An Entertaining Afternoon

I spent a fascinating afternoon at the University. It was Aharoni Day (famous dead Israeli archaeologist) and there was a collection of lecturers - mostly interesting. I only had trouble staying awake during one part of the conference. There was a lot of talk about how science and archaeology are walking hand in hand into the future. That is, until the last talk by Neil Silberman (famous living historian/archaeologist), who said that all the science we are doing is crap and we need to focus more on big questions. It was a lot of fun. Man, these archaeologists can get hot under the collar. An old guy sitting right behind me nearly had a apoplexy because one of the scientists dared to claim there was metalworking at Gath. An expert (ahem anne elk) on carbon dating nearly beat up one of the gentle lecturers from the Univ of Haifa who was not exact in his averaging. All in all a nice way to spend an afternoon.