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Lost empires
By JON WILSON, Times Staff Writer
SEMINOLE -- The red-eye hour was 7:20 a.m., first period at Osceola High School. Thirty-five, maybe 40 students trooped into John Stewart's Literature and the Arts class. Chipper and chatty, the juniors and seniors routinely engage in relatively esoteric discussions. Literature, architecture, painting and sculpture are bacon and eggs for these youngsters, who take Stewart's course as an elective. Essentially a humanities survey, it's unusual in high school. Freshman year in college is a more typical first exposure. Just two other high schools teach it in Pinellas County, Stewart said. Last week, James F. Strange, a distinguished professor of religious studies at the University of South Florida, talked to the class about his 20-year project reconstructing life, culture and religion at Sepphoris, a major city about 5 miles from Nazareth in the first century B.C. Stewart prepared his class with a month of study about the Romans and how they interacted with Jews and Christians. "We talked a lot about empire and empire culture," Stewart said. Strange is a popular lecturer. Stewart's roll call produced just one or two absentees. Four students who had to miss Strange's talk last year got permission to attend this time. Wearing a fedora and a thick, white beard, Strange, 64, looks the professorial part. An internationally acclaimed scholar, he earned degrees in philosophy and religion and was pursuing a doctorate when he became intensely interested in archaeology. Biblical and social archaeology are among his specialties. After surveying Sepphoris in 1982, Strange began excavating there in 1983. The focus has been a structure Strange believes was used as a community building for 31/2 centuries, starting about 1 B.C. He considers the 60-by-40-yard stone structure his greatest discovery. A student wondered whether diggers worry about threats from the local population. "Generally speaking, people are quite friendly and helpful," Strange said. "The only exception is if people think we're desecrating or digging dead people's bones." Animals sometimes play a role in archaeology, and excavators have to take care they aren't bamboozled, Strange said. Ground-dwelling creatures sometimes drag in modern material, strewing it around ancient structures being excavated, Strange said. One of his Sepphoris slides showed a few tiny holes that looked like burrows. Strange has conducted numerous other digs in Israel, the only nation where he has excavated. "There's plenty to do in Israel," he said. "We've only excavated less than 1 percent of the sites." That's out of 6,000 cataloged sites, he said. Student groups have come along to help, but the political and military situation in the Middle East will prevent that in 2003. Strange still plans to make his own trip in April. John Stewart has taught English for 24 years, but was drawn to archaeology, as was his wife, Sheila Stewart, a former teacher of gifted students. She is the manager of the Weedon Island education center, and helped Strange with the slide show last week. The Stewarts went with Strange during three summers from 1991 to 1993, learning firsthand the precision techniques requiring instruments such as toothbrushes, or even smaller brushes. Stewart's class paid rapt attention as Strange talked about his methods and the painstaking work required -- thousands of artifacts, some just fragments, to be washed and tagged, for example. But a high school group is bound to produce the question on every inquiring mind: "What's the weirdest thing you've ever dug up?" someone asked. The professor didn't miss a beat. "Once we dug up a dead boar. That was pretty weird. He still had his skin and hair. That wasn't archaeological . . . but he was pretty darned dead."
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