THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, August 13, 1995 TAG: 9508130100
SECTION: DAILY BREAK PAGE: E1 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: BY DAVE ADDIS, STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: CAESAREA, ISRAEL LENGTH: Long : 242 lines
THREE DAYS into a three-week vacation, I was lying sleepless on a cot in a bunker-like dormitory on a kibbutz in coastal Israel, fantasizing about wringing the neck of Herod the Great, King of the Jews.
It didn't matter that Herod had died 2,000 years before, a sycophant of the emperors of Rome until he drew his last ugly breath. I wanted him to die all over again, slowly and painfully.
When a voice over a computer network talked me into joining an international underwater archaeological team, he'd spoken of gentle Mediterranean breezes, sparkling-blue waters, ancient Roman coins dotting the beach, common as bottle caps.
He hadn't mentioned 12-hour workdays, bad food, tough physical labor, or indigestible Israeli coffee that could turn your stomach into a vat of acid.
Since the guy on the computer was still back in Roanoke, the only person I could blame for all this - other than myself - was King Herod. My roommates were just two more victims. They were taking turns bouncing snores off the poured-concrete walls of our 10-foot-square cell. And mosquitoes were taking turns feeding from the open wounds that had left both my legs looking like leftovers from an open-pit barbecue.
My right arm, numb most of the day from breaking rocks with a chisel and an 8-pound maul, was coming back to life just when I wished it would stay dead. It felt like fire ants had bored into my shoulder and were roasting marshmallows in there.
It was Herod's fault. He built this seaside city so opulently, so brilliantly, so boldly, that 2,000 years later its marvels are still lying everywhere, even under the whitecaps of the eastern Mediterranean shore. Caesarea has intrigued archaeologists for many decades, and they still have barely scratched the surface of what Herod and all the conquerors who followed him left behind.
The romance of archaeology is fleeting. For each golden moment of a significant find there are thousands of hours of heart-breaking, back-bending labor, usually at some hideously hot and dusty dig site, most of them far less hospitable than the one Herod left behind.
It will get better, I told myself, slapping futilely at the mosquitoes. I'd been in this kind of fix before and knew that things always look better in daylight.
We'd be up by daybreak anyway, some deviant college professor pounding on the door at 5:30, a perverse ``Boka ta,'' - Hebrew for ``good morning'' - welcoming us to another day of swimming for King Herod.
Yeah, ``boka ta,'' pal. Good morning. Welcome to another day of summer camp for the lunatic fringe.
Travelers who don't cotton to cruise ships or flock-of-sheep tours are turning to what is called ``cultural tourism'' or ``learning vacations.''
A lot of universities, museums and research foundations offer a deal much like the Combined Caesarea Excavations: Volunteers make a donation and pay their own travel expenses to join a scientific expedition. The volunteers get room, board and an insider's look at research in a foreign culture. And, if they're diligent and do the work like they promised, they can get a pretty good tax break for their efforts.
The researchers, in turn, get a crew of stoop laborers who will do the heavy lifting. This gives the researchers more time to spend on the weighty matters of science. It's a fairly even trade.
Caesarea was the third such trip I'd taken. They always attract a non-conformist mix of wanderers who can tell wondrous stories of visits to the strangest corners of the earth. Not a one of them has ever been part of a tour group that involved nametags or funny hats.
The underwater team on the Caesarea dig included 13 weekend scuba divers who had come at great personal expense to help excavate the submerged remains of a man-made harbor that was part of King Herod's city. A couple, like me, had heard about it on rec.scuba, a dive-oriented newsgroup on the Internet.
Six or eight were college students working on class credits and a little summer diversion. Two were ex-U.S. Navy men, one of whose military dive experience is so bizarre that much of it is still a national defense secret.
The others were a marketing exec/dive instructor from San Francisco, a Philadelphia transit engineer, an unemployed Mississippi religion writer, a retired Oklahoma City car dealer, and some guy from Virginia who kept muttering in his sleep about strangling a long-dead Jewish king.
The supervisors were a mix of scientists, free-lance archaeologist-adventurers who'd worked here before, and a group of rock-hard former Israeli military commandos now allied with the Maritime Institute at the University of Haifa.
