01x07 - Accidental Archaeology

[bunniefuu]

[SIMCHA] Accidental archaeologists,

construction workers, goat herders,

and intrepid amateurs find way more stuff

than the card-carrying kind.

Whether you're talking Biblical tombs in Jerusalem

or ancient scrolls in Qumran,

bona fide archaeologists

are almost never the first ones there.

The trouble is, a lot of them dismiss

or discredit anything they didn't find themselves.

Are they justifiably cautious

or just a little jealous?

I'm off to the Land of the Bible

to see what intrepid amateurs have turned up.

And to find out why the pros

are treating them like second-class citizens.

Here, get the kiss, get the kiss.

Did you get the kiss?

I got the kiss. -You got it?

[speaks Hebrew]

[CAMERAMAN] That was a good kiss.

He wasn't kidding around.

[CAMERAMAN] I think there was tongue there too.

John, this is a family show! but did you get a close-up?

[CAMERAMAN] Oh, I got a close-up.

It's fun making a Biblical Archaeology show.

That's the problem with everybody

they took all the fun out of the archaeology,

the Bible, Israel, it's just a bunch of guys

sitting around talking about fishbones.

Enough of that.

I'll ask the archaeologists to kiss.

But no tongue.

[SIMCHA] The romance begins in Jerusalem,

where I'm meeting with two amateurs

who've battled the pros for over three decades.

This may well be the father of King Solomon's wife.

[SIMCHA] Back in ,

Theo and Miriam Seibenberg bought land high

on the Western Hill with a king's view

of the Temple Mount.

Today, Theo and Miriam live

in one of the most unusual homes in Jerusalem.

The upstairs is ultra-modern.

The basement, well, we'll get to the basement.

Now, did you study archaeology?

When I came here I just had to start digging.

I wanted the archaeologists to do it.

I spoke to the professor who

was in charge of the excavations in the old city,

he stated it officially.

I've gone down to bedrock

and there's nothing there.

[SIMCHA] A stone's throw away,

archaeologist Nahman Avigad

was making headlines with the discovery

of ancient remains of the city of David.

The Western Hill was not a priority.

But in the time of Jesus,

this was the site of Herod's Palace

and the mansions of the wealthy.

How could there be no archaeological remains?

They gave you official permission to dig.

To dig.

To build a house and do what I want.

[SIMCHA] A team of architects,

engineers, diggers, and donkeys

worked for two years before Theo hit pay dirt.

The first item that was this particular key.

This is the first thing you found?

A ,-year-old ring

that somebody would wear on their finger

and it's a key to their precious jewelry box.

Right.

There was a little ball of dirt

and they were going to carry it out,

and I said wait a minute- and I picked it up.

So, you, you saw it with your own eyes.

Right.

[SIMCHA] The ring was just the tip of the iceberg.

But the pros were unimpressed.

Just like when a Bedouin goat herder

found the Dead Sea Scrolls in a cave

in Qumran back in .

It was an accident: he threw a rock into a cave

and broke open an ancient jar.

The rest is history.

I've come to the Museum

where the Dead Sea Scrolls are kept

to talk to Adolforo Roitman, about

the greatest accidental biblical find of all time

What are the Dead Sea Scrolls all about?

The Dead Sea Scrolls are a major discovery.

We have around Biblical manuscript

from years ago. In all the cases,

we have fragment of it, material,

not a complete section or scroll, except for one:

The Book of Isaiah.

The Book of Isaiah is one out of the first seven Scrolls.

This mythological seven first Scrolls

discovered by the Bedouin in Cave One.

So they're the best archeologists?

Oh, as always.

My feeling is:

non-professionals who know the country side,

who work, who live among the tombs,

who don't have to get permits,

who don't have to follow scientific method,

are actually in the better position

to find headline grabbing artifacts.

What do you think?

Maybe in this case you are right.

They live in the area of the Judean desert.

They know very much the area.

They know how to get and to reach the caves,

in the cliffs.

So in many cases,

it's very hard to actually to reach

all these caves and they know how to do it.

This is the full copy one?

This is the full copy.

But this is the facsimile of the full copy.

You mean it's a copy?

It's a copy.

It's not the real thing. -It's not the real thing.

We have the real thing,

and if you want us to show you

the Holies of the Holies.

Okay we're going into the Holies of Holies.

Everybody else is out there looking

at the facsimile or the fake really, and now.

The facsi- sorry, not the fake,

the photocopy of the real thing.

Look at this. Is this thick enough?

What's the combination?

