![]() ![]() ![]() I spotted the handle of an ancient piece of pottery, complete with an indentation for thumb support. “That indicates it’s ancient glass, because during that time, oven temperatures didn’t reach as high as they do now.” “Notice the bubbles,” she told me, holding it up to the light. When I tossed aside a shard of green glass I thought was from a soft-drink bottle, Snyder snatched it up. A chunk of what looked like conglomerate rock turned out to be plaster used to line cisterns during the time of Herod the Great, some 2,000 years ago. My job, she said, was to dump each bucket onto a screen, rinse off any soil with water from a garden hose, then pluck out anything of potential importance. Inside a large hothouse covered in plastic sheets and marked “Temple Mount Salvage Operation,” a woman from Boston named Frankie Snyder-a volunteer turned staffer-led me to three rows of black plastic buckets, each half-filled with stones and pebbles, then pointed out a dozen wood-framed screens mounted on plastic stands. My stint as an amateur archaeologist began one morning on the southern slope of Mount Scopus, a hill on the northern outskirts of Jerusalem. ![]()
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