on a studio lot you have these stages that can be used for multiple things and so like hey okay so the Bible plays out on this part over here
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[SPEAKER_05]: but then the Babylonian texts play out over here and a Hittite text, play out over here.
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[SPEAKER_01]: And they're all trying to tell you something.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, we're all trying to convince you of something and make you think something.
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[SPEAKER_05]: Yeah.
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[SPEAKER_05]: And they're also a lot more interrelated than most of the time people give.
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[SPEAKER_05]: Yeah, that's true.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah.
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[SPEAKER_01]: So the thing that's neat about archeology is that you can collect a ton of raw data.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Right.
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[SPEAKER_01]: So for example, you can get down to what kind of food where they're eating, because you can go inside of their pots, you can collect seeds and stuff.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Right.
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[SPEAKER_01]: which if you know what kind of food they're eating, you can know who they're trading, if you can get a keto diet.
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[SPEAKER_01]: But one of the things that's also interesting about the motivations of a text are locked.
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[SPEAKER_01]: And the Bible, they're trying to convince you.
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[SPEAKER_01]: that the Lord has got.
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[SPEAKER_01]: And they're trying to tell you certain things about them, right?
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[SPEAKER_01]: And it's locked.
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[SPEAKER_01]: You can't change that.
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[SPEAKER_01]: But in archeology, you now you approach a site and you'll be very explicit, let's say.
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[SPEAKER_01]: All right.
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[SPEAKER_01]: We're going to get as much raw data as we can, but understand that our motivations here are this, this and this.
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[SPEAKER_01]: and you never dig a site completely, right?
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[SPEAKER_01]: Because the next person's gonna come along and say, all right, we're gonna shift our motivations here.
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[SPEAKER_01]: We now have new questions to ask.
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[SPEAKER_01]: So you have a kind of, it's not the exact same data because you destroyed it as you went through it.
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[SPEAKER_01]: But you can approach a site now with new questions.
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[SPEAKER_05]: New questions that have arisen because of the work you've done.
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[SPEAKER_01]: All manner of things.
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[SPEAKER_01]: It could be you're asking a regional question.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Like I want to know what
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[SPEAKER_01]: Okay, these people lived here.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Like, who did they trade with?
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[SPEAKER_01]: Who was in, and why does it matter who they trade with?
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[SPEAKER_01]: Because then you know who they're influencing and who's influencing them, right?
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[SPEAKER_01]: And you can track patterns of behavior and I really need stuff that we all kind of take for as assumptions and daily life.
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[SPEAKER_01]: You can start slowly peeling back those layers.
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[SPEAKER_05]: Something that I think is interesting that I've learned about use Scott, just tracking with you.
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[SPEAKER_05]: Which, by the way, I'll plug this right now.
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[SPEAKER_05]: Scott, along with the faculty at Pillar does a Pillar podcast.
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[SPEAKER_05]: Woohoo!
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[SPEAKER_05]: And I would definitely encourage you guys to check that out.
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[SPEAKER_05]: You can just go find it on iTunes and you're all like Google Play and stuff like that as well.
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[SPEAKER_05]: Who knows?
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[SPEAKER_05]: Yeah, whatever.
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[SPEAKER_05]: Yeah, go find it.
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[SPEAKER_05]: But it's definitely worth listening to.
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[SPEAKER_05]: But one of the things that I've learned about you is you did your PhD thesis on how to read the data that comes out of the ground.
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[SPEAKER_05]: So talk to us about like everybody's digging this stuff up.
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[SPEAKER_05]: But is there a certain way that, you know, one guy's going to dig it up and he's going to be like, well, this means this.
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[SPEAKER_05]: Another guy's going to dig up maybe some very similar and say, I mean, something totally different.
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[SPEAKER_05]: And I think the heart of the question is, how do we trust archaeology?
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[SPEAKER_05]: How do we trust that the results that are coming out of it are reflective of what was actually going on?
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[SPEAKER_01]: You trust it because they're very, very good at what they're doing.
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[SPEAKER_01]: So in terms of like a bunch of data comes out of the ground and they're going to interpret it differently.
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[SPEAKER_01]: That's just part of any science, right?
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[SPEAKER_01]: Where they're just struggling to get enough information
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[SPEAKER_01]: and enough debate to wrestle with information.
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[SPEAKER_01]: And while it's up in the air or being debated, you just allow that to be a little bit wet cement until and you've got to be okay with that.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Any discipline, you have to be okay with the struggle.
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[SPEAKER_01]: So in terms of what's the right way to do it on the outside is to trust the specialist because they are very good at it.
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[SPEAKER_01]: And the discipline itself has a lot of checks
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[SPEAKER_01]: in place to say, hey, this person's fringe and or this this set of ideas, these are worth debating over here.
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[SPEAKER_01]: This is crazy town.
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[SPEAKER_01]: We now know right.
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[SPEAKER_06]: Definitely and also the issues that that are debatable and debated most good scholars acknowledge that and and say this is an ongoing conversation and this is where the data leads us
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[SPEAKER_06]: But like the fringe guys are more they're usually more have their heels dug in a bit more like this is absolutely the way it was.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, you'll also find them like attached to text in a certain way and you'll feel them going backwards.
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[SPEAKER_07]: Yeah, that's what I was going to ask like how do you leave these pre-suppositions at the door to walk into a site like that feels impossible.
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[SPEAKER_01]: It is, you just do your best to say what they are.
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[SPEAKER_01]: So this is the thing, archeology isn't a hard science, right?
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[SPEAKER_01]: None of what archeology does can be repeated, right?
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[SPEAKER_01]: Because you destroy the evidence that you go.
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[SPEAKER_01]: It can be almost repeated.
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[SPEAKER_01]: So it's not a soft sound.
13:54.620 --> 14:00.342
[SPEAKER_01]: You know, it's not completely soft, because you can while, like so, let's say we dig at a bell.
14:01.222 --> 14:02.643
[SPEAKER_01]: We're digging a room, right?
14:02.703 --> 14:04.964
[SPEAKER_01]: And we come up with a thesis about what's going on here.
14:05.484 --> 14:07.045
[SPEAKER_01]: It's based on the data we pulled out.
14:07.345 --> 14:09.786
[SPEAKER_01]: Maybe we miss some, but you'll never get that back.
14:09.826 --> 14:10.026
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah.
14:10.346 --> 14:12.567
[SPEAKER_06]: That's also why we record everything.
14:12.587 --> 14:20.250
[SPEAKER_06]: Have meticulously as we can because we want to be able to reconstruct it theoretically on paper because we can't physically reconstruct.
14:20.530 --> 14:21.531
[SPEAKER_05]: How do you record it?
14:21.791 --> 14:22.011
[SPEAKER_05]: Oh no.
14:22.653 --> 14:26.195
[SPEAKER_06]: Well, we did start a graphically like layer by layer.
14:26.775 --> 14:30.197
[SPEAKER_06]: Material gets laid down as people live.
14:30.977 --> 14:34.158
[SPEAKER_06]: And over the centuries, it builds up and up on itself.
14:34.939 --> 14:37.500
[SPEAKER_06]: And we're able to discern that as we dig.
14:37.520 --> 14:43.943
[SPEAKER_06]: And so we keep all of the material from the same layer together and record it together.
14:43.963 --> 14:48.005
[SPEAKER_06]: And as there are different features, we note those and record them.
14:48.025 --> 14:51.827
[SPEAKER_06]: Basically, we keep everything as separate as we can and everything
14:52.887 --> 14:54.648
[SPEAKER_06]: as precise as we can.
14:54.808 --> 15:05.473
[SPEAKER_05]: So do you like when you pull stuff out of the ground or you like separating it based on, hey, we think this belongs with this other stuff that we have dug up and we're going to put it in this container.
15:05.753 --> 15:08.874
[SPEAKER_05]: And no, we're going to actually put it in the container.
15:09.174 --> 15:09.615
[SPEAKER_05]: You nailed it.
15:09.895 --> 15:10.355
[SPEAKER_05]: Okay, cool.
15:10.395 --> 15:10.615
[SPEAKER_05]: Yeah.
15:10.675 --> 15:15.057
[SPEAKER_05]: So you put it in a container and then it's like, okay, we think this is what this is.
15:15.337 --> 15:16.958
[SPEAKER_05]: So it's not when you say destroy it.
15:17.698 --> 15:22.640
[SPEAKER_05]: You mean, it's just no longer in the place where it originally was.
15:22.680 --> 15:24.800
[SPEAKER_05]: You're not like taking a hammer and burning it.
15:24.860 --> 15:30.362
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, like, and so the reason you're doing that is because you're developing theories as you go down, right?
15:30.402 --> 15:32.443
[SPEAKER_01]: But you want to prove yourself wrong, too.
15:33.123 --> 15:43.267
[SPEAKER_01]: because you're gonna go down in the house next door and you wanna be able to say, oh, that was different, but you didn't destroy the information so much so that you can't go back and say, oh, you know, that's what that is.
15:43.327 --> 15:49.650
[SPEAKER_01]: Because as you're going through and you're peeling these layers back, you're digging down with a pick and some, you're scraping through, right?
15:50.050 --> 15:53.332
[SPEAKER_01]: And you think, ah, I've come to a new layer and you'll mark it.
15:54.092 --> 15:54.692
[SPEAKER_01]: What if you're wrong?
15:55.713 --> 15:59.835
[SPEAKER_01]: Here's the thing, the discipline has been doing it long enough that there's all these checks
16:00.663 --> 16:01.864
[SPEAKER_01]: to say, hey, you know what?
16:01.904 --> 16:02.784
[SPEAKER_01]: We thought this was two.
16:02.865 --> 16:03.285
[SPEAKER_01]: It's one.
16:03.505 --> 16:04.245
[SPEAKER_01]: We thought this was one.
16:04.265 --> 16:04.986
[SPEAKER_01]: I think it's two.
16:05.646 --> 16:10.410
[SPEAKER_01]: And like, there's a lot of ways to make sure that you can catch yourself.
16:11.090 --> 16:11.811
[SPEAKER_01]: It's not perfect.
16:12.571 --> 16:16.754
[SPEAKER_05]: But it's almost like, yeah, it's almost like you're looking through a really dirty lens.
16:17.435 --> 16:20.136
[SPEAKER_05]: And the longer you do it, the cleaner the lens gets.
16:20.637 --> 16:26.321
[SPEAKER_05]: So like, we couldn't really see this fifty years ago, but now we know because we're doing it for fifty years that
16:26.981 --> 16:34.147
[SPEAKER_05]: These kinds of checks are clarifying what when we encounter this thing, then we were able to better discern what that is.
16:34.228 --> 16:35.709
[SPEAKER_05]: We're seeing it more clearly now.
