Digging Up My Past

I've made some interesting discoveries this week "digging" around in my bookshelves.  I also "unearthed" another satirical piece I had written for Archae magazine back in the early 1990's, soon after I returned from an archaeological dig in Israel.  I had participated in a dig at the ancient site of Beth Shemesh ("House of the Sun"), working alongside Israeli and American archaeologists and a volunteer team consisting of Americans, Germans, Canadians, Israelis, Australians and a religious smorgasbord as diverse as Jew, Christian, Muslim, and Agnostic.  On the flight home, I knew I had to write something that would poke fun at the archaeological in-fighting and arguments and posturing I witnessed over small bits of pottery and fertility goddess artifacts, no less.

Although I was able to bring home a few pieces of pottery from the Israelite/Philistine era--when Beth Shemesh was a "border town" and had been at various times either Israelite or Philistine--the experience in the "Holy Land" was quite humorous, in retrospect (Sorry, I just think that way).  

I sat down and wrote a piece for an archaeological magazine entitled: Biblical Archaeology in Retrospect: A Decade's Worth of Unique Finds.  I provided illustrations for this piece, and the editor was so taken with my drawings, I remember he published it virtually unchanged.

My favorite section consists of a drawing of a human skeleton depicted as being discovered beside two dumbbells and clay jar containing a parchment.  I wrote:

Chamber 43 at Wadi-Mudu has proved to be an enigma to the archaeologist, but most scholars have simply refused to admit the obvious.  Here we find the remains of a man in his mid-forties who was a fitness fanatic, had receding gums, and had been gored by a goat in the left testicle.  At the time of his death he was buried alongside his primitive dumbbells and a well-preserved parchment containing fragments from a fitness and cardiovascular manual.  This important discovery has shattered our perceptions of the ancient Israelites as being a people who were out-of-shape, rotund individuals with a proclivity toward the pot belly. Evidently the fellow in Chamber 43 was a fitness buff who enjoyed working out with weights and spent the greater part of his adult life eating a low cholesterol, low sodium diet and working out to Shalom Ale chem.

I enjoy finding these published remnants from my past.  I'm still looking for some love letters from my wife (these gotta be old, since she don't write them no more), and a few early stories, poems, essays, and pieces of satire.

I'm also looking for that box of Philistine pottery.  If only I could remember where I buried it.