Scholarship Winners

Gina Fugate—Ashkelon

Gina Fugate is a senior English education major at Berea College in Kentucky. In her letter of application for a 2000 BAS dig scholarship, she displayed an educator’s understanding of the importance of firsthand experience: “As a future teacher,” Fugate wrote, “I know that one of the grandest ways to learn something is to literally get into it.” And that’s exactly what she did at Ashkelon, where she learned the lessons of history not by reading books and listening to lectures, but by personally uncovering the relics of an ancient culture.

Sometimes the sun was so hot and the dirt on me was so incredibly thick that I would think, “What have I gotten myself into?” I had no background in archaeology or theology. I was simply an English education major who wanted to teach high school English to “at-risk” kids. So what on earth was I doing on a dig? I was literally getting into history in a way that no traditional classroom would allow.

Excavating is tough work. There are so many different tools—not only pickaxes, trowels and goofahs (baskets made from cut-up tires), but also measuring tapes, stadia rods, grid paper and meter sticks. Almost every moment requires intense concentration. The grid I was working in seemed to be one huge puzzle: Do all of these walls meet? Why is there a gap in the middle? Why on earth would we find the remains of a human baby in a pot?