16:36.354 --> 16:57.895
[SPEAKER_07]: So help us understand what a day looks like for y'all like you're going to a site you don't just like pick up a shovel and dig right so what does a day look like it's much slower than I think a lot of people would anticipate yeah well possibly but also a lot of people imagine us just out there digging with dental picks and brushes and we actually move a lot of dirt because
16:59.136 --> 17:02.381
[SPEAKER_06]: Often areas would get back filled after they're occupied.
17:02.561 --> 17:07.689
[SPEAKER_06]: And so when you know that you're digging through just garbage, you have to get through it pretty pretty.
17:07.709 --> 17:08.110
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah.
17:08.410 --> 17:08.670
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah.
17:08.710 --> 17:12.456
[SPEAKER_01]: That means like to back, but look at me like someone's living in an area in a house falls down or something.
17:12.596 --> 17:14.459
[SPEAKER_01]: They'll like level it fill it up and make just flat.
17:14.559 --> 17:22.144
[SPEAKER_06]: Just like we do now, like you'll see people knock down a building and they'll fill the basement end with the debris from the building.
17:23.124 --> 17:26.366
[SPEAKER_06]: But typical day starts really early.
17:26.706 --> 17:28.627
[SPEAKER_06]: What time and what time to usually get on the bus?
17:28.687 --> 17:29.068
[SPEAKER_06]: It's here.
17:29.168 --> 17:31.049
[SPEAKER_01]: It feels like.
17:31.409 --> 17:33.510
[SPEAKER_01]: I think it's five, five, fifteen on the bus.
17:33.951 --> 17:34.331
[SPEAKER_01]: Is that right?
17:35.605 --> 17:40.926
[SPEAKER_01]: Your picture in the ground as the sun is coming up because it's too hot to dig in midday.
17:40.966 --> 17:41.166
[SPEAKER_01]: Right.
17:41.346 --> 17:45.927
[SPEAKER_01]: So as soon as the sun is on the horizon and you can see well enough to swing weapons.
17:47.968 --> 17:49.428
[SPEAKER_01]: Then close proximity.
17:49.588 --> 17:53.489
[SPEAKER_05]: Then if you're going after then you're doing so how long does a dig season last?
17:53.989 --> 18:01.211
[SPEAKER_05]: Usually four to six weeks and what is that in tail just the just the actual swinging of the pick and the scraping and the
18:02.048 --> 18:11.275
[SPEAKER_06]: Well, usually you spend about a week getting everything set up and clearing out the things that have gotten overgrown in the years since the last dig.
18:11.295 --> 18:14.858
[SPEAKER_06]: Because that's not the other thing that maybe not everybody knows.
18:14.938 --> 18:18.301
[SPEAKER_06]: It's typically we dig during the summer.
18:18.501 --> 18:23.005
[SPEAKER_06]: So we're only digging about a month out of the year at most sites.
18:23.465 --> 18:29.169
[SPEAKER_06]: And so we spend about a week clearing out the overgrowth and the worry, the wash, the back wash from
18:30.010 --> 18:32.516
[SPEAKER_06]: There's a rainy season to clean it before you.
18:32.536 --> 18:35.082
[SPEAKER_05]: Yeah, and why is that?
18:35.162 --> 18:36.866
[SPEAKER_05]: Why do we only dig six weeks out of the year?
18:37.147 --> 18:37.628
[SPEAKER_05]: Oh, married.
18:42.519 --> 18:44.560
[SPEAKER_06]: Why doesn't somebody dig throughout the year?
18:44.941 --> 19:02.890
[SPEAKER_06]: Part of it is the climate because you want to dig when it's dry because if you're in the middle of a season and you get a downpour, you can deal with it because people still do archeology and water climates, but it's definitely more manageable to dig during the dry season.
19:03.570 --> 19:13.601
[SPEAKER_06]: And also since it's driven by academia, you know, most dig directors are professors and a lot of staff members are our students.
19:14.141 --> 19:19.567
[SPEAKER_06]: And so it just it just kind of works out that you do it during the summer when everybody is available.
19:19.968 --> 19:25.634
[SPEAKER_05]: Talk to us about when you pull stuff out of the dirt, how long does it take before you realize what you have?
19:26.034 --> 19:26.314
[SPEAKER_01]: Oh gee.
19:26.334 --> 19:27.234
[SPEAKER_06]: Events on what it is.
19:27.254 --> 19:27.374
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah.
19:27.454 --> 19:34.036
[SPEAKER_06]: I mean, sometimes we know pretty immediately in other times it's we have no idea what we just pulled out.
19:34.356 --> 19:37.357
[SPEAKER_01]: Though we should say there's like one of the things that's super helpful is pottery sorting.
19:37.457 --> 19:37.717
[SPEAKER_06]: Yeah.
19:38.137 --> 19:41.478
[SPEAKER_01]: So while you're going down, you know, you've been on an excavation.
19:41.518 --> 19:42.838
[SPEAKER_01]: There's so much pottery.
19:42.878 --> 19:43.038
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah.
19:43.098 --> 19:43.298
[SPEAKER_01]: Right.
19:43.578 --> 19:45.599
[SPEAKER_01]: So you collect most of it.
19:45.679 --> 19:45.879
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah.
19:46.259 --> 19:47.579
[SPEAKER_01]: And you stick it in buckets.
19:47.659 --> 19:50.220
[SPEAKER_01]: It's labeled so that you know where everything comes from.
19:50.480 --> 19:52.360
[SPEAKER_01]: And then in the app, you wash it all off.
19:52.400 --> 19:55.741
[SPEAKER_01]: Get it clean to make sure you can erase any inscriptions on it.
19:58.562 --> 20:06.566
[SPEAKER_01]: So you clean it all off and then once it's dried out, the following day or whatever, you sit down at a table and you start sorting it.
20:07.147 --> 20:08.287
[SPEAKER_01]: And these are experts.
20:08.307 --> 20:09.228
[SPEAKER_01]: So we have it above.
20:09.268 --> 20:10.968
[SPEAKER_01]: We have Nova.
20:11.189 --> 20:12.049
[SPEAKER_01]: She's amazing.
20:12.649 --> 20:17.412
[SPEAKER_01]: And Bob, right, they're sitting there and they're working, looking at it and say, hey, you know,
20:18.172 --> 20:20.514
[SPEAKER_01]: at this side over here, this belongs to this period.
20:20.534 --> 20:26.679
[SPEAKER_01]: And oh, oh, and so you're starting to form pictures as you're moving through the information.
20:26.759 --> 20:30.862
[SPEAKER_01]: So sometimes it's days until you really know what you were in.
20:30.882 --> 20:36.667
[SPEAKER_01]: I mean, you have suspicions because there's pottery that will tell you, oh, you're an iron one, you're an iron two, whatever.
20:36.987 --> 21:03.047
[SPEAKER_05]: an iron one and two are like the various it ages yeah a lot of times I think people have the misconception that because they have an Indiana Jones type mentality where they're like you know the the golden idol comes out of the ground and you like know exactly what it is immediately and and it's this really kind of just excitement around all of it when in reality the discipline is much more like okay we have something here and it may be a while before you realize what that
21:03.647 --> 21:04.167
[SPEAKER_05]: thing is.
21:04.267 --> 21:08.909
[SPEAKER_01]: That can be years until you're understanding what you're going.
21:08.949 --> 21:12.510
[SPEAKER_01]: It's weird, which people are like, well, it's publications can take a long time.
21:12.550 --> 21:12.730
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah.
21:12.991 --> 21:15.511
[SPEAKER_01]: I imagine you're peeling layers across, right?
21:15.571 --> 21:16.892
[SPEAKER_01]: Even on one site, right?
21:17.212 --> 21:19.413
[SPEAKER_01]: Even in your yard, right?
21:19.593 --> 21:27.236
[SPEAKER_01]: You're peeling, you dig down your backyard, you dig down your front yard, try to figure out to correlate those exactly, right?
21:27.296 --> 21:30.757
[SPEAKER_01]: Well, then you've got like, fifty of those, sixty a hundred of those.
21:30.877 --> 21:32.598
[SPEAKER_01]: And like, how do you then understand
21:33.178 --> 21:57.391
[SPEAKER_01]: what was going on at that site from eleven hundred bc to a thousand b's and given all those different things from all different parts of the site and they're not connected it's just you're digging these patches and you're trying to connect the patches it's it's complicated so you bounce theories around with each other you argue there's lots of yelling yeah if you have three archaeologists together you have at least four theories that's right
21:59.072 --> 22:02.533
[SPEAKER_01]: But that's just because they're sorting through really complicated.
22:02.913 --> 22:08.314
[SPEAKER_01]: And I should say again, they're really good at it because they've been doing it.
22:08.634 --> 22:15.655
[SPEAKER_07]: So as we've been talking about this, like our listeners may be thinking, you're pulling up a bunch of pottery chunks out of the ground and washing it.
22:15.695 --> 22:17.515
[SPEAKER_07]: Like, what's helpful about that?
22:17.555 --> 22:20.516
[SPEAKER_07]: So help us understand what we can gain from this discipline.
22:20.536 --> 22:25.057
[SPEAKER_07]: Like, what do we gain from y'all spend in six weeks and hot Israel digging up pottery?
22:25.277 --> 22:26.257
[SPEAKER_07]: What's helpful to us?
22:26.537 --> 22:32.719
[SPEAKER_06]: I think the biggest thing is is just what life on the ground looked like for the ancient people.
22:33.079 --> 22:35.540
[SPEAKER_06]: Maybe not the biggest thing but a significant thing.
22:36.241 --> 22:44.284
[SPEAKER_06]: It provides context as if you're reading the Bible or reading Homer or reading some other piece of literature.
22:44.924 --> 22:52.507
[SPEAKER_06]: You only get the perspective that the author presents to you and they might not care what the guy down the street was doing.
22:52.547 --> 22:55.428
[SPEAKER_06]: They might not care what the average, how the average person lived.
22:55.868 --> 22:57.089
[SPEAKER_01]: Or they may assume that you know.
22:57.149 --> 22:58.570
[SPEAKER_06]: Yeah, that's a good point.
22:58.610 --> 22:58.810
[SPEAKER_06]: Yeah.
22:58.970 --> 23:00.511
[SPEAKER_01]: They think you understand a lot of assumptions.
23:00.571 --> 23:02.453
[SPEAKER_06]: It's written to a particular audience.
23:03.233 --> 23:18.364
[SPEAKER_06]: Yeah, I think the biggest thing for a reader of the Bible that archaeology provides is just context that sort of the social, historical world that the text took place in that's very foreign to the average person today.