While scores of other volunteers did the more traditional digging and sifting of sand on the landside sites of Caesarea, we were given the task of dredging, burrowing, chiseling and clawing our way through the harbor, through the muck and rock and rubble that had long buried the foundations of one of the most stunning construction projects of the Roman era.
King Herod ruled this land from 40 B.C. to 4 A.D., and was despised for most of that time by the Jewish people, though he regained a measure of respect by building the fortress at Masada and the Second Temple at Jerusalem.
When Herod, a favorite of the emperors of Rome, built his dream capital of Caesarea on what is now the northern coast of Israel, he understood that the unprotected coastline would be a storm-wracked hurdle to developing a major maritime center.
Relying on Roman engineering, and employing Roman soldiers and hordes of slave labor, Herod willed the construction of a man-made harbor. It stretched several hundred yards off shore, blocking the winds and waves from the southwest, offering a calm anchorage for ships plying the trade routes of the ancient Orient.
It was an awesome feat, a genuine construction miracle for the time.
The outer walls were so massive that they supported the weight of warehouses that ringed the artificial harbor's surface. At the northwest corner, where an opening allowed ships access to the sheltered anchorage, stood a lighthouse and man-made foundations bearing huge statues raised to the glories of Rome, Herod and the Caesars. They've never been found.
Ancient descriptions of this project, especially by the first-century historian Josephus Flavius, where so full of awe and grandeur that researchers long felt Josephus was indulging in a bit of Old Testament hyperbole.
But initial underwater searches in the late 1970s proved the ancient texts accurate: King Herod had built himself one truly spectacular harbor. Aerial photography, underwater surveys and architectural understanding - all rolled together with a bit of science-based speculation - began to draw a picture of just how he did it.
Much to their surprise, early divers found evidence that the harbor's foundation was built of massive concrete blocks. The Romans apparently had developed a type of hydraulic concrete that would harden under water. Analysis showed that the ingredients included volcanic ash from Mount Vesuvius and wooden frames whose timber also could be traced to Italy.
Herod's engineers employed shipwrights to build large, intricately designed barges on Caesarea's shore. These were towed to the construction site, pumped full of concrete, rock and rubble, and settled into place on the seabed. This process was repeated until the harbor wall rose above the sea's surface, where stone blocks could be used to complete the warehouses and other structures.
It's all under water now, destroyed by 2,000 years of waves and tides and the occasional earthquake. To a diver who'd never been here before it looked much like the rocky seabed of New England, or just another shallow-water coral reef off the Bahamas.
Until an occasional straight edge to some of the rocks became apparent among the rubble. Or a puzzling geometry to the way the stones lay on the ocean floor, in a pattern, alien to the randomness of nature. Then it was clear that somebody had planned and built all this.
From the first orientation dive, everybody on the team was hooked. We wanted to see more, wanted to know more. And the only way to do that was to keep digging.
By the second week, we were getting better at our work. We were even getting cocky. Those early days of banging into things, tripping over all the gear, and cutting, bruising and chafing ourselves on the boulders below had taught us a thing or two about chiseling our way through rocks and concrete 30 feet under water.
We'd stopped bleeding, and had pretty much stopped whining. We were even joking now, calling ourselves the ``underwater chain gang.''
To get to the bottom of what King Herod built is a tedious and equipment-intensive struggle. Four or five underwater sites were being probed simultaneously, with divers rotating duty among them. Most sites required the removal of tons of rock to get to the framework of the harbor's foundation. We usually accomplished this by stripping off our fins and moon-walking across the sea floor, hauling the rocks to a dump site nearby.
For the bigger stuff, we used heavy pry bars, chains, hammers, chisels and suction dredges. The latter were the trickiest. Above the dive site we would position a fishing boat outfitted amidships with an engine from an old car or motorcycle. There were two small, cranky British sports car engines, a BMW motorcycle engine, and a diesel of dubious lineage.
The engines were bolted to pumps of the size used on fire trucks. We would connect fire hoses to the pumps, drop the hoses overboard, and connect them to a huge pipe-like contraption suspended under water. All this gear, when activated by a heavy rush of water, resulted in a masterpiece of physics: a hose the diameter of a grapefruit with the power to suck away a ton of sand and gravel in moments. Heaven's own little Hoover.
