Art, Archaeology, and Identity in Caesarea and Haifa

Art, Archaeology, and Identity in Caesarea and Haifa

I went to Caesarea to work with a brilliant, creative marine geophysical archaeologist, Beverly Goodman from Haifa University.  Among other things, she studies ancient tsunamis so that we can better prepare our coastlines in the present and in the future.

Beverly was hoping that an excavation would be in swing while I was there, but that work actually has been moved to November.  Beverly has so many plates spinning, I am grateful for the time she could devote to shooting video with me, for time spent shuttling me around, and for the home stay she arranged.

Since we only had a little time together, we decided to focus on a very narrow story: how a fable from the Talmud helped researchers to date an ancient seismic event, and how such events are indicated by large deposits of a particular kind of seashell.  Near Caesarea is Tel Dor, and beaches there are just COVERED with these shells.  Walking through them, of course, makes a marvelous sound, so we captured that.

We could not, however, get into the recording studio at Haifa University at any time that worked for us, so we had to record at the beach with a windsock.  It is good enough for a YouTube video for Beverly’s website, but to make something film festival worthy, one really needs to record clean voiceover and mesh it on top of ambient ocean and shells.  So this is a sketch for a better version next visit, hopefully!    And she can use it for presentations.

Phoenicians were the first people we know of to build a port at Caesarea.  Then King Harod built a Roman city.  Medieval European crusaders were there, Mumlaks, Ottomans, and Arabs.  Many layers of history indeed!

Tel Dor was also an important Phoenician site.  The small local museum there is a true gem.  They have a whole case of Astarte goddess figurines, a case of jewelry that the Phoenician acquired from trade with Egyptians, fine examples of amphorae from various Mediterranean explorers (Cyprus, Greece, Phoenicia, etc.) and many other notable artifacts.  The rooms of the museum are set up as installations, including an underwater archaeology room.

I also was in my glory at the art museum at Haifa University, Hecht.  The bulk of the collection on display was Canaanite archaeology.  A whole wing is devoted to Phoenicians specifically, a subset of Canaanite along with Israelites and other tribes.  In this wing, as with the Tel Dor museum, the exhibit design was installation focused.  Instead of an institutional floor, the visitor crunches through Mediterranean stones to examine artifacts.  I loved it.

Not to ignore the Modern and Contemporary art of the region, I took a train to Israel’s hippest city, Tel Aviv.  The Tel Aviv Museum of Art was enormous and took me the whole day, so I did not venture on to any galleries but for one that was hosting the museum’s new video art acquisitions.  It was worth the trip! (--and a relief to spend a whole day in air conditioning.)

My hosts for this leg of the trip were amazing, Ofi and Uri and their young adult son Nadav.  They took me in like family.  Ofi loves to nurture people, and Uri is very athletic like me.  He has devoted much of his retirement to mountain biking all over the region! So he showed me a nearby park with mile and miles of trails for me to run---plus goats and Griffon vultures and jackals and English gardens!

Again, I felt like I fit in here really well.  The ancestral roots were all around me.  The locals look like my mom’s family (Grandpa used to say we were of Phoenician stock), and Ancestry.com insists that my Polish grandma’s maiden name is usually Ashkenazi, though I have not yet convinced my dad (who was blond as a child).  So lots of identity sorting…

Also, Beverly and Ofi are both archaeologists and both moms.  I think THIS would make a great short film!  Those things just do not go together in my mind.  Archaeologists are free spirits and high-risk adventurers, traveling all the time.  How do you balance that with motherhood ?!??  Both women have taken very different approaches.  I felt profoundly inspired.  

I hope I get to go back and do more work with these wonderful, intrepid women.  This first trip felt like a research trip to feel out the area, which is so rich with stories to be told.

Team Work with Tel Aviv University Archaeologists at Timna Park, July 12-15 2017

Team Work with Tel Aviv University Archaeologists at Timna Park, July 12-15 2017

I have been off line having adventures, and doing a lot of waiting for rides, busses, trains…

     I just got back from Caesarea and Haifa, but before I left, I had quite an exciting experience at Timna!  

     One of the archaeologists with whom I had been in contact, Dr. Erez Ben-Yosef from Tel Aviv University, had said that he would be available to answer questions, but he would likely not be on site when I was here; their excavations take place in sane temperatures in spring and late fall.  (Afternoon highs at Timna in mid-summer have been 104-109 degrees farenheit.)   However, his team ended up having a last minute excavation, and they invited me to document the action.  Also fortuitously, the Discovery Channel was going to be there, he said.  It was a chance for me to make some contacts and learn from the pros.

     The excavation, near the Hathor chapel, was more fruitful than anyone imagined for 3.5 days in the sweltering desert heat.   The team found several skeletons, including a fetus (estimated 3 months) in the pelvis of an adult we had all been calling “he.”  We had to redress our pronouns.  They also found 2 glass beads and more pattern shards in a couple of days than they had found their whole last season, one lead archaeologist told me.