23:18.404 --> 23:22.266
[SPEAKER_05]: So if you guys can give us an example of a way that that shows up.
23:22.626 --> 23:22.867
[SPEAKER_01]: Okay.
23:22.907 --> 23:24.648
[SPEAKER_01]: So I just picked up this book.
23:25.168 --> 23:28.849
[SPEAKER_01]: It's an investigation into where the tribes of Israel go.
23:28.909 --> 23:32.810
[SPEAKER_01]: And one of the things that they're looking at is after Israel's conquered by a Syria.
23:32.830 --> 23:35.511
[SPEAKER_01]: It's like what will happen to where they go, right?
23:36.051 --> 23:38.831
[SPEAKER_01]: And so they look at what happened in the south.
23:39.431 --> 23:44.453
[SPEAKER_01]: And they see an influx, archaeologically, of material that's typically in the north.
23:45.773 --> 23:46.793
[SPEAKER_01]: Like so wide you care.
23:47.273 --> 23:53.695
[SPEAKER_01]: But if you go read the prophets and you go read the book of kings, there's all these warnings about behaving like they did in the north.
23:54.755 --> 23:59.838
[SPEAKER_01]: So it's one thing to say, theologically, oh, it's just like, don't do what those guys did over there.
24:00.438 --> 24:06.401
[SPEAKER_01]: But if you can contextualize their world better and understand that they just got a whole bunch of new neighbors.
24:07.161 --> 24:10.243
[SPEAKER_01]: And these neighbors just experienced this deportation.
24:10.883 --> 24:19.207
[SPEAKER_01]: And you can start to see that when the prophets are speaking, they're speaking into a world where the northern influence is coming down.
24:19.667 --> 24:20.267
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, right.
24:20.307 --> 24:22.328
[SPEAKER_05]: Yeah, and so like the literally.
24:22.428 --> 24:24.589
[SPEAKER_05]: Yes, and so then materially coming down.
24:24.649 --> 24:27.791
[SPEAKER_01]: Yes, and the cultural and the cultural influence would be there, right?
24:27.911 --> 24:35.214
[SPEAKER_01]: And if the more you can contextualize and make the people of the Bible people and really understand not some abstract.
24:35.294 --> 24:41.136
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, the more you can keep your theology from being an abstract area, right?
24:41.316 --> 24:44.578
[SPEAKER_01]: So they are thinking that you understand
24:45.418 --> 24:51.220
[SPEAKER_01]: For example, the role of women in their society, when they bring that up and they're talking about, they have all these assumptions.
24:51.960 --> 24:55.081
[SPEAKER_01]: But how do you, we don't know what that is, right?
24:55.141 --> 24:57.582
[SPEAKER_05]: And our assumptions are definitely different.
24:57.822 --> 24:59.623
[SPEAKER_01]: They are totally different, right?
24:59.723 --> 25:07.265
[SPEAKER_01]: And so being able to do things like, for example, certain pottery bunches of it had to have been made by women, well, how do they know?
25:07.385 --> 25:11.247
[SPEAKER_01]: Because men's hands don't fit down to make it, right?
25:11.407 --> 25:12.327
[SPEAKER_01]: Have you seen these studies?
25:12.707 --> 25:15.368
[SPEAKER_01]: But it's the other women or children like this is how this potter is.
25:15.408 --> 25:19.469
[SPEAKER_01]: Well, that helps you start forming an understanding of how society is working.
25:19.830 --> 25:26.592
[SPEAKER_01]: You put all this stuff together and then when you're reading the verses, these are real people and you're understanding who they're talking to.
25:27.140 --> 25:29.121
[SPEAKER_07]: So it feels like the roles have sort of switched.
25:29.201 --> 25:33.442
[SPEAKER_07]: So when we started this conversation, you're like, hey, for an archeologist, the text is a tool.
25:33.682 --> 25:36.903
[SPEAKER_07]: And so for somebody who's reading the scripture, then archeology can be a tool.
25:37.043 --> 25:37.483
[SPEAKER_00]: Is that right?
25:37.503 --> 25:37.883
[SPEAKER_00]: Exactly.
25:37.923 --> 25:43.485
[SPEAKER_07]: Like, hey, you pull that in and you can better understand these were real people who were living a real life.
25:43.865 --> 25:51.807
[SPEAKER_07]: And as I read the Bible, then I can understand better what that author was trying to tell me because I've context for what kind of world they were living in.
25:51.927 --> 25:52.147
[SPEAKER_01]: Right.
25:52.187 --> 25:55.808
[SPEAKER_01]: So like another example, this is like, well, what happens when we tell you that
25:56.229 --> 26:01.311
[SPEAKER_01]: There's very little evidence that the Lord was followed throughout Judea and Israel.
26:01.670 --> 26:26.407
[SPEAKER_01]: back what yeah like there's very little evidence there's cult stuff or at least a quote the following the lord according to the way do to honor me in leviticus layout if you do that then you're like oh no the lord had to have been followed by all these people like no you'll read the profits like yeah there's been a lot of time telling people they need to be fall yeah so they have to be surprising that they weren't that's right so that you start to develop an on the ground view that this
26:27.107 --> 26:37.739
[SPEAKER_01]: Pure yawism that the Bible is advocating was not followed very often at all right and this get another really cool one is the one we're talking about in the way here.
26:38.340 --> 26:44.968
[SPEAKER_06]: Damn yeah speaking of the difference between the north and the south and Israel and Judah if you read
26:45.348 --> 26:47.048
[SPEAKER_05]: wrote real quickly for our listeners.
26:47.228 --> 26:50.689
[SPEAKER_05]: So around nine thirty one B.C.
26:50.949 --> 26:51.149
[SPEAKER_05]: ish.
26:51.369 --> 26:55.530
[SPEAKER_05]: There was a king of Israel who was acting crazy.
26:56.051 --> 26:59.251
[SPEAKER_05]: And so the the kingdom divided into two different kingdoms.
26:59.591 --> 27:01.932
[SPEAKER_05]: And the northern kingdom was called Israel.
27:02.412 --> 27:03.872
[SPEAKER_05]: And the southern kingdom was called Judah.
27:04.112 --> 27:05.473
[SPEAKER_05]: So that's what he's leading.
27:05.533 --> 27:09.054
[SPEAKER_01]: So he's about to tell you about what the first king in the north did.
27:09.434 --> 27:11.434
[SPEAKER_05]: Jerobon.
27:11.854 --> 27:13.875
[SPEAKER_01]: Now we've contextualized what you're about.
27:13.895 --> 27:14.555
[SPEAKER_06]: Yeah, exactly.
27:15.716 --> 27:22.045
[SPEAKER_06]: So as you read the Bible, they have a lot of condemnation of the Northern practices.
27:23.158 --> 27:40.649
[SPEAKER_06]: And you would kind of assume that they were just a bunch of completely apostate pagans who aren't trying to worship the Lord at all because Jeroboam established new sanctuaries at Dan and new priesthood.
27:40.889 --> 27:42.290
[SPEAKER_06]: Yeah, exactly.
27:42.330 --> 27:44.272
[SPEAKER_06]: And golden calves.
27:45.232 --> 27:46.053
[SPEAKER_06]: Not y'all waste stuff.
27:46.537 --> 27:53.681
[SPEAKER_06]: Well, the Bible might lead you to believe it was not your way stuff.
27:54.282 --> 27:56.703
[SPEAKER_01]: Or the way your reflex and reading the Bible.
27:56.723 --> 28:11.492
[SPEAKER_06]: Yeah, that's, you might assume from reading the Bible that they weren't worshiping Yahweh, because, because the prophets from Judah, you saw them as apostate.
28:11.732 --> 28:15.114
[SPEAKER_06]: Saw them as unfaithful worshipers of Yahweh.
28:15.754 --> 28:29.302
[SPEAKER_06]: And so you assume that they had just completely left it all behind, but then when we excavated it at Tel-Dan, there's a religious precinct that looks very much like what the Bible describes as proper Yahweh worship.
28:29.502 --> 28:30.642
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, they're doing the Vedic.
28:30.762 --> 28:34.004
[SPEAKER_06]: So it seems like they... What those golden camps?
28:34.324 --> 28:38.287
[SPEAKER_06]: They thought that they were worshiping Yahweh properly.
28:38.727 --> 28:39.367
[SPEAKER_05]: Could it have been?
28:39.767 --> 28:44.010
[SPEAKER_05]: I'm sure there's a bunch of theories about this, but just a syncretism between... Yes.
28:44.550 --> 28:46.592
[SPEAKER_06]: Yeah, that's exactly what.
28:46.612 --> 28:50.256
[SPEAKER_05]: Secretism is like blending right blending religious practices.
28:50.536 --> 29:00.727
[SPEAKER_01]: So when you're so what happens, this is where again, helps us read the text because when you go to kings, you think, oh, they they turned to worship other gods when they did the golden calf.
29:01.007 --> 29:05.052
[SPEAKER_01]: No, no, no, and you go and look at it more carefully and you read kings again, it says, oh,
29:05.672 --> 29:16.337
[SPEAKER_01]: They're distinguishing between deviant y'all-way worship, which Jarabom brings in, and A. Have actually brings in state-sponsored worship of Baylor Foren God.
29:16.617 --> 29:20.299
[SPEAKER_01]: So, what Jarabom does is deviant, and that's why they're mad.
29:20.779 --> 29:25.081
[SPEAKER_01]: It's pagan, but it still has this y'all with.
29:25.101 --> 29:27.082
[SPEAKER_01]: It's totally y'all with, yep.
29:27.462 --> 29:32.324
[SPEAKER_01]: It's just broken according to the Bible, with the superiority of...
29:34.045 --> 29:49.366
[SPEAKER_06]: In a sense, it gives you a lot more nuanced perspective of it because you might assume, oh, these people are just overtly, flagrantly violating the law and completely rejected the Lord, but it seems like they at least didn't think they had.
29:51.628 --> 29:54.091
[SPEAKER_01]: which makes you read profits to the north differently.
29:54.871 --> 30:00.957
[SPEAKER_01]: I mean, and have, I think, even more compassion on the sin of Jeribon.
30:02.478 --> 30:06.242
[SPEAKER_01]: Because what he does is actually worship y'all way,
30:06.782 --> 30:13.386
[SPEAKER_01]: But according to his cultural reflex, rather than according to what scriptures ask you to do.
30:13.446 --> 30:15.107
[SPEAKER_01]: And if you put in, that's those terms.
30:15.127 --> 30:15.828
[SPEAKER_07]: That's terrifying.
30:15.848 --> 30:16.928
[SPEAKER_01]: That's terrifying.
30:16.948 --> 30:17.028
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah.