Dredging was intriguing - we often turned up ancient pottery shards, even bones, coins and camels' teeth. But it could be dangerous. It called for us to undercut large outcroppings of rock and concrete. At times, when we removed the sand and rock that supported them, rock formations the size of a refrigerator would come tumbling down, unannounced. We nearly lost one of our bosses that way. Later, on shore, he said he'd seen God. Nobody called him a liar.
A chisel and maul could be just as daunting down below. On windy days there was a heavy surge, so divers would have to position a chisel on a piece of rock they were working, then wait for the surge to shove them back over it, timing the hammer swing all along. This is something like trying to hoe your tomatoes while swinging above them from a trapeze.
The work was hard on our gear. We adapted by ignoring pretty much everything we'd been taught in scuba training. Dive computers, expensive wristwatches and even backup breathing devices were left ashore. Anything that was unnecessary, any loose piece of gear that might be broken on a rock or sucked into the Hoover, was stripped from our rigs.
This made some of the newer divers nervous. Should disaster strike, though, most knew that at a relatively shallow 20-30 feet, you probably could get back to the surface on a single lungful of air.
Probably.
The dive team would gather at our shore base about 6:30 a.m. and draw the first of the day's assignments. One morning about two weeks into the dig I drew K-5, the archaeologists' designation for a dive site at the entrance to the ancient harbor.
I hadn't been to K-5 in about a week. It was a plum assignment because the site was interesting and the supervisor was a guy named Shuckie (pron: shoo'-key) Ovadiah, a little fireplug of a guy, an ex-Israeli commando. Shuckie said little, smiled a great deal, and had that look in his eye that said he knew a lot more about most things than you would ever know, but he wasn't about to lord it over you. He was a particular favorite of the volunteers.
We did a chalkboard briefing on the day's objectives, then set out for the site. Geared up, Shuckie and two volunteers rolled backwards off a rubber Zodiac and dropped about 25 feet to the bottom. Normally we'd start rigging the dredge hoses right away, but Shuckie waved us off and signaled to follow him.
Divers at K-5 had been excavating a cavern into the heaps of rock and concrete, down to the harbor wall's base. It was the first dive of the day and the water had not yet been stirred up by the work. It was cool and crystal clear, like swimming through a gin-and-tonic.
Shuckie slipped head-first, inverted, into the mouth of the cavern, and I followed. It was about as wide as an elevator shaft and maybe 15 feet deep. Right away I saw that a lot of stone and sand had been dug out since I'd last worked the site. He signaled to me to swim up beside him, to the left. We were at the bottom of the hole, in tight quarters, just enough light filtering in.
Then he showed me why we were doing all this. There, at the bottom of the shaft, were two massive timbers, one atop the other, still tightly joined. The slats that had been pegged to hold them together were clearly visible. At a corner, Shuckie pointed out the intricate mortise work that shipwrights had used 2,000 years ago to bind together the frames that lay at the base of King Herod's miracle city on the sea.
We were looking at expert carpentry that had been fashioned at a time when one of the carpenters of the region was a guy named Joseph. And nobody but the dive team had seen this work since then.
The trouble with being really impressed under water is that you can't shout out loud. You just have to breathe normally and shake your head up and down, in a ``Yes, I understand'' signal that seemed hopelessly understated. Shuckie returned the nod and we went back up to rig the dredge hoses.
Everything seemed easy after that. We rolled out of bed without complaint, we didn't carp much about all the work, the food seemed to taste better, a couple of us started talk about coming back next summer.
And King Herod was forgiven for an awful lot of sins. It's tough to hold a grudge against a man with that sort of vision. ILLUSTRATION: ROBERT J. TERINGO/National geographic IMAGE COLLECTION
Using Roman engineering, Herod ordered construction of a great
harbor, now submerged.
Color photo
DAVE ADDIS
Projects like the Caesarea excavation offer a chance for tourists to
learn as they work. The researchers, in turn, get a labor crew.
Map
STAFF
by CNB