You wouldn't go snooping in someone's kitchen, opening closets, peeking in the oven, and even sorting through the garbage. At the most you might take a quick look in the cookie jar. But archaeologists go snooping all the time. It's not called snooping when the owner of the kitchen has been dead for 2,000 years. It's called the science of archaeology. And the scientists, the archaeologists, are detectives of the past who search patiently for evidence of the ways people lived long, long ago.

A Giant Layer Cake

Where in Israel should an archaeologist start looking? Every place! Israel is like a giant layer cake. The icing on the top layer holds the farms and cities and roadways of modern Israel. When farmers dig down a few feet to plow a field or when builders dig foundations for a house, they reach another layer of the cake. They may begin to turn up bits of pottery, square-shaped stones, old tools, bones, and other things that come from an earlier time in history. Then the archaeologists race up in their jeeps, shoo away the farmers or builders, and begin to dig very carefully down through the layers of earth and rock.

Archaeologists examine every bit of pottery and every rock that has been cut and shaped. Just as you can tell the difference between a Model T Ford and a brand-new car, an archaeologist can tell the difference between the designs and colors on bits of pottery from different times and places. He or she can look at a carved, stone figure, a coffin, or a bit of jewelry and decide which people made it, and when.

Telling about Tells

It is easy to understand the layers of human settlement when we look at a tell, which is a rounded hill that isn't made of rock like ordinary hills. It's made of towns built on top of each other. People might have built the first town, the one at the bottom of the tell, beside a clear spring or stream. After many years enemies may have attacked the town, killed the people, or driven them away and smashed the houses. Prickly thistles and wild oats sprouted between the stones of the walls. Dust, earth, and leaves slowly covered the ruins, forming a low mound. After a while new people came. They liked the little stream and built their houses on the mound beside it. Years later the newcomers might have been driven off by enemies too, or disease may have killed them. The stream may have dried up during a long spell without rain. Then the people would have packed up and gone off to find new homes near water. Their leftover houses would form another layer. With each new settlement the tell grew higher.

When we cut slices from the tell of Sasa we find remains of these earlier settlements.

Each layer of a tell has a sad or exciting story to tell. For instance, in a layer deep under the city of Jerusalem archaeologists uncovered a family kitchen from the time of the Second Temple, 2,000 years ago. Huge jars for grain, oil, and dried fruit stand by the walls. A clay oven is ready for a batch of pita bread. But the walls and jars are black from the soot of a great fire. Could it have been the fire that broke out when the Romans destroyed the Temple and the city in 70 C.E.? "Maybe," say the archaeologists. Then what happened to the family? We can only guess.