30:17.309 --> 30:17.529
[SPEAKER_01]: Right?
30:17.649 --> 30:23.712
[SPEAKER_01]: Are you worse to think the Lord, as he's wanting you to, or are you doing it according to your cultural reflex?
30:23.733 --> 30:23.813
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah.
30:24.213 --> 30:24.993
[SPEAKER_01]: And good luck with that.
30:25.093 --> 30:27.215
[SPEAKER_01]: Makes you wonder about the church in America.
30:27.235 --> 30:27.815
[SPEAKER_07]: Yeah.
30:27.995 --> 30:28.195
[SPEAKER_05]: Yeah.
30:28.215 --> 30:29.216
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah.
30:29.236 --> 30:30.597
[SPEAKER_07]: That we're sufficiently scared.
30:30.717 --> 30:31.197
[SPEAKER_07]: Okay.
30:31.277 --> 30:33.098
[SPEAKER_05]: Well, we're going to stop there for now.
30:34.917 --> 30:36.379
[SPEAKER_01]: So that's my archeology.
30:36.519 --> 30:43.086
[SPEAKER_01]: That's why archeology from the everyday believer perspective because it will help us understand the text.
30:43.767 --> 30:46.911
[SPEAKER_01]: And if we can understand the text and we can start asking those kinds of questions.
30:46.931 --> 30:47.551
[SPEAKER_01]: That's the right question.
30:47.732 --> 30:51.296
[SPEAKER_01]: So in order to get there, you've got to let archeology do this thing.
30:53.770 --> 30:56.692
[SPEAKER_00]: Thank you for listening to the Restory Podcast.
30:57.012 --> 31:05.757
[SPEAKER_00]: If you like what you heard, hit that subscribe button, share it with your friends, leave us a rating, and check out our other resources at theevenproject.com.
31:07.038 --> 31:07.378
[SPEAKER_00]: Peace!
00:02.754 --> 00:06.156
[SPEAKER_00]: Welcome to Lee Sewing, an Eden Project podcast.
00:06.576 --> 00:08.938
[SPEAKER_00]: Telling you a bigger story of a greater love.
00:13.250 --> 00:19.171
[SPEAKER_05]: We're excited today to have a couple of guys in the studio with us to talk about archaeology.
00:20.192 --> 00:21.792
[SPEAKER_05]: That's awesome.
00:22.112 --> 00:25.973
[SPEAKER_05]: The first one is from the Pillar Seminary in Omaha, Nebraska.
00:26.173 --> 00:27.854
[SPEAKER_05]: His name is Dr. Scott Booth.
00:29.034 --> 00:34.235
[SPEAKER_05]: And he has been digging at a place in Israel called Alville, Batma, Akha.
00:34.415 --> 00:34.995
[SPEAKER_05]: Nice.
00:35.735 --> 00:36.776
[SPEAKER_05]: And what's cool about that?
00:37.336 --> 00:41.897
[SPEAKER_01]: It is quite possibly the most significant archaeological site in Israel.
00:42.257 --> 00:42.717
[SPEAKER_05]: Okay, cool.
00:42.737 --> 00:47.139
[SPEAKER_05]: We'll hit pause on that and we'll come back to that statement because that's intriguing.
00:47.759 --> 00:57.502
[SPEAKER_05]: And then the other guy with us is John Harmon, who is a doctoral student at Southwestern Seminary in Fort Worth, and also has been doing archeology for about ten years, right?
00:57.682 --> 00:58.422
[SPEAKER_06]: Yep.
00:58.802 --> 01:04.324
[SPEAKER_06]: Doug for the first time at Till Dan in, in, in, then I've kind of cut the archeology bug.
01:05.024 --> 01:14.189
[SPEAKER_06]: and Doug at Rehove and Gezer, and then I've been digging it, I fell bait my cost since, twenty thirteen, I think, about twenty fourteen.
01:14.470 --> 01:17.591
[SPEAKER_05]: Basically, you guys are the ones to talk about archaeology.
01:17.751 --> 01:21.113
[SPEAKER_05]: And so, let's start like this, just a very simple question.
01:21.654 --> 01:23.154
[SPEAKER_05]: What is archaeology?
01:23.295 --> 01:25.716
[SPEAKER_07]: The real question being, are you Indiana Jones?
01:25.936 --> 01:26.957
[SPEAKER_07]: Yes.
01:27.037 --> 01:27.417
[SPEAKER_01]: Yes.
01:27.957 --> 01:28.217
[SPEAKER_01]: Yes.
01:28.698 --> 01:28.878
[SPEAKER_01]: Yes.
01:29.858 --> 01:30.839
[SPEAKER_01]: That's exactly what we do.
01:32.093 --> 01:34.635
[SPEAKER_07]: Yeah, you can't see him, but he does have an Indiana Jones hat.
01:34.956 --> 01:36.737
[SPEAKER_07]: So I'm not on the thread right now.
01:36.937 --> 01:37.758
[SPEAKER_05]: The whip is in the car.
01:39.380 --> 01:39.680
[SPEAKER_05]: Nice.
01:40.140 --> 01:44.484
[SPEAKER_05]: So yeah, for people who are like, yeah, I know that term, I know archeology, but like, I have no idea what you guys do.
01:44.564 --> 01:47.287
[SPEAKER_05]: What what does archeology and what does that look like?
01:47.427 --> 01:52.249
[SPEAKER_06]: Well, I think most broadly, it's just the study of humanity's past.
01:52.650 --> 01:56.712
[SPEAKER_06]: And particularly, it's the past as represented in material culture.
01:57.392 --> 02:09.718
[SPEAKER_06]: And so it enables us to see beyond just what the text would tell us of more of what life on the ground looked like and how people lived and how they worked, how society function.
02:09.898 --> 02:13.700
[SPEAKER_05]: So it's kind of like a lot of ways, it's like a doorway to the past.
02:14.440 --> 02:39.035
[SPEAKER_06]: for digging this stuff up and pulling it out of the ground we're able to see like oh this is this is what it was like for them to live in the first century and what everyday life was and what they valued and yeah exactly because text whether it's the Bible or or another historical text only really tells us what the author wanted to focus on and a lot of the times they're not concerned about the nitty gritty of daily life
02:39.835 --> 02:45.698
[SPEAKER_06]: and who the neighbors were, who the next city state over the top next to everyone else.
02:46.439 --> 02:51.341
[SPEAKER_06]: And so it allows us to get a lot broader picture of ancient society.
02:51.401 --> 03:01.347
[SPEAKER_05]: If you're talking about it from a place standpoint, it's the thing that kind of sets the stage so that the story can, we have the story, the narrative, but it's the thing that sets the stage to help us understand.
03:01.407 --> 03:03.208
[SPEAKER_06]: Yeah, I think that's a good imagery.
03:03.468 --> 03:03.908
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, cool.
03:04.088 --> 03:12.973
[SPEAKER_01]: There's some background to it that I think is helpful to see you can understand archaeology and then I think some of the pitfalls of using it and or abusing it.
03:13.173 --> 03:17.555
[SPEAKER_05]: So down that same train of thought, archaeology is a fairly new discipline.
03:17.695 --> 03:18.155
[SPEAKER_05]: Yeah, isn't it?
03:18.295 --> 03:24.078
[SPEAKER_05]: So talk to us about a little bit of the overview of the history of it and how did it become the discipline that it is today.
03:24.298 --> 03:40.876
[SPEAKER_01]: Okay, so typically that discussion kind of begins in the last hundred, hundred and fifty years, but like it has a richer history than that in the West dating back to Renaissance and before when they started having this big antiquities portion, they wanted to go see stuff.
03:41.456 --> 03:50.200
[SPEAKER_01]: And then also even in the east, there are Islamic scholars who are interested in it prior to the Ottoman Empire and pretty cool stuff.
03:50.260 --> 03:59.684
[SPEAKER_01]: But I think what's important for the beginning of it, especially in the West, and it's kind of like surge of archeology that happens in the late eighteen hundreds and nineteen hundreds.
03:59.844 --> 04:02.465
[SPEAKER_01]: Early nineteen hundreds, it's text driven.
04:03.125 --> 04:06.827
[SPEAKER_01]: Which means like you read about all these cool cities and you want to go find them and dig them up.
04:07.667 --> 04:08.047
[SPEAKER_06]: Yeah, right.
04:08.247 --> 04:10.408
[SPEAKER_06]: Whether it's the Bible or Homer.
04:10.528 --> 04:11.728
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, yeah, it doesn't matter.
04:11.748 --> 04:14.449
[SPEAKER_01]: You want to go, you know, there's nothing malicious.
04:14.649 --> 04:15.209
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, right.
04:15.249 --> 04:16.569
[SPEAKER_01]: You want, like, oh, there's none of that.
04:16.609 --> 04:17.209
[SPEAKER_01]: Go find Nineveh.
04:17.229 --> 04:22.511
[SPEAKER_01]: Let's go see what you're wanted like validate to text or even understand the world of the text.
04:22.531 --> 04:22.691
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah.
04:22.711 --> 04:23.371
[SPEAKER_01]: What were they in?
04:23.391 --> 04:23.651
[SPEAKER_01]: Right.
04:23.891 --> 04:30.812
[SPEAKER_01]: But the the issue is it's really driven by some textual investigation.
04:30.852 --> 04:32.853
[SPEAKER_01]: So at that point, it's even understood as kind of
04:33.373 --> 04:35.056
[SPEAKER_01]: the hand maiden, right?
04:35.577 --> 04:36.878
[SPEAKER_01]: It's not its own discipline.
04:36.918 --> 04:40.924
[SPEAKER_01]: It's serving some other need which in this case is the study of tax.
04:41.024 --> 04:43.148
[SPEAKER_01]: And then you're like, oh, we should go find Troy and dig it out.
04:43.188 --> 04:44.069
[SPEAKER_01]: We should find in a van.
04:44.089 --> 04:44.830
[SPEAKER_01]: Figure out what's there.
04:44.850 --> 04:46.432
[SPEAKER_01]: Babble on it.
04:46.733 --> 04:49.176
[SPEAKER_01]: So it's driven by those inquiries.
04:49.777 --> 04:54.264
[SPEAKER_01]: And it's also driven by like, oh, we know that great empires were there, right?
04:54.364 --> 04:56.006
[SPEAKER_01]: We know that great empires were at Nenema.
04:56.527 --> 05:00.533
[SPEAKER_01]: So when you show up at Nenema, what you're interested in is finding those empires.
05:01.074 --> 05:03.157
[SPEAKER_01]: And so they were like literally tunnel through it.
05:04.833 --> 05:07.415
[SPEAKER_05]: This may be so sad.
