Picking Up the Pieces

At 3:08 pm on October 7th, 2023, the containers housing some 26,000 artifacts discovered at Tel Ashkelon suffered a direct hit in a missile attack from Gaza. These meticulously excavated and analyzed finds – spanning thousands of years, from Canaanites to Crusaders – had been arranged on shelves and gently packed in boxes and bags. Each one, marked in ink and tagged, had been methodically identified with details of origin and other information. None of these careful methods survived the onslaught. What remained was pottery fragments, not unlike those showcased in the nearby Potteryline display. However, these sherds had been marred by fresh breaks, melted plastic fused onto the pottery, and scorch marks that may prove indelible.

The pottery sherd is a faint but tangible trace of human activity in the past, and archaeologists examine sherds to gain insight into the social realities of the ancient world. Now they once again find themselves sifting through shattered remnants, this time from an all-too-recent layer of destruction, in an attempt to document their latest history and mend the broken pieces wherever possible.

 

Pottery fragments courtesy of the Leon Levy Expedition to Ashkelon and the Israel Antiquities Authority