We finished our first week of the Tel Lachish excavation with some nice finds, including the perfectly-designed grinding stone shown in the video below. Women’s hands in the Late Bronze age (ca. 1400-1200 BC) were apparently the same size as many women’s hands today. Cindy Fite, one of the members of my group this year, explains and demonstrates:
This kind of stone (also called a millstone) was used to create flour from grain. Millstones/grinding stones are common finds in archaeology. They were among the day-to-day sounds of home life, as we perceive from this prophecy of doom in Jeremiah 25:10.
I will banish from them the voice of mirth and the voice of gladness, the voice of the bridegroom and the voice of the bride, the grinding of the millstones and the light of the lamp.
There is nothing like digging something out of the ground that was last seen thousands of years ago. Whose was this? What things were talked about by the people who last used this object? What personal or family stories were connected to this object? We will never know the answer to these kinds of questions, but we are illuminating the daily life of ancient people. Excavators become part of the history of these objects from archaeology.
Bible, Archaeology, and Travel with Luke Chandler 