05:07.675 --> 05:08.775
[SPEAKER_05]: Because tunneling through it is.
05:09.136 --> 05:10.336
[SPEAKER_01]: It was okay early on.
05:10.657 --> 05:12.097
[SPEAKER_05]: Yeah, but they're destroying a bunch of.
05:12.178 --> 05:13.558
[SPEAKER_05]: They're destroying when they do that.
05:13.618 --> 05:20.262
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, because what they're doing is their primary motivation is to understand their text better.
05:20.383 --> 05:20.583
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah.
05:21.103 --> 05:24.045
[SPEAKER_06]: And so you've got to get to the text.
05:24.065 --> 05:24.225
[SPEAKER_01]: Right.
05:24.505 --> 05:26.226
[SPEAKER_06]: And also if they get museum pieces.
05:26.406 --> 05:26.787
[SPEAKER_06]: That's true.
05:26.827 --> 05:27.567
[SPEAKER_06]: The institutions.
05:27.667 --> 05:28.248
[SPEAKER_06]: Yeah.
05:28.468 --> 05:29.048
[SPEAKER_06]: Yeah.
05:29.088 --> 05:29.929
[SPEAKER_06]: Yeah.
05:30.109 --> 05:34.973
[SPEAKER_07]: So if the motivation isn't trying to understand the text better, what's a pure motivation and archeology then?
05:36.068 --> 05:36.369
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah.
05:36.849 --> 05:39.410
[SPEAKER_01]: The archeology spent some time trying to figure that out.
05:39.931 --> 05:40.151
[SPEAKER_01]: Okay.
05:40.171 --> 05:43.733
[SPEAKER_01]: So this is super broad paint brush stuff here.
05:43.953 --> 05:45.474
[SPEAKER_01]: So there are exceptions to everything.
05:45.494 --> 05:54.580
[SPEAKER_01]: We're going to say on this, because there's real early examples of people like collecting funnel data and all kinds of botanical data and stuff, even in the early night and hundreds.
05:55.040 --> 05:58.222
[SPEAKER_01]: But on the most part, you're looking for these big fines.
05:58.923 --> 06:00.804
[SPEAKER_01]: That's going to wow the public or something.
06:00.844 --> 06:02.084
[SPEAKER_05]: Did you need people to fund your dick?
06:02.185 --> 06:02.525
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah.
06:03.045 --> 06:03.405
[SPEAKER_01]: Yes.
06:03.686 --> 06:05.427
[SPEAKER_01]: Which side would plug here?
06:05.627 --> 06:06.108
[SPEAKER_01]: No, I'm kidding.
06:06.508 --> 06:09.170
[SPEAKER_08]: What would you rather wait?
06:09.190 --> 06:12.313
[SPEAKER_01]: Did I mention that Avela Malka is the most significant.
06:14.295 --> 06:14.495
[SPEAKER_01]: All right.
06:14.555 --> 06:16.096
[SPEAKER_01]: Anyway, needs big donors.
06:16.316 --> 06:16.557
[SPEAKER_01]: Yes.
06:16.717 --> 06:17.477
[SPEAKER_01]: Yes.
06:17.958 --> 06:18.238
[SPEAKER_01]: Anyway.
06:18.819 --> 06:20.980
[SPEAKER_01]: So archeology then turned it.
06:21.521 --> 06:28.647
[SPEAKER_01]: The archeologists were frustrated by this because the more they're in the dirt, the more they want to understand about what's going on with these people, right?
06:28.887 --> 06:32.171
[SPEAKER_01]: So a bunch of methodological questions came up, what do we do?
06:32.251 --> 06:33.092
[SPEAKER_01]: How do we do this?
06:33.332 --> 06:39.600
[SPEAKER_01]: And they start really doing a lot of internal investigation, like philosophical inquiries about like, how do we do this correctly?
06:40.020 --> 06:44.946
[SPEAKER_01]: And then you get stuff like stratification, like, like, hey, we should dig like flat.
06:45.727 --> 06:46.368
[SPEAKER_01]: Like we should follow.
06:46.388 --> 06:48.229
[SPEAKER_05]: So by stratification, you mean layers.
06:48.529 --> 06:48.810
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah.
06:49.130 --> 06:49.330
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah.
06:49.370 --> 06:50.271
[SPEAKER_01]: They start figuring this out.
06:50.431 --> 06:53.033
[SPEAKER_01]: Or they start putting together ceramic sequences.
06:53.393 --> 06:53.613
[SPEAKER_01]: Right.
06:54.214 --> 06:54.754
[SPEAKER_01]: Who is that John?
06:54.774 --> 06:55.795
[SPEAKER_01]: That's Peter.
06:56.075 --> 06:56.335
[SPEAKER_06]: Yeah.
06:56.476 --> 06:59.018
[SPEAKER_06]: He dug an absurd number of sites.
06:59.098 --> 07:00.219
[SPEAKER_06]: I forget what it was.
07:00.259 --> 07:02.560
[SPEAKER_06]: But and he was a genius.
07:02.821 --> 07:09.226
[SPEAKER_06]: And I think mostly just by chance, he noticed that pots from different levels looked different.
07:09.266 --> 07:11.968
[SPEAKER_06]: And they seemed to be consistent from site to site.
07:12.148 --> 07:14.370
[SPEAKER_06]: And he came up with the idea of
07:15.030 --> 07:21.618
[SPEAKER_06]: We can look at the ceramics that paints and people are using and can use that as a tool for dating.
07:21.926 --> 07:37.799
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, like so like you go to one site, this is gonna be the stupidest thing, but like you go down to one site and you're like, all the pottery here is purple and then keep digging down and then it's red and then it's blue and you go to the next site and you start digging and it's red and he says, oh, wait a second.
07:37.899 --> 07:40.642
[SPEAKER_01]: I bet these folks lived with this and he digs down and it's blue again.
07:40.682 --> 07:44.905
[SPEAKER_01]: He's like, whoa, and he does a ton of these and now you can start building a picture
07:45.766 --> 07:48.749
[SPEAKER_01]: that's has nothing to do with the text, right?
07:48.869 --> 07:56.217
[SPEAKER_01]: So then, to get back to you original question like so, what is pure archaeology or pure motivation in archaeology?
07:56.237 --> 08:00.241
[SPEAKER_01]: I think that just want to understand the people kind of from the ground up.
08:00.839 --> 08:07.025
[SPEAKER_07]: So then the text is aside to help you, like identify, but it's not your driving force.
08:07.266 --> 08:10.288
[SPEAKER_01]: In that sense, the text becomes a tool, right?
08:10.709 --> 08:18.957
[SPEAKER_01]: Like to help you understand at least some perspectives about some of the things that happened to some of the people.
08:19.277 --> 08:20.618
[SPEAKER_07]: I see what you did there.
08:20.998 --> 08:22.059
[SPEAKER_07]: Some some some some.
08:22.239 --> 08:26.802
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, because when we think of the text and you think, oh, well, this is a big view of what happened.
08:26.902 --> 08:30.024
[SPEAKER_01]: Well, tell me from the Bible, for example, what was daily life like?
08:30.124 --> 08:30.324
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah.
08:31.185 --> 08:31.485
[SPEAKER_01]: Good luck.
08:32.102 --> 08:50.110
[SPEAKER_06]: also archeology becomes a text in itself and so you have the biblical text that gives one perspective and you have archeology that can potentially give like a broader perspective and then scholar who wants to recreate the history of the Bible or the history of the ancient world can draw on
08:50.890 --> 09:12.178
[SPEAKER_05]: written text and it's not just limited to the Bible I mean there are any of these texts that from that world so like to use the metaphor talking about earlier is this is like a stage that's being set but it's almost like a like on a studio lot you have these stages that can be used for multiple things and so like hey okay so the Bible plays out on this part over here
09:12.778 --> 09:18.041
[SPEAKER_05]: but then the Babylonian texts play out over here and a Hittite text, play out over here.
09:18.262 --> 09:20.003
[SPEAKER_01]: And they're all trying to tell you something.
09:20.023 --> 09:22.664
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, we're all trying to convince you of something and make you think something.
09:22.684 --> 09:22.804
[SPEAKER_05]: Yeah.
09:23.285 --> 09:27.047
[SPEAKER_05]: And they're also a lot more interrelated than most of the time people give.
09:27.087 --> 09:28.408
[SPEAKER_05]: Yeah, that's true.
09:28.588 --> 09:28.808
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah.
09:29.168 --> 09:34.352
[SPEAKER_01]: So the thing that's neat about archeology is that you can collect a ton of raw data.
09:34.712 --> 09:34.852
[SPEAKER_01]: Right.
09:34.892 --> 09:41.957
[SPEAKER_01]: So for example, you can get down to what kind of food where they're eating, because you can go inside of their pots, you can collect seeds and stuff.
09:42.037 --> 09:42.217
[SPEAKER_01]: Right.
09:42.817 --> 09:46.861
[SPEAKER_01]: which if you know what kind of food they're eating, you can know who they're trading, if you can get a keto diet.
09:47.042 --> 09:54.670
[SPEAKER_01]: But one of the things that's also interesting about the motivations of a text are locked.
09:56.912 --> 09:58.954
[SPEAKER_01]: And the Bible, they're trying to convince you.
09:59.655 --> 10:01.797
[SPEAKER_01]: that the Lord has got.
10:02.537 --> 10:04.559
[SPEAKER_01]: And they're trying to tell you certain things about them, right?
10:04.599 --> 10:05.139
[SPEAKER_01]: And it's locked.
10:05.519 --> 10:06.300
[SPEAKER_01]: You can't change that.
10:06.760 --> 10:11.764
[SPEAKER_01]: But in archeology, you now you approach a site and you'll be very explicit, let's say.
10:12.144 --> 10:12.344
[SPEAKER_01]: All right.
10:12.865 --> 10:18.589
[SPEAKER_01]: We're going to get as much raw data as we can, but understand that our motivations here are this, this and this.
10:19.109 --> 10:21.411
[SPEAKER_01]: and you never dig a site completely, right?
10:21.491 --> 10:26.776
[SPEAKER_01]: Because the next person's gonna come along and say, all right, we're gonna shift our motivations here.
10:26.936 --> 10:28.918
[SPEAKER_01]: We now have new questions to ask.
10:29.298 --> 10:33.622
[SPEAKER_01]: So you have a kind of, it's not the exact same data because you destroyed it as you went through it.
10:34.002 --> 10:36.304
[SPEAKER_01]: But you can approach a site now with new questions.
10:36.584 --> 10:40.167
[SPEAKER_05]: New questions that have arisen because of the work you've done.
10:40.187 --> 10:41.308
[SPEAKER_01]: All manner of things.
