WHY HAVE SO MANY RELICS BEEN FOUND IN ISRAEL LATELY?

Last December, an Israeli boy was hiking with his family near Tel Beit Shemesh when he spotted the head of an Iron Age fertility goddess figurine. The Israel Antiquities Authority expressed its gratitude to eight-year-old Itai Halperin with a certificate of good citizenship and an invitation to him and his classmates to tour the IAA archive and participate in a real dig.

In January, seven-year-old Ori Greenhut stumbled across a 3,400-year-old statuette while scampering up an archaeological mound at Tel Rehov. He, too, got a certificate and a class presentation from IAA regional archeologists.

Accidental finds are not at all rare in Israel, where archeological treasures lurk in abundance underground and underwater.

“Israel is a very small country, intensively settled over thousands of years, and there are 37,000 registered archeological sites, so almost everywhere you have the potential to find things,” says Yardenna Alexandre, an IAA research and field archaeologist stationed in the Jezreel Valley.

But it seems the random discoveries have been coming fast and thick lately.

“There does seem to be a concentration of finding things over the past year,” Alexandre tells ISRAEL21c. “There may be several reasons aside from coincidence.”

She explains that when former politician Yisrael Hasson became chairman of the IAA in December 2014, he placed a priority on community involvement and educational programs to engage the public, especially schools, in archeological activities such as dig-for-a-day events.

“Antiquities and archeology is much more prominent in the media today, and that brings awareness,” says Alexandre.

“Hiking is very popular in Israel, and people may have been finding things and keeping them, whereas now they see that we encourage them to follow the law of turning them in.”

Rimon, finder of the rare coin of Trajan, tells ISRAEL21c that friends from the United States saw her story covered on TV news and talk shows. In addition to Israel, she granted interviews to reporters from Irish National Radio, the Canadian Broadcasting Company and the BBC and Huffington Post.

“A lot of people said I did the right thing by turning it in, while others said, ‘Why didn’t you just pocket it?’ I’m not the sort of person who would have sold something like this, but I’m sure there are tons of stuff people find and don’t turn in,” says Rimon, a native of Connecticut who moved to Kibbutz Kfar Blum in 1973.

She does wish she’d had time to show the coin to her family before giving it up. But everything happened very quickly, she relates.

To read the complete article, see:
Why do hikers in Israel keep stumbling upon ancient relics? (www.israel21c.org/why-do-hikers-in-israel-keep-stumbling-upon-ancient-relics/)

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