The Archaeology of the Holocaust by Richard A. Freund

Author:Richard A. Freund [Freund, Richard A.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers
Published: 2019-02-07T00:00:00+00:00

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The Secret of Jewish Rhodes

While I came to Rhodes to investigate the archaeology of Jewish culture—the destroyed buildings and mysteries of the architecture, from before the Holocaust era to the present day—I also came to Rhodes because there were so many different possible projects I could do with geoscience, and so many good colleagues with whom to collaborate. Furthermore, I had a lingering archaeological question that I wanted to solve from my work in Israel.

It may seem strange, but one thing that made me very curious to visit Rhodes was the ceramic pots. The amphora pictured on the next page, from the excavations of Bethsaida, was discovered in the 1990s and has always been a favorite of mine. Bethsaida is where I have spent my summers for most of the past thirty years. We found hundreds of fragments of Rhodian amphorae, but this amphora became the symbol of our work because we were able to take the many pieces and put it together and get a sense of its grandeur. We used it as a symbol on our own Bethsaida wine, which was produced in Israel during the excavations, and it graced the cover of the third volume of our investigations, titled Bethsaida: A City by the North Shore of the Sea of Galilee,1 which I co-edited in 2004 with Dr. Rami Arav. When reconstructed, this Rhodian amphora truly reveals that it was unlike any other pottery vessels found in the excavation—a “Cadillac” of pots that could hold as much as one hundred pounds of liquid or grain. Some amphorae were five feet tall. Our Rhodian amphorae were not the largest or the smallest; they seem to have been the right size to travel over the seas and land to arrive at a site far from the coast.

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