Science: Diggers

Both Britain and Israel are long inhabited lands whose soil is steeped in legend and salted with ancient relics. In both, the drama of the past waits only the educated spade of the archaeologist.

Romans of Britain. For almost a decade, one of Britain’s leading amateur archaeologists has been excavating a Roman villa on the Darent River in Kent. Last week he made public his most important find: a private temple.

Ex-Lieut. Colonel G. W. Meates was attracted to the Darent River site by an old report that workmen digging postholes more than 200 years ago found a mosaic floor. Moving in with a crew of diggers, he quickly proved that the 18th century fence builders had really stumbled on something. Little by little he uncovered the lower parts of a magnificent villa that was probably inhabited for 300 years. Beside mosaic flooring, it had sculpture of imported Greek marble, a fine painting of water nymphs, and a heated bath.

This summer, guided by pottery fragments that seemed to have washed from higher ground, he and his men dug a trench up the hill behind the villa. It led them into a temple that had passed out of human memory more than 1,000 years ago. He realized that he had found something unique in Roman Britain: a temple built especially to serve the memory of a wealthy Roman-British couple.

Somewhere between A.D. 280 and 325, Meates figures, the master of the villa died. His wife had died a short time before, and preparations for their afterlife were well advanced. On the hill behind the villa, a temple 40 ft. square was partly constructed, and its inner sanctuary was prepared to receive the dead. The bodies of the master and his wife, sealed into lead coffins, were lowered into the earth. Food and drink were put into the grave as provisions for the journey to the isles of the dead. Two knives and two spoons were placed neatly beside the coffins. “It looked like a picnic basket.” said Meates. “laid out for these two individuals.”

Then the grave was filled, and the temple above it completed, with columns and red-painted plaster walls. About A.D. 400 the villa and temple fell into ruins as barbarians from Scotland and the sea swept over Roman Britain.

Israelites on the Plain. In the land of the Bible, diggers probed into ruins and legends that were old when Britons did not exist and Romans were savages. On the narrow coastal plain of southern Israel stands a rounded mound 100 ft. high covering 50 acres. It is a “tell,” a heap of debris, hiding the remains of an ancient city. Israel is lumpy with tells, but this one is more famous than most because Archaeologist William F. Albright of

Johns Hopkins identified it 30 years ago as the Philistine city of Gath, home town of the giant Goliath who died when Slingshot Expert David sunk a stone in his forehead. The Israeli government named a nearby settlement Kiryat Gath (Gath-town), and settlers were proud of Gath’s Biblical background, even though the city and Goliath had been anti-Israelite.

In 1956 Director Shmuel Yeivin of Israel’s Department of Antiquities set 100 laborers digging into Tell Goliath, as it came to be called. On top they found a largely Arab cemetery. Below it were traces of Greek and Persian influence. Even lower was an Israelite layer, which showed signs of a great fire that Yeivin thinks may have raged in 586 B.C., during the Babylonian invasion under Nebuchadnezzar. Beneath was a city of the Canaanites, who occupied the Promised Land before Joshua’s invasion.

Nowhere did Yeivin find evidence that the tell had ever been a Philistine city. It could not. therefore, have been Goliath’s Gath. But what was it? How could so big a city exist for so many thousands of years without leaving a trace in history?

At last Yeivin found a dim identity for the mysterious tell. In the Israelite stratum he came across 15 pottery jar handles bearing the seal of the Jewish Kingdom of Judah. Two of them had in addition four Hebrew letters spelling Mamshat, the name of a Judean city whose site has never been identified.

Yeivin thinks that Tell Goliath may well be Mamshat. Other Israelis hope that he is right. The Hebrews of the Old Testament were hillbillies living in the mountains. The rich lowlands belonged to the Philistine “cities of the plain.” Now the Judean hills belong mostly to Arabs, while the Israelis occupy former Philistine territory. If Tell Goliath proves to be Mamshat, it will be an exception: a city of the plain that was Jewish in ancient times and is today part of modern Israel.