     I captured a lot of very solid video of the team excavating, and I captured some clean audio of the sounds of excavation—trowels clanking, brushes clearing, sifters sorting beads and bones from dirt.  We did a couple of 360VR videos.  I cannot publish most of the photos on the web, though, because of the human remains.  First the skeletons go with the medical anthropology team back to the lab at Tel Aviv University, and then I do not yet know what Israel's antiquities rules are after that.  I just know skeletons are a sensitive matter, just like in the U.S. 

     I enjoyed working with Erez’s team immensely, and I hope I have the opportunity to work with them again.  They were so inclusive and welcoming, and they really felt like tribe. Did I mention they fed me really well, too? We were al in sync with each other, and we shared a passion for the same interests.

     I actually cried a little bit when it was time to say good-bye!  I think it is because I felt a really strong sense of belonging to a group in a way that I only have three other times in life: with my 11^th grade circle of friends (and that was 1988), with some colleagues at UC Berkeley whom I have known for 17 years, and with the Santa Fe Striders -- a trail running group I ran with every Sunday morning for the academic year that I was a Visiting Professor in the Media Arts and Cultural Technology department at New Mexico Highlands University. 

    The Bay Area is a very challenging place to make friends and maintain relationships because everyone is far too busy with 60, 70, 80+ hour workweeks and loads of activities and even kids and their kids activities. No one wants to sit for 90 minutes in traffic to drive 15 miles, people pause over paying bridge tolls, and giving up a parking space is a risky gamble.  Add to that, few of my friends back home are friends with each other.  So this sense of having a cohesive tribe—like the Santa Fe Striders or Erez’s archaeology team-- feels very soul nourishing.

    There was one point where we were hiking up on a high narrow ridge, the way down was steep and sharp, and I had to balance with my camera equipment as we met up with the Discovery team taking shots in an ancient copper mine.  I completely froze.  I really did not want to test the limits of my UCSU health insurance overseas if I tumbled into a heap of broken bones.  One of the team members, a 20-something, sure-footed woman named Talia, took my hand to help me across the ridge, and I realized how much more we are all capable of with the support and confidence of others.  In the right team, we are exponentially more powerful when we pull together.

     Life lesson reminders.

Is that noise coming out of the car?

We decided to take two cars to Jerusalem, because there were 5 of us (Adina, Kim, Stephan, Stephen, and me) plus 2 people from the institute who wanted a ride. We left around 8AM and stopped to get gas at a kibbutz. Apparently this was the kibbutz with the famous ice cream, which I did not know until we were back in the car. They also had really nice hair product that smelled really nice, among other things.

About an hour into our drive, there was a loud noise coming out of the car. I figured maybe the road had become rougher or something - but no! We got a flat tire... in the middle of the desert! Thankfully we had a donut, and one of my collaborator, Yuri, and Stephan changed it before any of us got heat stroke. It was actually the first time I had ever seen someone change a flat tire, so I'm kind of happy it happened. Now I know what to do if it happens when I'm alone.

Me watching Steve take a picture of Yuri changing the tire

Stephan modeling our surroundings at our unplanned stop

Micro-SEM: my new favorite insturment

Today was epic!

So you can understand how cool it was, you need some background info first.

1. When things (dust, dead plankton, etc.) fall from the surface ocean down into the deep, we catch some of it on 'sediment traps.'

WHOI.edu

2. Since my project is analyzing barium (Ba) in the Gulf of Eilat, I wanted to look at these falling particles from the sediment traps under a really fancy microscope [micro-Scanning Electron Microscope (SEM)] to search for BaSO4 (barite) crystals (these have so far been shown to be the #1 influence on Ba isotopes).


3. To search for BaSO4, you are looking for symmetrical, oval-shaped, bright, white crystals ~2 micrometers in size.

4. Then, you play 'I Spy!'

This is what the overall image looks like:

The BaSO4 crystals are likely the bright, white dots in these images:

 

Then, there's these beautiful images of dead plankton and salt crystals that I couldn't help but take photos of:

Salt Crystal

Top left: pinnate diatom, Top right: salt crystal, Bottom right: plankton

Plankton!

Plankton!

I dunno... but I like them!

A Danish pastry?

No idea.

Reminded me of a skull...

Popcorn ball?

Israel is a BEAUTIFUL DISGUSTING MESS

You can't deny it. From the Iconic black and yellow mountains to the rainbow coral reefs, Israel is stunning. You can stand or snorkel for hours enjoying the scenery until a piece of... TRASH... HITS YOU IN THE FACE! Literally, there's trash everywhere and the wind blows it straight into the ocean and or your face.

We went to the Old City, walked where King David (the David and Goliath David), Jesus Christ, and people have lived for tens of centuries. We saw tombs, temples, walls, and bridges 30 meters wide. The bridges have massive stones (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Western_Stone) placed there by people without modern machines hundreds of years ago. It's unbelievable! I just couldn't ignore all the trash... It was strewn all over. If I looked hard enough I could find it anywhere. Apparently, Israel is trash at managing... well... trash.