I bet's you it's his cell number.

What's your cell phone number?

You have here a great opportunity,

actually a unique one.

No, we appreciate it, believe me.

To show to your public

actually the real Isaiah Scroll that actually you see.

This is a real wow, oh my God.

The only full copy of any biblical Book

discovering the work.

This one is unique written , years ago.

-, years ago?

When the Scribe copied down this specific one,

Herod the Elder, Jesus,

Herod the Great were not born yet.

It's not a fake, it's not a copy.

On the basis of all the methods we know,

we know that this is an original.

[SIMCHA] It's safe to say

we wouldn't have the Dead Sea Scrolls

a priceless window on the ancient world

if we left archaeology to archaeologists.

Don't touch.

-Am I touching?

Okay, good-bye.

Just kidding. Just kidding.

[SIMCHA] I'm meeting up with Biblical Archaeologist

Gabi Barkay, to find out why some of his peers

are so quick to judge new finds fake.

Because the archeologists have to abide by certain rules,

they're not the one that are going to

find the stuff that gets the headlines

At the end of the day, some Bedouin's going into a cave

is going to find the Dead Sea Scrolls.

Isn't that frustrating?

This is life.

We have to make of it the best we can.

But some archaeologists get so frustrated

they start saying that everything

that wasn't found in a dig is worthless.

I don't subscribe to that approach.

We have to build the knowledge of the past

base upon all possible sources.

But I heard a lot of people say that-

And that includes suspicious stories.

But there are also people who say:

I found it, good. You found it, bad.

Yes, there are such people.

What can you do?

For years

The Dead Sea Scrolls the very famous Dead Sea Scrolls

were portrayed in daily papers as a fake,

as a forgery, as a masterpiece of fake, etc.

So one should be very careful to give it enough time.

Give it enough thought and one shouldn't hurry.

[SIMCHA] It was years

before The Dead Sea Scrolls were authenticated,

but only after the card carrying archaeologists

found more scrolls nearby.

What will it take for the Seibenbergs

to win their respect?

[SIMCHA] When Theo Seibenberg found the remains

of a , year old mansion under his house

in Jerusalem's old Jewish Quarter,

archaeologists ignored the amateur find.

But nothing would stop him.

You continued digging and what happened?

I found all kinds of things

and the archeologists were just not interested.

You could have found the Lost Ark

of the Covenant and they wouldn't care.

Professor Avigad mentioned

that there is nothing here, so there was nothing.

[SIMCHA] But there was something.

Theo found tons. A Roman crucifixion nail.

A rare glass bracelet.

And hundreds of other artifacts.

Seeing all this, you have to wonder:

What drove Theo underground?

The answer is in his own past.

A Belgian-born Holocaust Survivor,

Theo was a child

when his family fled the invading Nazis.

Uprooted because of who he was,

he longed for home, not Antwerp,

but Jerusalem and the Temple Mount,

the heart of the Jewish faith.

He wanted a direct link with his Jewish ancestors.

Theo's basement is that link.

Since he's not as mobile as he once was,

Theo's wife Miriam is taking me down.

Wow, I thought it was a little basement

here we're talking about. This is your basement?

It's a house.

I thought, I thought it was a little basement

with a ping pong table and some ancient stuff.

You don't have a ping pong table.

[SIMCHA] The first layer of the Siebenberg basement

seems to be mansion of a priestly family.

It dates back to the nd century BC

and contains items of religious significance.

You can see that the ceiling

is actually the floor of our house.

All this was a hill.

This is what is called a footbath.

The person would sit here-

Like this?

This is how they did it.

[SIMCHA] Ritual purity is essential to religious Jews.

and is the foundation of Christian Baptism.

This is a mikvah ritual bath.

It has six or seven steps.

This is where baptism comes from.

Unbelievable being to actually step on it.

Yeah, stepping on stairs from , years ago.

The water would cover all the stairs

and everybody would go down according to his height

and immerse himself.

Simcha would have to go down all the way.

I would have to go all the way there and crouch?

Yeah, exactly.

[SIMCHA] The Bible says King Solomon

built a holy temple to house the Ark of the Covenant,

which held the Ten Commandments.

The centre of all Jewish life for a thousand years,

the Temple stood less than meters from this spot.

You believe that the people who went into this mikvah,

this ritual bath purified themselves,

came out and went to the Temple.

Yes.

That's unbelievable actually.

Now all these stones that you see all around you.

We picked them up one by one.

We brought them here and we put them

all in one place so they'll be a memorial

for the palace that stood here two thousand years ago.