10:41.729 --> 10:43.670
[SPEAKER_01]: It could be you're asking a regional question.
10:44.291 --> 10:45.452
[SPEAKER_01]: Like I want to know what
10:46.238 --> 10:47.339
[SPEAKER_01]: Okay, these people lived here.
10:47.920 --> 10:49.081
[SPEAKER_01]: Like, who did they trade with?
10:49.382 --> 10:51.284
[SPEAKER_01]: Who was in, and why does it matter who they trade with?
10:51.304 --> 10:55.008
[SPEAKER_01]: Because then you know who they're influencing and who's influencing them, right?
10:55.129 --> 11:02.998
[SPEAKER_01]: And you can track patterns of behavior and I really need stuff that we all kind of take for as assumptions and daily life.
11:03.719 --> 11:06.222
[SPEAKER_01]: You can start slowly peeling back those layers.
11:06.602 --> 11:10.765
[SPEAKER_05]: Something that I think is interesting that I've learned about use Scott, just tracking with you.
11:10.825 --> 11:12.166
[SPEAKER_05]: Which, by the way, I'll plug this right now.
11:12.586 --> 11:15.788
[SPEAKER_05]: Scott, along with the faculty at Pillar does a Pillar podcast.
11:15.848 --> 11:16.189
[SPEAKER_05]: Woohoo!
11:19.217 --> 11:21.838
[SPEAKER_05]: And I would definitely encourage you guys to check that out.
11:21.898 --> 11:26.399
[SPEAKER_05]: You can just go find it on iTunes and you're all like Google Play and stuff like that as well.
11:26.579 --> 11:26.919
[SPEAKER_05]: Who knows?
11:27.499 --> 11:27.999
[SPEAKER_05]: Yeah, whatever.
11:28.019 --> 11:28.979
[SPEAKER_05]: Yeah, go find it.
11:29.679 --> 11:31.920
[SPEAKER_05]: But it's definitely worth listening to.
11:31.980 --> 11:39.601
[SPEAKER_05]: But one of the things that I've learned about you is you did your PhD thesis on how to read the data that comes out of the ground.
11:40.161 --> 11:42.482
[SPEAKER_05]: So talk to us about like everybody's digging this stuff up.
11:43.262 --> 11:49.144
[SPEAKER_05]: But is there a certain way that, you know, one guy's going to dig it up and he's going to be like, well, this means this.
11:49.705 --> 11:54.126
[SPEAKER_05]: Another guy's going to dig up maybe some very similar and say, I mean, something totally different.
11:54.246 --> 11:57.828
[SPEAKER_05]: And I think the heart of the question is, how do we trust archaeology?
11:58.248 --> 12:03.150
[SPEAKER_05]: How do we trust that the results that are coming out of it are reflective of what was actually going on?
12:04.242 --> 12:07.205
[SPEAKER_01]: You trust it because they're very, very good at what they're doing.
12:07.225 --> 12:11.150
[SPEAKER_01]: So in terms of like a bunch of data comes out of the ground and they're going to interpret it differently.
12:11.910 --> 12:15.294
[SPEAKER_01]: That's just part of any science, right?
12:15.414 --> 12:18.498
[SPEAKER_01]: Where they're just struggling to get enough information
12:18.998 --> 12:21.399
[SPEAKER_01]: and enough debate to wrestle with information.
12:21.819 --> 12:30.462
[SPEAKER_01]: And while it's up in the air or being debated, you just allow that to be a little bit wet cement until and you've got to be okay with that.
12:30.642 --> 12:33.703
[SPEAKER_01]: Any discipline, you have to be okay with the struggle.
12:33.723 --> 12:42.826
[SPEAKER_01]: So in terms of what's the right way to do it on the outside is to trust the specialist because they are very good at it.
12:43.106 --> 12:45.987
[SPEAKER_01]: And the discipline itself has a lot of checks
12:46.967 --> 12:56.014
[SPEAKER_01]: in place to say, hey, this person's fringe and or this this set of ideas, these are worth debating over here.
12:56.314 --> 12:57.475
[SPEAKER_01]: This is crazy town.
12:57.635 --> 12:59.876
[SPEAKER_01]: We now know right.
13:00.337 --> 13:14.567
[SPEAKER_06]: Definitely and also the issues that that are debatable and debated most good scholars acknowledge that and and say this is an ongoing conversation and this is where the data leads us
13:15.267 --> 13:22.672
[SPEAKER_06]: But like the fringe guys are more they're usually more have their heels dug in a bit more like this is absolutely the way it was.
13:22.692 --> 13:29.877
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, you'll also find them like attached to text in a certain way and you'll feel them going backwards.
13:29.997 --> 13:38.443
[SPEAKER_07]: Yeah, that's what I was going to ask like how do you leave these pre-suppositions at the door to walk into a site like that feels impossible.
13:39.475 --> 13:42.276
[SPEAKER_01]: It is, you just do your best to say what they are.
13:42.336 --> 13:45.197
[SPEAKER_01]: So this is the thing, archeology isn't a hard science, right?
13:45.657 --> 13:49.198
[SPEAKER_01]: None of what archeology does can be repeated, right?
13:49.398 --> 13:51.619
[SPEAKER_01]: Because you destroy the evidence that you go.
13:52.059 --> 13:53.340
[SPEAKER_01]: It can be almost repeated.
13:53.380 --> 13:54.520
[SPEAKER_01]: So it's not a soft sound.
13:54.620 --> 14:00.342
[SPEAKER_01]: You know, it's not completely soft, because you can while, like so, let's say we dig at a bell.
14:01.222 --> 14:02.643
[SPEAKER_01]: We're digging a room, right?
14:02.703 --> 14:04.964
[SPEAKER_01]: And we come up with a thesis about what's going on here.
14:05.484 --> 14:07.045
[SPEAKER_01]: It's based on the data we pulled out.
14:07.345 --> 14:09.786
[SPEAKER_01]: Maybe we miss some, but you'll never get that back.
14:09.826 --> 14:10.026
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah.
14:10.346 --> 14:12.567
[SPEAKER_06]: That's also why we record everything.
14:12.587 --> 14:20.250
[SPEAKER_06]: Have meticulously as we can because we want to be able to reconstruct it theoretically on paper because we can't physically reconstruct.
14:20.530 --> 14:21.531
[SPEAKER_05]: How do you record it?
14:21.791 --> 14:22.011
[SPEAKER_05]: Oh no.
14:22.653 --> 14:26.195
[SPEAKER_06]: Well, we did start a graphically like layer by layer.
14:26.775 --> 14:30.197
[SPEAKER_06]: Material gets laid down as people live.
14:30.977 --> 14:34.158
[SPEAKER_06]: And over the centuries, it builds up and up on itself.
14:34.939 --> 14:37.500
[SPEAKER_06]: And we're able to discern that as we dig.
14:37.520 --> 14:43.943
[SPEAKER_06]: And so we keep all of the material from the same layer together and record it together.
14:43.963 --> 14:48.005
[SPEAKER_06]: And as there are different features, we note those and record them.
14:48.025 --> 14:51.827
[SPEAKER_06]: Basically, we keep everything as separate as we can and everything
14:52.887 --> 14:54.648
[SPEAKER_06]: as precise as we can.
14:54.808 --> 15:05.473
[SPEAKER_05]: So do you like when you pull stuff out of the ground or you like separating it based on, hey, we think this belongs with this other stuff that we have dug up and we're going to put it in this container.
15:05.753 --> 15:08.874
[SPEAKER_05]: And no, we're going to actually put it in the container.
15:09.174 --> 15:09.615
[SPEAKER_05]: You nailed it.
15:09.895 --> 15:10.355
[SPEAKER_05]: Okay, cool.
15:10.395 --> 15:10.615
[SPEAKER_05]: Yeah.
15:10.675 --> 15:15.057
[SPEAKER_05]: So you put it in a container and then it's like, okay, we think this is what this is.
15:15.337 --> 15:16.958
[SPEAKER_05]: So it's not when you say destroy it.
15:17.698 --> 15:22.640
[SPEAKER_05]: You mean, it's just no longer in the place where it originally was.
15:22.680 --> 15:24.800
[SPEAKER_05]: You're not like taking a hammer and burning it.
15:24.860 --> 15:30.362
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, like, and so the reason you're doing that is because you're developing theories as you go down, right?
15:30.402 --> 15:32.443
[SPEAKER_01]: But you want to prove yourself wrong, too.
15:33.123 --> 15:43.267
[SPEAKER_01]: because you're gonna go down in the house next door and you wanna be able to say, oh, that was different, but you didn't destroy the information so much so that you can't go back and say, oh, you know, that's what that is.
15:43.327 --> 15:49.650
[SPEAKER_01]: Because as you're going through and you're peeling these layers back, you're digging down with a pick and some, you're scraping through, right?
15:50.050 --> 15:53.332
[SPEAKER_01]: And you think, ah, I've come to a new layer and you'll mark it.
15:54.092 --> 15:54.692
[SPEAKER_01]: What if you're wrong?
15:55.713 --> 15:59.835
[SPEAKER_01]: Here's the thing, the discipline has been doing it long enough that there's all these checks
16:00.663 --> 16:01.864
[SPEAKER_01]: to say, hey, you know what?
16:01.904 --> 16:02.784
[SPEAKER_01]: We thought this was two.
16:02.865 --> 16:03.285
[SPEAKER_01]: It's one.
16:03.505 --> 16:04.245
[SPEAKER_01]: We thought this was one.
16:04.265 --> 16:04.986
[SPEAKER_01]: I think it's two.
16:05.646 --> 16:10.410
[SPEAKER_01]: And like, there's a lot of ways to make sure that you can catch yourself.
16:11.090 --> 16:11.811
[SPEAKER_01]: It's not perfect.
16:12.571 --> 16:16.754
[SPEAKER_05]: But it's almost like, yeah, it's almost like you're looking through a really dirty lens.
16:17.435 --> 16:20.136
[SPEAKER_05]: And the longer you do it, the cleaner the lens gets.
16:20.637 --> 16:26.321
[SPEAKER_05]: So like, we couldn't really see this fifty years ago, but now we know because we're doing it for fifty years that
16:26.981 --> 16:34.147
[SPEAKER_05]: These kinds of checks are clarifying what when we encounter this thing, then we were able to better discern what that is.
16:34.228 --> 16:35.709
[SPEAKER_05]: We're seeing it more clearly now.
16:36.354 --> 16:57.895
[SPEAKER_07]: So help us understand what a day looks like for y'all like you're going to a site you don't just like pick up a shovel and dig right so what does a day look like it's much slower than I think a lot of people would anticipate yeah well possibly but also a lot of people imagine us just out there digging with dental picks and brushes and we actually move a lot of dirt because
16:59.136 --> 17:02.381
[SPEAKER_06]: Often areas would get back filled after they're occupied.
