c. 2004 Religion News Service

JERUSALEM _ Since the start of the Palestinian uprising four years ago, local archaeologists, many of them working on sites alluded to in the Bible, have had to scale back or even cancel their digs.

That’s because the threat of continued violence has kept foreign professors and students from providing assistance at large digs.

Twin bus bombings that killed 16 people in the southern Israeli city of Beersheba on Aug. 31 did nothing to calm skittish scholars and nervous insurance companies. But archaeologists are still hopeful that the attraction of biblical history _ especially the discovery of a cave said to be John the Baptist’s _ will lure academics and tourists alike.

“The intifada has definitely had an effect on Israeli archaeology, including our dig,” said Shimon Gibson, the archaeologist who excavated the “John the Baptist cave.”

Gibson announced in mid-August that he had found a cave that he believes was used by John the Baptist to anoint some of his followers. The news received international media attention.

Then came more bus bombings.

“Prior to the intifada we had many students from the (United) States,” said Gibson in an interview. “When the intifada began, the U.S. State Department advised Americans not to travel here, and ever since then we’ve had to rely on smaller and smaller groups. It’s been a bit of a nightmare, actually.”

A major problem is that American institutions, especially federally funded ones, find it difficult to obtain insurance for anyone they send to the region, said Gideon Avni, director of the excavations service department at the Israel Antiquities Authority.

From the mid-1990s through the year 2000, Avni said, approximately 45 foreign academic institutions, two-thirds of them American, ran or co-ran digs in Israel. That number dwindled to five in 2003.

With a lull in the violence before the bus bombings, the situation improved.

“We have 12 American excavations,” said Avni. “We hope the trend will continue despite the recent attacks.”

Avni stressed that even when the foreigners stopped coming, Israeli teams tried to persevere. Even during the intifada years, he said, Israelis carried out 15 to 20 large-scale excavations and about 200 mostly short-term “rescue” digs on sites uncovered in the course of modern-day sewer repairs and road construction.

Gibson, a senior fellow at the American Albright Institute of Archaeological Research in Jerusalem, said he managed to continue his dig because the cave he excavated is so small, fitting only 20 workers at a time.

For larger digs, needing 100 or more people, “the lack of volunteers was disastrous,” said Gibson.

To compensate for the loss of his younger university students, Gibson began to utilize the services of older volunteers from the United States and Europe as well as Israeli volunteers of all ages.

“We had pensioners who always wanted to work a dig,” Gibson said. “We could have employed paid workers, but where’s the educational value in that?”

While the excavations have suffered, so have archaeology students.

“For the first time,” said Gibson, “students studying the archaeology of Israel aren’t always able to gain field experience. How can a student learn how to excavate unless he’s actually doing it?”

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Some of the last foreign students to help Gibson hailed from the University of North Carolina at Charlotte.

“The intifada forced us to make some adjustments,” said James Tabor, a UNC archaeologist who helped excavate the John the Baptist cave. “In 2001, even after the intifada began, we sent students to Israel, but only those over the age of 21. They made their own decision as adults and we required them to procure their own insurance and to sign a waiver of liability.”

Tabor said he reluctantly decided not to send students in 2002 _ young or old _ “because my classes have students of all ages and limiting Israeli excavations to those over 21 was problematic.”

“Personally, I travel to Israel often and feel quite safe,” Tabor said from his North Carolina base.

Excavations at the northern fortress of Megiddo, the great biblical battlefield, managed to continue “because we had Israeli students and some paid volunteers from the Parks Authority,” said Yisrael Finkelstein, a Tel Aviv University archaeologist who has been excavating the site for years.

When the number of excavators dropped from 200 in 2000 to just 50 in 2002, “we considered stopping the dig,” Finkelstein said. “It was that bad. But then we decided that if the Israeli people could go on with their lives during this time, we would, too.”

Some of the excavations that managed to survive the intifada years have unearthed some remarkable finds. In June of this year an Israeli team discovered what is believed to be the Biblical Pool of Siloam, the main water reservoir for Jerusalem dwellers two millennia ago. It is fed by the nearby Gihon Spring, which has been under excavation for decades.

Haifa University archaeologist Ronny Reich explained that the pool was found by chance.

“A sewage pipe was being repaired, and as often happens in Jerusalem, something ancient was uncovered,” said Reich.

MO/PH END CHABIN