Digging Deeper: 5 Things About Archeology

What can archaeology teach us about the world of the Bible and the early church? Today, Stephen Nichols highlights how archeological discoveries bring historical context to the life and faith of God’s people.

Welcome back to another episode of 5 Minutes in Church History. The last couple of weeks we were together, we were talking about that wonderful discovery of the prayer hall at Megiddo, and it was found, of course, in what is called Tel Megiddo, and that was a very significant, remains a very significant, archeological site. Well, this week I thought we would dig a little deeper into the dust and ancient stones and talk about this field of archeology itself. So here we go: five things about archeologists.

First is the relationship to historians. A simple way to put it is historians love texts. They love to study texts, analyze texts, interpret text, debate texts, and present texts from the past to the present. Archeologists help give context to those texts. Archeologists work with what we call material culture. That's the items used by everyday people doing everyday things, lamps and jars and coins, and of course, they're interested in buildings, massive public buildings like stadiums or churches and also houses. And they're trying to discover and interpret the physical remains of the past to reconstruct the lives of these ancient people, whether it's in biblical times or the times of the ancient church, or even Reformation era, or even in the modern age, archeologists are trying to reconstruct the past and bring it forward.

Where do archeologists work?—our second thing. Well, they work at a “Tel,” and that's with one “L” or two “L”s. Tel is a mound. It sort of represents where a village existed, and then it was destroyed or leveled, either through an army or some natural circumstance. And then they rebuilt, and then it was destroyed again, and they rebuilt again. And over time, this created a hill and there are layers to it. Imagine a layer cake and you got everything in there, the chocolate, the whipped cream, the strawberries. We'll throw in blueberries. You slice through that layer cake. You see these nice layers. If you ever get a chance to go to Athens and you're standing in front of the palace, simply go underground to the main subway station there, and you will see that there is an entire cutaway (it's all recreated), but a cutaway, recreating ancient Athens from where it stands now, all the way down to the ancient philosophers and poets and playwrights. So they work at a Tel. They also work actually wherever remains are found. Sometimes it's under a parking lot in Great Britain, and they realize that there was a king buried down there. So that's our second thing.

How about our third thing—is archeology all about Indiana Jones? And the answer to that is simple—“no.” Well, if it's not about Indiana Jones, then what is it about? And that's our fourth question or our fourth item about archeology. Archeology is really a team. You have the directors who supervise the site. You have all the specialists. There are people who have their PhD in pot sherds, dating little pieces of pottery, and they are absolute specialists in that field. And then surrounding them are an army of students and volunteers who are painstakingly on hands and knees, usually in brutal conditions under much intense heat and sun with little brushes in their hands, pushing away the dirt to uncover what lies underneath.

Finally, what happens to all these artifacts that get found? Well, first, when something is found, there's a lot of excitement. It's the payoff, the reward for all that hard work. They clean around very carefully, cleaning around the item. It is photographed in its setting; it is registered; it is all very carefully documented. Then these artifacts are sent off to the lab, and they're analyzed, and they're dated, and they actually then date those layers. Let's go back to our layer cake. They date those layers of the tell based on the dates of the artifacts. That's why they love coins, because they're very easy to date. And now we can get some understanding of this particular area, and we can begin to recreate the past.

So, historians, again, love bringing the texts of the past forward; Archeologists love bringing the contexts of the past forward, and this helps us have a better understanding of these people and the places and the things they did in the past. That's archeology, and I'm Steve Nichols and thanks for listening to 5 Minutes in Church History.