POOR WALL

When the rich build mighty walls to honor themselves, or their gods, or their God — and later the poor use those same walls for shelter — is it justice?

I think so, in a way. But it’s the wrong question to ask on this expedition.

Archaeologists are scientists, you see. They deal in fact. But I’m no archaeologist. I’m just a dirt hog who keeps showing up season after season.

So maybe I can write about poor walls.

We’re digging at Hippos, a remarkable city founded in the fourth century BCE. It persisted a thousand years until a great earthquake destroyed it about 748 CE.

No one rebuilt Hippos thereafter. Too remote to rob of stones, high atop a 1,000-meter mountain overlooking the Sea of Galilee, Hippos has become an archaeological treasure — mostly still all there.

But the great day of wrath wasn’t the last day for Hippos. People lived here afterwards. And they built poor walls.


FUSSBUDGET

Here I work with Mark Schuler, a theologian from Concordia University in St. Paul, Minn., and an assistant dig director at Hippos.

Mark is an exacting scholar, meticulous excavator, caring pastor — and a real fussbudget about walls.

Our little team has been digging in an area just west of what we call North East Church, where we have excavated since 2002. Anchoring a complex of buildings that may be an urban monastery, the church proper dates to at least the seventh century, probably earlier. It has burials. Fascinating place.

This season we’re likely on the outer periphery of the complex, perhaps in a domestic area where monks may have lived.

So it’s important. And I’ve never seen Mark think so hard as he did this past week. He was puzzling over a wall — or destruction fill. We couldn’t tell which.

Finally he took a pick to it. After a few swings he stopped. “I feel as though I’m taking apart a wall,” he muttered to himself.

“Better you than us,” I said. I was trying to be funny.


DIRT FLYING

Next day I was in a hole not quite two meters deep that we excavated last season. I was working slowly through the balk toward where a corner should be. We had one face of a wall in the next square beyond the meter-wide balk. My side of the wall had to be in there.

I picked at it gently, handing up football-size rocks and buckets of soil to other workers who hauled away the fill in the gathering morning heat.

I like this work. Some days you bust your tail yanking out massive stones and buckets of dust. Other days you slow down, working expectantly. I was finding a lot of pottery shards — which tend to be in corners. You find remarkable things in corners.

But our putative wall still looked like rubble. About 8:30 a.m. I left for breakfast.

When I came back I found Mark in my hole, dirt flying. In the changing light he had seen the line of his wall and gone after it.

This wall turned out to be a poor wall built atop the earlier construction, “floating” on a layer of soil that already covered the earlier ruins. Hence our difficulty in distinguishing it.

To real archaeologists, poor walls are nuisances. But I like them. They show that people lived here even after the great day of wrath, the earthquake that destroyed the city. A family had built this wall out of rocks lying about nearby in the dead city, probably to pen up livestock.


UNWITTING RE-ENACTORS

That’s why I dig — to come to know the people who once lived here. Some days I can almost see them, tending their sheep, preparing food, hurrying along the abandoned main street — the decumanus — or coming down the cardo past the ruins of our long-empty church.

It’s a strange business, archaeology. Supposedly passionless excavators are really dreamers, are they not? They’re trying to resurrect the dead.

Sometimes they become unwitting re-enactors: At the North West Church 100 meters away, Julia Burdajewicz and Anna Knapek of the Polish team screen soil against the indescribable azure backdrop of the Sea of Galilee. They might be winnowing grain. Emilia Jastrzebska muscling a bucket from the cistern might be drawing water, not earth.

But today is today. A young man, their friend and colleague, is down in the cistern troweling for artifacts. Julia and Emilia joke about whether to leave him there for the weekend.

Did the shepherd’s family laugh as well? A great, rich, dead city? Why build a wall when the ancients have already done so for us? Let us add our poor wall and it will be enough.

I ask Arthur Segal of Haifa University, our dig director, what surprises him about Hippos in his eighth season here.

He says it is the affluence of the place in classical times: Five hundred granite columns imported from Egypt — this was not government spending. Private citizens paid. We have an inscription about one couple who did so. It’s their buildings we want to find, not the poor walls.

Yet after the rich were gone, the poor walls went up: ordinary people making a living in the city of the dead.

So I like finding poor walls. Any family today could make one with a little hard work and cooperation — and without expensive Byzantine architects or stone masons.

These capable post-destruction people knew how to survive. They never stopped trying. They made do. And, as Jesus said, we will always have them with us. Let us pay attention. We can learn from them.