James Tabor, professor of religious studies, and students from UNC Charlotte and other colleges are in Israel to conduct an excavation near the Zion Gate in Jerusalem, as part of UNC Charlotte's ongoing, multi-year archaeological dig in the ancient city. UNC Charlotte is the only American university licensed to carry out such excavations in Jerusalem. Students are participating as part of an education abroad program coordinated by the University’s Office of International Programs.
This UNC Charlotte summer experience in Jerusalem consists of archaeological field work, lectures and specially guided tours of Jerusalem and the Judean Desert, including the Dead Sea and Masada. The program is open to UNC Charlotte students as well as students from accredited American universities and community members. Tabor, chair of the Religious Studies Department in the College of Liberal Arts & Sciences, is co-director of the dig, along with Shimon Gibson, Israeli archaeologist, Fellow at the Albright Institute in Jerusalem and adjunct professor at UNC Charlotte.
Diane Zablotsky, faculty director of the Levine Scholars Program, is on the trip with a number of Levine Scholars, as is Geoff Love, a lecturer in architecture, who is capturing still photography and filming the site to produce 3-D and digital models for future planning. They will be joined each week by other non-students, with 40 to 60 people on-site each of the four weeks.
According to Tabor, the excavation site is in front of the 11th-century Ayyubid Gate on the southern side of the Old City of Jerusalem. During the Byzantine period, this area was situated at the southern end of the Cardo Maximus, a grand columned street. In the 6th century, a few yards north of the site, Justinian built the Nea Church to honor Mary, mother of Jesus.
Writing on his blog, Tabor explained “this particular site, initially explored by Magen Broshi in the 1970s, was at the very center of Herodian Jerusalem. … The site is incredibly complex with Islamic, Byzantine and Roman/Herodian ruins, including the basement area of a Second Temple period ‘mansion’ that we assume, from records of pilgrims regarding the location of the ‘House of Caiaphus,’ and what we have found at the site, was part of a priestly residential area in the time of Jesus.”