Dig it!
Archeology at Beth Shemesh (1400 B.C.)
Arthur Bankoff, chair of our Anthropology Department, is busy readying his team for their two-month long trip to Israel. A 1965 Brooklyn College alumnus, Professor Bankoff has been teaching at his alma mater since 1974. And each year since 1992, Bankoff has traveled across to excavation sites in Bulgaria, Serbia and, for the last three years, Israel.
      “BC students have been consistently good over the years,” Bankoff says, quickly noting that the summer program is also opened to students and volunteers from different walks of life.
      Describing archeology as blue collar academics, Bankoff notes that “it’s very rewarding to work with young people. Not only does this make you feel young but it’s intellectually rewarding and stimulating to solve the puzzles about the people who lived at those sites.”
      This year Bankoff and his team are returning to Beth Shemesh (House of the Sun), an  excavation site south of Jerusalem for the first month of the trip.
      A physically demanding job, students must start the day digging from 5:00 a.m. until 8:30, when they break to get breakfast, then resume excavating until about 1:00 p.m. The rest of the day is spent washing the pottery found in the excavation and examining the pieces from the day before. The day ends with a lecture before supper.

     “Our job is to bring back the lives of everyday people, people like us who don’t make it into the official documents of the past. Without archeological work, history becomes a very flat, very gray endeavor and our job provides the colors to paint a complete picture of the past.”
      The second month, students must take classes in cultural anthropology at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. Although this is an expensive proposition, the Anthropology Department makes every effort to defray part of the cost.
      “Thanks to Assemblywoman Rhoda Jacobs, we got money from the state. We also got money from the BC foundation and the Archeology Center,” Bankoff says, adding that the students may also apply for fellowships to cover their costs.
      But even for those who can’t afford a trip abroad there are other viable alternatives, Bankoff points out. “We have an excavation site in Brooklyn where you can work three weeks.”
      So whatever your situation, you can spend part of your summer digging up the past.