17:02.561 --> 17:07.689
[SPEAKER_06]: And so when you know that you're digging through just garbage, you have to get through it pretty pretty.
17:07.709 --> 17:08.110
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah.
17:08.410 --> 17:08.670
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah.
17:08.710 --> 17:12.456
[SPEAKER_01]: That means like to back, but look at me like someone's living in an area in a house falls down or something.
17:12.596 --> 17:14.459
[SPEAKER_01]: They'll like level it fill it up and make just flat.
17:14.559 --> 17:22.144
[SPEAKER_06]: Just like we do now, like you'll see people knock down a building and they'll fill the basement end with the debris from the building.
17:23.124 --> 17:26.366
[SPEAKER_06]: But typical day starts really early.
17:26.706 --> 17:28.627
[SPEAKER_06]: What time and what time to usually get on the bus?
17:28.687 --> 17:29.068
[SPEAKER_06]: It's here.
17:29.168 --> 17:31.049
[SPEAKER_01]: It feels like.
17:31.409 --> 17:33.510
[SPEAKER_01]: I think it's five, five, fifteen on the bus.
17:33.951 --> 17:34.331
[SPEAKER_01]: Is that right?
17:35.605 --> 17:40.926
[SPEAKER_01]: Your picture in the ground as the sun is coming up because it's too hot to dig in midday.
17:40.966 --> 17:41.166
[SPEAKER_01]: Right.
17:41.346 --> 17:45.927
[SPEAKER_01]: So as soon as the sun is on the horizon and you can see well enough to swing weapons.
17:47.968 --> 17:49.428
[SPEAKER_01]: Then close proximity.
17:49.588 --> 17:53.489
[SPEAKER_05]: Then if you're going after then you're doing so how long does a dig season last?
17:53.989 --> 18:01.211
[SPEAKER_05]: Usually four to six weeks and what is that in tail just the just the actual swinging of the pick and the scraping and the
18:02.048 --> 18:11.275
[SPEAKER_06]: Well, usually you spend about a week getting everything set up and clearing out the things that have gotten overgrown in the years since the last dig.
18:11.295 --> 18:14.858
[SPEAKER_06]: Because that's not the other thing that maybe not everybody knows.
18:14.938 --> 18:18.301
[SPEAKER_06]: It's typically we dig during the summer.
18:18.501 --> 18:23.005
[SPEAKER_06]: So we're only digging about a month out of the year at most sites.
18:23.465 --> 18:29.169
[SPEAKER_06]: And so we spend about a week clearing out the overgrowth and the worry, the wash, the back wash from
18:30.010 --> 18:32.516
[SPEAKER_06]: There's a rainy season to clean it before you.
18:32.536 --> 18:35.082
[SPEAKER_05]: Yeah, and why is that?
18:35.162 --> 18:36.866
[SPEAKER_05]: Why do we only dig six weeks out of the year?
18:37.147 --> 18:37.628
[SPEAKER_05]: Oh, married.
18:42.519 --> 18:44.560
[SPEAKER_06]: Why doesn't somebody dig throughout the year?
18:44.941 --> 19:02.890
[SPEAKER_06]: Part of it is the climate because you want to dig when it's dry because if you're in the middle of a season and you get a downpour, you can deal with it because people still do archeology and water climates, but it's definitely more manageable to dig during the dry season.
19:03.570 --> 19:13.601
[SPEAKER_06]: And also since it's driven by academia, you know, most dig directors are professors and a lot of staff members are our students.
19:14.141 --> 19:19.567
[SPEAKER_06]: And so it just it just kind of works out that you do it during the summer when everybody is available.
19:19.968 --> 19:25.634
[SPEAKER_05]: Talk to us about when you pull stuff out of the dirt, how long does it take before you realize what you have?
19:26.034 --> 19:26.314
[SPEAKER_01]: Oh gee.
19:26.334 --> 19:27.234
[SPEAKER_06]: Events on what it is.
19:27.254 --> 19:27.374
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah.
19:27.454 --> 19:34.036
[SPEAKER_06]: I mean, sometimes we know pretty immediately in other times it's we have no idea what we just pulled out.
19:34.356 --> 19:37.357
[SPEAKER_01]: Though we should say there's like one of the things that's super helpful is pottery sorting.
19:37.457 --> 19:37.717
[SPEAKER_06]: Yeah.
19:38.137 --> 19:41.478
[SPEAKER_01]: So while you're going down, you know, you've been on an excavation.
19:41.518 --> 19:42.838
[SPEAKER_01]: There's so much pottery.
19:42.878 --> 19:43.038
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah.
19:43.098 --> 19:43.298
[SPEAKER_01]: Right.
19:43.578 --> 19:45.599
[SPEAKER_01]: So you collect most of it.
19:45.679 --> 19:45.879
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah.
19:46.259 --> 19:47.579
[SPEAKER_01]: And you stick it in buckets.
19:47.659 --> 19:50.220
[SPEAKER_01]: It's labeled so that you know where everything comes from.
19:50.480 --> 19:52.360
[SPEAKER_01]: And then in the app, you wash it all off.
19:52.400 --> 19:55.741
[SPEAKER_01]: Get it clean to make sure you can erase any inscriptions on it.
19:58.562 --> 20:06.566
[SPEAKER_01]: So you clean it all off and then once it's dried out, the following day or whatever, you sit down at a table and you start sorting it.
20:07.147 --> 20:08.287
[SPEAKER_01]: And these are experts.
20:08.307 --> 20:09.228
[SPEAKER_01]: So we have it above.
20:09.268 --> 20:10.968
[SPEAKER_01]: We have Nova.
20:11.189 --> 20:12.049
[SPEAKER_01]: She's amazing.
20:12.649 --> 20:17.412
[SPEAKER_01]: And Bob, right, they're sitting there and they're working, looking at it and say, hey, you know,
20:18.172 --> 20:20.514
[SPEAKER_01]: at this side over here, this belongs to this period.
20:20.534 --> 20:26.679
[SPEAKER_01]: And oh, oh, and so you're starting to form pictures as you're moving through the information.
20:26.759 --> 20:30.862
[SPEAKER_01]: So sometimes it's days until you really know what you were in.
20:30.882 --> 20:36.667
[SPEAKER_01]: I mean, you have suspicions because there's pottery that will tell you, oh, you're an iron one, you're an iron two, whatever.
20:36.987 --> 21:03.047
[SPEAKER_05]: an iron one and two are like the various it ages yeah a lot of times I think people have the misconception that because they have an Indiana Jones type mentality where they're like you know the the golden idol comes out of the ground and you like know exactly what it is immediately and and it's this really kind of just excitement around all of it when in reality the discipline is much more like okay we have something here and it may be a while before you realize what that
21:03.647 --> 21:04.167
[SPEAKER_05]: thing is.
21:04.267 --> 21:08.909
[SPEAKER_01]: That can be years until you're understanding what you're going.
21:08.949 --> 21:12.510
[SPEAKER_01]: It's weird, which people are like, well, it's publications can take a long time.
21:12.550 --> 21:12.730
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah.
21:12.991 --> 21:15.511
[SPEAKER_01]: I imagine you're peeling layers across, right?
21:15.571 --> 21:16.892
[SPEAKER_01]: Even on one site, right?
21:17.212 --> 21:19.413
[SPEAKER_01]: Even in your yard, right?
21:19.593 --> 21:27.236
[SPEAKER_01]: You're peeling, you dig down your backyard, you dig down your front yard, try to figure out to correlate those exactly, right?
21:27.296 --> 21:30.757
[SPEAKER_01]: Well, then you've got like, fifty of those, sixty a hundred of those.
21:30.877 --> 21:32.598
[SPEAKER_01]: And like, how do you then understand
21:33.178 --> 21:57.391
[SPEAKER_01]: what was going on at that site from eleven hundred bc to a thousand b's and given all those different things from all different parts of the site and they're not connected it's just you're digging these patches and you're trying to connect the patches it's it's complicated so you bounce theories around with each other you argue there's lots of yelling yeah if you have three archaeologists together you have at least four theories that's right
21:59.072 --> 22:02.533
[SPEAKER_01]: But that's just because they're sorting through really complicated.
22:02.913 --> 22:08.314
[SPEAKER_01]: And I should say again, they're really good at it because they've been doing it.
22:08.634 --> 22:15.655
[SPEAKER_07]: So as we've been talking about this, like our listeners may be thinking, you're pulling up a bunch of pottery chunks out of the ground and washing it.
22:15.695 --> 22:17.515
[SPEAKER_07]: Like, what's helpful about that?
22:17.555 --> 22:20.516
[SPEAKER_07]: So help us understand what we can gain from this discipline.
22:20.536 --> 22:25.057
[SPEAKER_07]: Like, what do we gain from y'all spend in six weeks and hot Israel digging up pottery?
22:25.277 --> 22:26.257
[SPEAKER_07]: What's helpful to us?
22:26.537 --> 22:32.719
[SPEAKER_06]: I think the biggest thing is is just what life on the ground looked like for the ancient people.
22:33.079 --> 22:35.540
[SPEAKER_06]: Maybe not the biggest thing but a significant thing.
22:36.241 --> 22:44.284
[SPEAKER_06]: It provides context as if you're reading the Bible or reading Homer or reading some other piece of literature.
22:44.924 --> 22:52.507
[SPEAKER_06]: You only get the perspective that the author presents to you and they might not care what the guy down the street was doing.
22:52.547 --> 22:55.428
[SPEAKER_06]: They might not care what the average, how the average person lived.
22:55.868 --> 22:57.089
[SPEAKER_01]: Or they may assume that you know.
22:57.149 --> 22:58.570
[SPEAKER_06]: Yeah, that's a good point.
22:58.610 --> 22:58.810
[SPEAKER_06]: Yeah.
22:58.970 --> 23:00.511
[SPEAKER_01]: They think you understand a lot of assumptions.
23:00.571 --> 23:02.453
[SPEAKER_06]: It's written to a particular audience.
23:03.233 --> 23:18.364
[SPEAKER_06]: Yeah, I think the biggest thing for a reader of the Bible that archaeology provides is just context that sort of the social, historical world that the text took place in that's very foreign to the average person today.
23:18.404 --> 23:22.266
[SPEAKER_05]: So if you guys can give us an example of a way that that shows up.
23:22.626 --> 23:22.867
[SPEAKER_01]: Okay.
23:22.907 --> 23:24.648
[SPEAKER_01]: So I just picked up this book.
23:25.168 --> 23:28.849
[SPEAKER_01]: It's an investigation into where the tribes of Israel go.
