Scholarship Winners

Katie M. Heffelfinger

Archaeology took me out of the library and into a hole in the ground.

My summer dig experience at Yavneh Yam got me out of what has become my natural environment and into an exciting new world of digging [see cover photo—Ed.], sifting and carefully examining each spadeful. Sometimes there would be a green glimmer in the dirt, a sure sign that something metallic was lurking. Of these metal finds, coins created the most commotion. The coin would be held up in the air with the shout “Special find!” and sometimes someone with a metal detector would come along to see if other coins might be hidden nearby. I found one coin lying directly on a sandstone floor that I had just spent several days carefully exposing. I hope it will help give a clearer picture of when that floor was in use. Two other green glints turned out to be arrowheads, one bent from impacting a wall or a person.

The ancient seaport city yielded many fascinating pottery vessels, called amphorae, used for transporting liquids by sea. It seemed as though nearly every day there would be an intact or nearly intact jar, often almost 3 feet tall, in one of the nearby squares.