[SIMCHA] A priestly mansion this close to the Temple

would be no small find for two amateurs.

And the Seibenbergs say there's even bigger news below.

Still, archaeologists ignore them.

Is that because they didn't find it themselves?

If they're jealous of anyone,

shouldn't they be jealous

of the greatest archaeologist anywhere?

The bulldozer.

It's built for digging, not for archaeology.

How important is construction,

dynamite and bulldozers in Jerusalem archaeology.

Biblical archaeology?

Wherever you go in Jerusalem

and in this country in general,

you come upon ancient remains.

So many archaeological discoveries

are just chance finds as a result of modern development.

Sometimes people blow up the rock for construction

and they find the entrance to a burial cave.

Jason's tomb was found again?

Jason's tomb in was discovered

while blasting the rock for construction.

[SIMCHA] It was in West Jerusalem.

Contractors were just doing their job when

they almost wrecked the , year-old resting-place

of a Jewish family of priests.

Construction came to a crashing halt.

Archaeologists took over.

The builders had no choice but to work around them.

Today, "Jason's Tomb" is just part of the 'hood.

I spoke to resident Bracha Ben Zvi,

about what it's like living with the past so present.

Is it strange to have an ancient,

two thousand year ld tomb in the middle

of all these new apartment buildings?

Not in Jerusalem.

I think every place that you are digging in Jerusalem

you find something.

This is something special of Jerusalem.

I can tell you that we call it the cave here.

And my son, when he was small,

he was playing there in the cave.

We were telling him all the time:

'Don't go to the cave. Come home'.

In Hebrew it sounds better.

[SIMCHA] The bulldozer is a great tool

for uncovering ancient finds,

but what happens when it's used to cover them up?

[SIMCHA] When your bulldozer uncovers archaeology

in Jerusalem, you often call David Mevorah.

To what degree is bulldozer archaeology

responsible for a lot of the big finds?

Huge extent. -Really?

It's unbelievable how many of the important finds

that we have are accidental finds.

All the neighborhoods around us are upon ancient sites,

so this is a very common thing in Jerusalem.

Does the bulldozer driver get an honorary Ph.D.?

Immediately![laughs]

Is it safe to say that bulldozers have discovered

more stuff than trained archaeologists?

No, it's not. -No?

Why are construction workers better?

A bulldozer just bulldozes.

But an archaeologist has to follow the rules.

He applies for permission from various governing bodies.

He consults committees, raises money, hires staff,

digs, dusts, counts, measures, documents, researches.

He fills out paperwork, publishes, exhibits.

He's far too busy to FIND things.

I met with archaeologist, Israel Finkelstein,

who thinks amateurs searching for buried

treasure are signing up for heartbreak.

Look, you are, we are excavating in Jerusalem

for a century and more, a century and a half.

Every square meter in Jerusalem,

about every square meter,

has been checked and dug.

By professional excavations.

Professional excavations.

I mean with hundreds of people in the field.

From morning to evening for months and years.

In an effort of a century and a half, major excavations,

consortium of universities

going with hundreds of students.

What happened?

They found very little.

[SIMCHA] If archaeologists don't find much,

amateurs and bulldozers do.

They aren't shackled by protocol.

But once a construction worker has..

found something ancient,

doesn't he have to follow the rules?

The developers, on the other hand,

are not very happy when such an instance occurs

because they have not only to stop the work..

but also to finance the excavation.

Sometimes the whole project is cancelled.

So developers-

You pray not to have an archaeological site

in your ground.

Some people know that there are remains

and some of them do work at night

to try to avoid being monitored.

And there are all kinds of cases.

It's a cat and mouse game

between the archaeologists and the builders?

Yes. -Yeah?

This is the basement of a convention center in Jerusalem.

When it was being constructed, bulldozers made a major find.

But instead of calling the authorities,

developers tried to cover it up,

but they got busted and archaeologists moved in.

What they uncovered was

an ancient Roman tile and brick factory.

This place was found

by that most famous archaeologist of all time

in Biblical archaeology, at least, John A. Bulldozer.

Bulldozer did it again. , year-old kilns.

This is a big outfit, this is a factory.

This is not one kiln. The size of this kiln.

Where I'm staying here, this is where the fire was.

Above me, over were, was all the pottery.

We're talking about tile making, road building,

water supplies.

This is the guts of the Roman army.

This is what made possible years

of Roman occupation of this area.

Built by the army itself,

by the most feared legion of all time:

the th Roman Legion.