23:28.909 --> 23:32.810
[SPEAKER_01]: And one of the things that they're looking at is after Israel's conquered by a Syria.
23:32.830 --> 23:35.511
[SPEAKER_01]: It's like what will happen to where they go, right?
23:36.051 --> 23:38.831
[SPEAKER_01]: And so they look at what happened in the south.
23:39.431 --> 23:44.453
[SPEAKER_01]: And they see an influx, archaeologically, of material that's typically in the north.
23:45.773 --> 23:46.793
[SPEAKER_01]: Like so wide you care.
23:47.273 --> 23:53.695
[SPEAKER_01]: But if you go read the prophets and you go read the book of kings, there's all these warnings about behaving like they did in the north.
23:54.755 --> 23:59.838
[SPEAKER_01]: So it's one thing to say, theologically, oh, it's just like, don't do what those guys did over there.
24:00.438 --> 24:06.401
[SPEAKER_01]: But if you can contextualize their world better and understand that they just got a whole bunch of new neighbors.
24:07.161 --> 24:10.243
[SPEAKER_01]: And these neighbors just experienced this deportation.
24:10.883 --> 24:19.207
[SPEAKER_01]: And you can start to see that when the prophets are speaking, they're speaking into a world where the northern influence is coming down.
24:19.667 --> 24:20.267
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, right.
24:20.307 --> 24:22.328
[SPEAKER_05]: Yeah, and so like the literally.
24:22.428 --> 24:24.589
[SPEAKER_05]: Yes, and so then materially coming down.
24:24.649 --> 24:27.791
[SPEAKER_01]: Yes, and the cultural and the cultural influence would be there, right?
24:27.911 --> 24:35.214
[SPEAKER_01]: And if the more you can contextualize and make the people of the Bible people and really understand not some abstract.
24:35.294 --> 24:41.136
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, the more you can keep your theology from being an abstract area, right?
24:41.316 --> 24:44.578
[SPEAKER_01]: So they are thinking that you understand
24:45.418 --> 24:51.220
[SPEAKER_01]: For example, the role of women in their society, when they bring that up and they're talking about, they have all these assumptions.
24:51.960 --> 24:55.081
[SPEAKER_01]: But how do you, we don't know what that is, right?
24:55.141 --> 24:57.582
[SPEAKER_05]: And our assumptions are definitely different.
24:57.822 --> 24:59.623
[SPEAKER_01]: They are totally different, right?
24:59.723 --> 25:07.265
[SPEAKER_01]: And so being able to do things like, for example, certain pottery bunches of it had to have been made by women, well, how do they know?
25:07.385 --> 25:11.247
[SPEAKER_01]: Because men's hands don't fit down to make it, right?
25:11.407 --> 25:12.327
[SPEAKER_01]: Have you seen these studies?
25:12.707 --> 25:15.368
[SPEAKER_01]: But it's the other women or children like this is how this potter is.
25:15.408 --> 25:19.469
[SPEAKER_01]: Well, that helps you start forming an understanding of how society is working.
25:19.830 --> 25:26.592
[SPEAKER_01]: You put all this stuff together and then when you're reading the verses, these are real people and you're understanding who they're talking to.
25:27.140 --> 25:29.121
[SPEAKER_07]: So it feels like the roles have sort of switched.
25:29.201 --> 25:33.442
[SPEAKER_07]: So when we started this conversation, you're like, hey, for an archeologist, the text is a tool.
25:33.682 --> 25:36.903
[SPEAKER_07]: And so for somebody who's reading the scripture, then archeology can be a tool.
25:37.043 --> 25:37.483
[SPEAKER_00]: Is that right?
25:37.503 --> 25:37.883
[SPEAKER_00]: Exactly.
25:37.923 --> 25:43.485
[SPEAKER_07]: Like, hey, you pull that in and you can better understand these were real people who were living a real life.
25:43.865 --> 25:51.807
[SPEAKER_07]: And as I read the Bible, then I can understand better what that author was trying to tell me because I've context for what kind of world they were living in.
25:51.927 --> 25:52.147
[SPEAKER_01]: Right.
25:52.187 --> 25:55.808
[SPEAKER_01]: So like another example, this is like, well, what happens when we tell you that
25:56.229 --> 26:01.311
[SPEAKER_01]: There's very little evidence that the Lord was followed throughout Judea and Israel.
26:01.670 --> 26:26.407
[SPEAKER_01]: back what yeah like there's very little evidence there's cult stuff or at least a quote the following the lord according to the way do to honor me in leviticus layout if you do that then you're like oh no the lord had to have been followed by all these people like no you'll read the profits like yeah there's been a lot of time telling people they need to be fall yeah so they have to be surprising that they weren't that's right so that you start to develop an on the ground view that this
26:27.107 --> 26:37.739
[SPEAKER_01]: Pure yawism that the Bible is advocating was not followed very often at all right and this get another really cool one is the one we're talking about in the way here.
26:38.340 --> 26:44.968
[SPEAKER_06]: Damn yeah speaking of the difference between the north and the south and Israel and Judah if you read
26:45.348 --> 26:47.048
[SPEAKER_05]: wrote real quickly for our listeners.
26:47.228 --> 26:50.689
[SPEAKER_05]: So around nine thirty one B.C.
26:50.949 --> 26:51.149
[SPEAKER_05]: ish.
26:51.369 --> 26:55.530
[SPEAKER_05]: There was a king of Israel who was acting crazy.
26:56.051 --> 26:59.251
[SPEAKER_05]: And so the the kingdom divided into two different kingdoms.
26:59.591 --> 27:01.932
[SPEAKER_05]: And the northern kingdom was called Israel.
27:02.412 --> 27:03.872
[SPEAKER_05]: And the southern kingdom was called Judah.
27:04.112 --> 27:05.473
[SPEAKER_05]: So that's what he's leading.
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[SPEAKER_01]: So he's about to tell you about what the first king in the north did.
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[SPEAKER_05]: Jerobon.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Now we've contextualized what you're about.
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[SPEAKER_06]: Yeah, exactly.
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[SPEAKER_06]: So as you read the Bible, they have a lot of condemnation of the Northern practices.
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[SPEAKER_06]: And you would kind of assume that they were just a bunch of completely apostate pagans who aren't trying to worship the Lord at all because Jeroboam established new sanctuaries at Dan and new priesthood.
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[SPEAKER_06]: Yeah, exactly.
27:42.330 --> 27:44.272
[SPEAKER_06]: And golden calves.
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[SPEAKER_06]: Not y'all waste stuff.
27:46.537 --> 27:53.681
[SPEAKER_06]: Well, the Bible might lead you to believe it was not your way stuff.
27:54.282 --> 27:56.703
[SPEAKER_01]: Or the way your reflex and reading the Bible.
27:56.723 --> 28:11.492
[SPEAKER_06]: Yeah, that's, you might assume from reading the Bible that they weren't worshiping Yahweh, because, because the prophets from Judah, you saw them as apostate.
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[SPEAKER_06]: Saw them as unfaithful worshipers of Yahweh.
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[SPEAKER_06]: And so you assume that they had just completely left it all behind, but then when we excavated it at Tel-Dan, there's a religious precinct that looks very much like what the Bible describes as proper Yahweh worship.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, they're doing the Vedic.
28:30.762 --> 28:34.004
[SPEAKER_06]: So it seems like they... What those golden camps?
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[SPEAKER_06]: They thought that they were worshiping Yahweh properly.
28:38.727 --> 28:39.367
[SPEAKER_05]: Could it have been?
28:39.767 --> 28:44.010
[SPEAKER_05]: I'm sure there's a bunch of theories about this, but just a syncretism between... Yes.
28:44.550 --> 28:46.592
[SPEAKER_06]: Yeah, that's exactly what.
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[SPEAKER_05]: Secretism is like blending right blending religious practices.
28:50.536 --> 29:00.727
[SPEAKER_01]: So when you're so what happens, this is where again, helps us read the text because when you go to kings, you think, oh, they they turned to worship other gods when they did the golden calf.
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[SPEAKER_01]: No, no, no, and you go and look at it more carefully and you read kings again, it says, oh,
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[SPEAKER_01]: They're distinguishing between deviant y'all-way worship, which Jarabom brings in, and A. Have actually brings in state-sponsored worship of Baylor Foren God.
29:16.617 --> 29:20.299
[SPEAKER_01]: So, what Jarabom does is deviant, and that's why they're mad.
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[SPEAKER_01]: It's pagan, but it still has this y'all with.
29:25.101 --> 29:27.082
[SPEAKER_01]: It's totally y'all with, yep.
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[SPEAKER_01]: It's just broken according to the Bible, with the superiority of...
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[SPEAKER_06]: In a sense, it gives you a lot more nuanced perspective of it because you might assume, oh, these people are just overtly, flagrantly violating the law and completely rejected the Lord, but it seems like they at least didn't think they had.
29:51.628 --> 29:54.091
[SPEAKER_01]: which makes you read profits to the north differently.
29:54.871 --> 30:00.957
[SPEAKER_01]: I mean, and have, I think, even more compassion on the sin of Jeribon.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Because what he does is actually worship y'all way,
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[SPEAKER_01]: But according to his cultural reflex, rather than according to what scriptures ask you to do.
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[SPEAKER_01]: And if you put in, that's those terms.
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[SPEAKER_07]: That's terrifying.
30:15.848 --> 30:16.928
[SPEAKER_01]: That's terrifying.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Right?
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[SPEAKER_01]: Are you worse to think the Lord, as he's wanting you to, or are you doing it according to your cultural reflex?
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[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah.
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[SPEAKER_01]: And good luck with that.
30:25.093 --> 30:27.215
[SPEAKER_01]: Makes you wonder about the church in America.
30:27.235 --> 30:27.815
[SPEAKER_07]: Yeah.
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[SPEAKER_05]: Yeah.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah.
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[SPEAKER_07]: That we're sufficiently scared.
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[SPEAKER_07]: Okay.
30:31.277 --> 30:33.098
[SPEAKER_05]: Well, we're going to stop there for now.
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[SPEAKER_01]: So that's my archeology.
30:36.519 --> 30:43.086
[SPEAKER_01]: That's why archeology from the everyday believer perspective because it will help us understand the text.
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[SPEAKER_01]: And if we can understand the text and we can start asking those kinds of questions.
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[SPEAKER_01]: That's the right question.
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[SPEAKER_01]: So in order to get there, you've got to let archeology do this thing.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Thank you for listening to the Restory Podcast.
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[SPEAKER_00]: If you like what you heard, hit that subscribe button, share it with your friends, leave us a rating, and check out our other resources at theevenproject.com.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Peace!
