My best week digging in the Judean foothills ended with a pottery sherd that changed my research

Last April I spent five days on a salvage excavation near Beit Shemesh, and on day four I pulled out a tiny handle fragment with a lmlk seal impression. I had to sit down right there in the dirt because that find basically confirmed the site was a royal supply center from Hezekiah's time. Has anyone else had a single artifact completely reframe their whole season?

2 comments

2 Comments

jessica_dixon2d ago

That line about "sitting down right there in the dirt" hit close to home. I read a piece in Biblical Archaeology Review last year where a digger in Lachish found a single arrowhead that shifted the dating of a whole destruction layer. A tiny handle with a lmlk stamp can rewrite the supply chain map of an entire kingdom, it's wild how much weight one piece of broken pottery carries.

michael_jones2d ago

Used to think one piece of pottery couldn't really tell you much about a big picture. This totally changed my mind on that, it's kind of amazing really.