Exploring Mysteries Of Ancient History

Some archaeologists think the palace Megiddo, near Haifa, Israel, was built by King Solomon. The city at Megiddo was destroyed and rebuilt 25 times. (Photos Eric Cline)

Senior anthropology major Courtney Prutzman, 22, was thrilled to unearth the skeleton of a 2-year-old child in a residential area on the mount. "To actually have human bone in my area and to excavate it the right way made me very happy," said Prutzman, a native of Bethlehem, Pa., whose specialty is osteoarchaeology, the study of bones.

She named the child Evan and spent a week gently brushing away the dirt from the tiny frame and from a pottery flask that had been buried alongside it. A co-worker had uncovered a portion of the skeleton under a threshold but was unaware of what it was before Prutzman analyzed it.

Prutzman said she identifies more with the artisans and laborers who built palaces and grand houses than with the kings and business people who occupied them. The discovery of numerous pieces of unworked ivory suggested that the area was also home to artisans who carved beautiful ivory objects discovered in the palace years ago.

"Artisans are normal people basically like me," she said. "They deserve just as much attention as the Solomon debate."

Jonathan Greenberg, a 20-year-old junior and archaeology major from Easton, Conn., also worked in the residential area and was fascinated by objects emerging from the ground "that were more mundane than exotic."

"Such things included bread ovens (tabuns), mortars and pestles, grinding stones, hammer stones, flint and bronze blades -- things that were needed to maintain an ancient household," he wrote in an e-mail.

Senior Max Wolk, 21, an archaeology major from Hopkins, Minn., and sophomore Michael Saltzman, 20, of St. Louis, worked a hundred feet away on a different part of the grid. Their task was to look for clues to identify the period of an impressive tomb uncovered a century ago and the person inside.

The joke -- or reality -- among archaeologists is that "on your first dig you won't find anything, but the person next to you will," said Wolk, who worked with a pickax for nearly three weeks excavating a hole that was five meters square and two meters deep. "Or you'll go all the way to the end [of your time there] and find something and the people after you will take it out."

Sure enough, toward the end of his session Wolk found what appeared to be a large vessel. He won't know what it is until he reads the final report on the summer's dig, which could be months from now, he said.

He found the work stimulating nonetheless. "One of the coolest things is to really see it, not just read it in a book," Wolk said of the multilayered excavation site. Saltzman didn't uncover anything but was impressed at how excited other people in the group got when they realized they "might have found a wall of the tomb, or basalt rock that may have been the base of a pillar for a statue."

In the palace area, where Cline and co-director Margaret Cohen of Penn State University supervised 14 people, including George Washington anthropology major Sarah Loyer, 19, of Chelmsford, Mass., two horse-head figurines were uncovered.

The horse images represent another Megiddo debate -- whether a stable area traditionally believed to have been Solomon's was actually built by him -- and whether it even was a stable. Some scholars argue that the structure, possibly constructed with stones from the palace after it was destroyed by humans or an earthquake, might have been a warehouse or an opium manufacturing facility.

"It would have been nice if we had found the horses' heads in the stables," said Cline, who had to leave after the first half of the summer dig to assume his new job as chair of George Washington's Department of Classical and Semitic Languages and Literature. "But we found the horse heads in the palace level, above the stables."

Do the heads represent a Solomonic connection? "Who knows?" Cline said, adding his conviction that the building was a stable for some ruler.