Here's some pictures of the place!

Some preliminary results, and where I'm going from here

I'm at the point now where I can simulate little blobs of phytoplankton drifting toward my tintinnid! Which is good, because the little guy was HUNGRY.

The especially good news with this is that it pretty much hits experimental data spot-on. Well, at least from a physics theory perspective. For instance, the simulated flow at the top of the green dome is around 1.3 mm/s. In the experiments, flow in this region is around 0.6-0.8 mm/s. Being "right" on the first try to within a factor of 2 is great news. A little fiddling with parameters should take care of the difference!

So...what do I do now? Honestly, if I were to present my work at a conference next week, the response would probably be something like:

"So...you correctly calculated flows that were already experimentally measured. Congratulations?"

In short, this calculation doesn't really teach us anything new. The results of this simulation merely show that this method works. It's only calibration. But...what exactly am I calibrating?

Let's back up. The fundamental question this work is trying to address is "Why do tintinnids look like that, and why do they behave in that way?" This question is difficult to answer from an experimental perspective. Natural selection ensures that there simply aren't many "bad" specimens out there, so it's hard to say what exactly goes wrong if a tintinnid is not optimized for survival.

...until now!

Despite how hungry my little virtual tintinnid looks, he actually doesn't need any food to survive. I've given my code lots of versatility, so I can change all sorts of things about him, including (but not limited to) mouth radius, number of cilia, number of cilia "waves" around the mouth, cilia length (both during upstroke and downstroke), and cilia frequency. Now I can answer the question: "If the tintinnid doesn't look or behave correctly, what exactly goes wrong?" Time to break what nature worked so hard to perfect!

Ok, that sounded a little Frankenstein-y. But that's fine. Imagine if Dr. Frankenstein could just simulate his work. All the ethical dilemmas would be gone.

-Steve

P.S. My little tintinnid needs a name. I'm leaning toward Floaty McFloatface, but I'm open to suggestion.

Bucket list item - complete!

My thesis research is on geochemical proxy development for paleoceanography and my personal interests tend more toward geology than chemistry
                                        (if you think of geochemistry like wind patterns, I'm more GGC than GCC).

Therefore, I tend to chill with a lot of paleo people (oceanographers, not the diet) and they are pretty awesome. However, they always bemoan the tedium that is picking forams. To blend in, I always use my limited knowledge of foram picking to empathize with them. My limited knowledge comes from calibrating my columns, which was done while crushing podcasts late into the night in Earth & Marine Science building. Often, the only other people in the building at this time of night were foram pickers. So, I had a good idea of the time consuming nature of their work and its repetitiveness.

But... empathizing with somebody over foram picking when you've never actually picked a foram always felt cheap to me.

So... I added 'pick a foram' to my bucket list.

Today, Ariel (a student from Dalhousie) made that happen for me!

A picture of my foram up close

#29 - G. ruber

The wizard and her wand of choice

Action shot

For more pictures like those from my blog posts, check out my IG @TheKauaiKemist

Why are all the ingrediants in Israel making my food so tart?

During our first week in Eilat, I was really motivated to cook each meal and start the research trip on a healthy note. At home, I usually make a large batch of food and munch on it for 2-3 days.

The first meal I made were gnocchi in tomato sauce with vegetables... for some reason it came out a little bit tart. I used tomato paste to make the sauce and I figured it was more tart than the kind in the U.S. 

The second meal I made was a large pot of quinoa, vegetables, and beans (which I bought dried, and ended up soaking for 2 days). First of all, the beans were not soft enough. I didn't realize this after I put everything in the pot, so the beans were slightly crunchy. Secondly, the dish turned out pretty tart. Not tart like "Oh, I think I used too much lemon", but tart like "This is kind of making my stomach hurt."

I'm not sure now how I realized this - but it turns out that I had been using citric acid instead of salt. Yes, the people that we were subletting the house from kept citric acid in their kitchen for food flavoring. I tried to salvage it, but I ended up throwing most of it away. 

The only bright side is that I have been very cautious to read all labels, in and out of the lab, after the mishap. 

For Rent

I've gotten into the business of virtual real estate recently as I try to simulate my little zooplankton. Behold -- a renovated triplex with a floor plan over 45000 square microns!

(Special thanks to Kim for her custom ad design)

Underwater photos - finally

People (namely, my cousin Andrew) keep asking me for 'more details' regarding the awesome Eilat diving. I don't think that I can really capture all of its immense beauty (there's just so much!), but this will be the blog post that I continuously edit with underwater photos of the cool stuff I see.

I have not been SCUBA diving here yet, but I've been snorkeling/free diving every day and finally took the camera out yesterday.

Dori!

Can you spot the octopus?

The octopus is on the move

A giant clam

Steve learning to free dive

Butterfly fish

Steve's getting good!

Acroporidae hemprichii

Mr. Clownfish defending his partner and home

"Protect me!"

That last video is of a spotted grouper harassing an eel.