This is all real stuff:

this is the kilns as they were found.

Look, the bricks are still there.

Here, c'mere, c'mere, c'mere.

This is the stamp of the th Roman Legion.

These were bigshots, and it was found by bulldozer.

Way to go bull!

[SIMCHA] When we come back,

some amazing bulldozer finds of the century,

from the sacred grounds of the Temple Mount.

But due to nasty politics, they were tossed in a dump.

Now, archaeologist, Gaby Barkay,

is struggling against time

to uncover historical treasures from the trash.

I haven't even started yet

and I already found something: modern glass.

[SIMCHA] This is one of the most sacred sites in the world.

For Muslims, it's the Dome of the Rock,

where the prophet Mohammad ascended to heaven.

For Christians, it's where

Jesus taught the law as a youngster.

For Jews, it's the site where the Holy Temple once stood..

and where the Ten Commandments were kept.

One of the biggest archaeological mysteries

in the world is:

what's under the Dome of the Rock?

The problem is the politics of who controls the site

have prevented any major archaeology

from being carried out near the dome.

But in , when the Muslim Authority

did some controversial renovations under the building.

They dug up and dumped tons of debris into a nearby valley.

But archaeologists weren't allowed to sift through it

to see if it contained any ancient artifacts.

They dug a huge pit with heavy machinery.

Actually, it was an archaeological disaster.

Described by the director of Antiquities as a 'crime.'

'An archaeological crime'.

It was just dumped there.

And when you said, 'I want to dig this,

on the other hand, Muslim authorities

were just bulldozing this archaeological stuff,

but what about the Israelis?

Did they give you a big slap on the back and say,

'Way to go, you willing to do this?'

I was denied a license.

[SIMCHA]It took Barkay five years of political wrangling

to get permission to set up a proper excavation.

Now the sifting has begun.

What we do, we fill up the material

from these piles into buckets.

Then, the material is soaked for a couple of hours.

And then it is sifted in, through screens

Oh, Gaby, look at this.

What do make of that?

Either late Roman or Byzantine.

It's a nice ancient coin. We'll have to clean it.

How much am I getting paid for this?

I don't think you deserve anything.

[SIMCHA] Barkay has searched through

only a small portion of the rubble

and has already uncovered

a treasure trove of history.

Oh my goodness.

We have here a-

Wow, look at that! A goat's head.

This is amazing. What period?

Late Roman probably.

For me, the most important pieces

are plain pottery pieces,

such as these from the time of the prophet Isaiah,

from the time of King Hezekiah.

They are , years old and

this is the important stuff that we have.

Is this a comb?

It is a comb.

It may have still lice upon it.

Really? -Original lice.

And what could the lice teach us?

That they suffered from the same curses

as we suffer from today.

When you see coins and whatever,

but this, this is so human, you know?

Everything is human. -Woah!

This is an arrowhead,

which was first introduced

by the armies of Nebuchadnezzar,

King of Babylon, .

This is the tragedy of the destruction

of the st Temple of Jerusalem.

The destruction of Solomon's Temple,

which occurred years after it was built.

The Bible talks about the

destruction of Solomon's Temple.

And this is an actual arrowhead from that time.

Yes -At the Temple Mount.

Yes.

It's, it's pretty, it's pretty amazing.

Every single piece is very special for me.

Not only nicely shaped objects as this one,

but the odd pieces of pottery that teach us a lot

about people's presence upon the Temple Mount.

That is what matters for me.

So every piece is very, very significant.

[SIMCHA] Whatever the politics might be,

it's another example of the bulldozer

unwittingly being mobilized for the sake of archaeology.

On the other side of the Temple Mount,

Miriam Seibenberg is equally enthusiastic

about the archaeological history in her basement.

I heard of people who hug trees.

Do you hug stones?

I don't have to give it a hug but I love to watch them.

They speak to you?

They speak to me.

Really? -Yes, yes.

What do you feel?

I feel that they saw and listened

to the people that were here,

they saw everything that was going on,

and they got soul.

I think so.

You're only a few yards away

from where the Temple Mount used to be,

where the Dome of the Rock is right now.

Yes.

This must be one of the most incredible views in Israel.

The only one, I think.

[SIMCHA] Chance finds

made by wandering Bedouins, or bulldozers,

amatures are the foundation of Biblical Archaeology.

They are the unsung heroes of the trade.

Without them, we wouldn't have the Dead Sea scrolls,

Jason's tomb and these artifacts

from the Seibenberg basement.

Maybe it's time

to give them a well deserved pat on the back.