Eric H. Cline - Three Stones Make a Wall: The Story of Archaeology

THREE STONES MAKE A WALL

THREE STONES MAKE A WALL

THE STORY OF ARCHAEOLOGY

ERIC H. CLINE

With illustrations by
Glynnis Fawkes

PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS PRINCETON & OXFORD

Copyright 2017 by Princeton University Press

Published by Princeton University Press, 41 William Street, Princeton,

New Jersey 08540

In the United Kingdom: Princeton University Press, 6 Oxford Street, Woodstock, Oxfordshire OX20 1TR

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Cline, Eric H., author.

Title: Three stones make a wall : the story of archaeology / Eric H. Cline.

Description: Princeton : Princeton University Press, [2017] | Includes
bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2016041435 | ISBN 9780691166407

(hardback : acid-free paper)

Subjects: LCSH: ArchaeologyHistory. | Excavations (Archaeology)History. | ArchaeologistsBiography. | ArchaeologyMethodology. | Antiquities. | Civilization, Ancient. | BISAC: SOCIAL SCIENCE / Archaeology. | HISTORY / Ancient / General. | HISTORY / Civilization. | HISTORY / World.

Classification: LCC CC100 .C55 2017 | DDC 930.1dc23 LC record
available at

https://lccn.loc.gov/2016041435

British Library Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available

This book has been composed in Sabon Next LT Pro

Printed on acid-free paper.

Printed in the United States of America

1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2

CONTENTS

vii

xi

Frontispiece: Excavating at Tel Kabri

One stone is a stone.

Two stones is a feature.

Three stones is a wall.

Four stones is a building.

Five stones is a palace.

(Six stones is a palace built by aliens.)

Archaeological axiom

W HEN I WAS SEVEN YEARS OLD, MY MOTHER GAVE ME A book called The Walls of Windy Troy. It was about Heinrich Schliemann and his search for the ruins of ancient Troy, written just for children. After reading it, I announced that I was going to be an archaeologist. Later, when I was in junior high and high school, I read John Lloyd Stephenss Incidents of Travel in Yucatn and C. W. Cerams Gods, Graves, and Scholars, which cemented my desirethe stories of finding lost cities in the jungle and uncovering ancient civilizations were mesmerizing. In college, I declared my major in archaeology just as soon as I could and, when I graduated, my mother again gave me the book about Schliemann that had started it all fourteen years earlier. I still have it in my office at George Washington University today.

Im not alone in being fascinated by archaeology; its pretty clear that a lot of other people are as well. This is evident by the success of the Indiana Jones movies and in the burgeoning television documentaries that air almost every night on one channel or another. Ive lost track of the number of times that someone has said to me, You know, if I werent a _____ (fill in the blank with doctor, lawyer, nurse, accountant, Wall Street financier, etc.), I would have been an archaeologist. Most people, however, have little or no idea whats involved. Maybe they imagine searching for lost treasures, traveling to exotic locales, and meticulously digging using toothbrushes and dental tools. Its usually not like that at all, and most archaeologists are nothing like Indiana Jones.

Ive been going on archaeological expeditions almost every summer since I was a sophomore in collegemore than thirty field seasons in all, over the past thirty-five years. Because of where Ive workedprimarily in the Middle East and Greecemost people consider me to be an Old World archaeologist. But Ive also excavated in California and Vermont in the United States, which is considered the New World in archaeological terms.

Ive been able to participate in a variety of interesting projects, including Tel Anafa, Megiddo, and Tel Kabri in Israel; the Athenian Agora, Boeotia, and Pylos in Greece; Tell el-Maskhuta in Egypt; Palaiokastro in Crete; Kataret es-Samra in Jordan; and Ayios Dhimitrios and Paphos in Cyprus. Most of those are sites or regions that almost nobody except archaeologists has ever heard of, except perhaps the Agora in downtown Athens and Megiddo in Israel, which is biblical Armageddon. I can tell you for a fact that digging at those sites is nothing like in the movies.

People often ask me, Whats the best thing youve ever found? In response, I tell them, a petrified monkeys paw. It happened on my very first overseas excavation, during the summer after my sophomore year in college. I was digging at the Greco-Roman site of Tel Anafa in the north of Israel on a project run by the University of Michigan.

One day, about mid-morning, it was getting really hot and I was starting to worry about sunstroke. Just then, my little patish, or digging hammer, hit an object at such an angle that the piece flew straight up in the air, turning over and over before it landed again. While it was still in midair, I noticed that it was green and thoughtin a bit of a daze because of the heathey, its a petrified monkeys paw! By the time it landed, I had come to my senses: What would a petrified monkeys paw be doing in northern Israel?

Sure enough, when I examined it closely, it turned out to be a Hellenistic bronze furniture piece in the shape of the Greek god Panthe one with horns on his head who goes around playing on the double pipes. It would probably have been attached to the end of a wooden arm of a chair, but the wood had disintegrated long ago and so only this bronze piece was left where I was digging. It was green because the bronze had turned that color during the two thousand years that the piece had been lying in the ground, waiting for me to find it. We carefully brought it out of the field, drew it, and photographed it, so that it could eventually be published. I didnt see it again for almost thirty years, until I just happened to run across it in a museum at the University of Haifa, where it was on loan from the Israel Museum in Jerusalem.

But then, in 2013, our team digging at the Canaanite site of Tel Kabri in northern Israel found something that trumped even my petrified monkeys paw. Ive been codirecting the excavations at the site every other year since 2005 with Assaf Yasur-Landau of the University of Haifa. Each season has brought new surprises, but this was entirely unexpected, for we uncovered what turned out to be the oldest and largest wine cellar yet discovered in the world, dating to about 1700 BCEnearly four thousand years ago.