Thousands of visitors usually crowd Tel Ashkelon National Park on Saturdays to enjoy time in nature, wildlife sightings, and archaeological relics dating back thousands of years, but on Saturday, October 7, 2023, the park was empty. The site had swiftly been closed following the heavy bombardment from Gaza and Hamas’ terrorist infiltration.
For this archaeological site, the tragedy of October 7 struck at 3:08 p.m. A missile launched from the Gaza Strip directly hit containers stationed in the park, which stored thousands of years of historical treasures, 26,000 artifacts and archaeological discoveries collected by the excavation expedition.
“I heard about the missile that day from soldiers who were in the park,” said Professor Daniel Master, an archaeologist at Wheaton College in Illinois, who has been directing the excavations at Tel Ashkelon since 1992. “It was a closed military zone, and obviously on that day it wasn't anyone's priority.”
Master received videos from the site and tried to figure out what had just happened.
“The video shows the back of several damaged containers, and then you can see the contents of one of them. I knew what it was supposed to look like, and it looked empty, like everything had been taken away… It took us a while to realize that what happened was an explosion and a fire,” he said.
Master, whose excavations at Tel Ashkelon had managed to uncover the area’s history from the beginning of the Bronze Age through the Crusades, tried to gauge the damage. “In the first videos, we saw only two of the containers, the ones that were opened from the explosion,” he said. “But then I got another video, I saw that there were two more closed containers with paint peeling off them. I assumed that if we opened them we would see only ashes, and unfortunately, that's really what we saw.”
In December 2023, the Israel Antiquities Authority invited Master to the site to decide together what the next steps would be. In January, he landed in Israel and began digging in the ground with his own hands.
“I knew where certain things might be, and I wanted to find them myself,” he said. “We found that the fire destroyed all the tags we attached to the items, even the ink we used to write everything down. We had photographs of the items and tried to connect them to the debris we found.”
As an archaeologist, the task of rescuing the items, reconstructing them and trying to tell the public a story through them is familiar to Master.
“I’ve dealt in the past with burnt things in Ashkelon, things that Nebuchadnezzar burned, so this is nothing new,” he said. “But I never dug and found shrapnel from a missile. It's a strange feeling for an archaeologist, and I’m sure it was much stranger for my colleagues who dug in kibbutzim, that the event is so present, and part of a trauma that is happening now. It's not like finding burnt people in ruins from 3,000 years ago."
Master had been working on the site for 24 years. All his team’s discoveries and findings were photographed, sorted and numbered. Most of the antiquities damaged were pottery pieces, which were held on the sire because they do not require special storage conditions. Jewelry, coins, and ivory and metal items found on the site had all been transferred to the Israel Antiquities Authority for storage and were therefore saved.
Nurit Goshen, curator of archaeology of the Chalcolithic and Bronze Ages at the Israel Museum, recognized how this unique story connects past and present, and asked to display three pottery vessels from the containers damaged on October 7.
“Their scattered pattern on the floor of the container is reminiscent of the pottery line shown here, but they are severely damaged and show fresh fragments, plastic had melted and stuck to them, and signs of fire and soot that are almost impossible to remove” reads the curatorial text at the entrance to the museum's archaeology wing, under the heading “Picking up the pieces.”
“Archaeologists found themselves sifting and mapping pottery fragments, this time from a fresh layer of destruction, and trying to repair the repairable fragments,” the text continues.
The special exhibit is not the end of the story for the staff of the national park. They intend to open a visitors’ center in the coming year to operate alongside the site’s escape room and camping area.
“We are not giving up, we have many more items, we are working hard to open a visitor center in the coming year, and we will present wonderful finds that will illustrate Ashkelon's rich history,” Master said. “We want our project to be something that the residents of Ashkelon can be proud of.”
This article was translated from Hebrew by Benji Sharp.
