Harbor discovery documents changes along Israel’s coast

DIGGING DEEPER: URI assistant professor William Krieger said that the Israel Coast Exploration project will be returning to the country to explore Akko. / COURTESY WILLIAM KRIEGER
DIGGING DEEPER: URI assistant professor William Krieger said that the Israel Coast Exploration project will be returning to the country to explore Akko. / COURTESY WILLIAM KRIEGER

University of Rhode Island assistant professor William Krieger’s interests in philosophy and archaeology have combined in educational and career tracks that afford him a unique perspective.
These intersecting interests have led him and his colleagues to uncover the remains of a fleet of early 19th-century ships and harbor structures from the Hellenistic period at the Israeli city of Akko, an ancient port on the Mediterranean Sea.
Krieger is working in collaboration with URI assistant history professor Bridget Buxton and the Israel Antiquities Authority. Their findings were presented at the 2013 meeting of the Archaeological Institute of America in Seattle on Jan. 5 and at the American Schools of Oriental Research in Chicago last November.

PBN: How did your experience lead you to work on this project in Israel?
KRIEGER: I have been working in Israel as an archaeologist since 1994. I was in Israel for another project and found that Jacob Sharvit, the director of the underwater unit of the Israel Antiquities Authority, and I were both interested in looking at Israel’s coast, on land and sea. We both have training in those areas and decided it would be a good idea to collaborate.

PBN: When did the collaboration begin?
KRIEGER: Some of the discoveries were in 2009 before I began working with Jacob. We started working together in 2010 and are co-directors of the Israel Coast Exploration project. Another important part of our team is my colleague at URI, Bridget Buxton, an assistant professor of history. She brings valuable perspective to the project. We are both members of an informal archaeological group at URI. Another member of our team is professor John Hale, an archaeologist at the University of Louisville.

PBN: How did you become interested in this?
KRIEGER: It came from my interest in Akko, a harbor city that’s extraordinarily important in Israel’s history. Akko is also known as Ptolemais, a city that was an entry point during the Crusades. It was their harbor when they went into Israel fighting over control of the Holy Land. This particular discovery of the harbor structures has nothing to do with the Crusades, it’s much earlier. The structures we found are Hellenistic and date to the third-to-first centuries B.C.

PBN: Why weren’t these structures found earlier by other archaeologists?
KRIEGER: They weren’t found earlier because they were underwater and underneath an existing city wall. It was only in the course of repairing and preserving that city wall that Jacob Sharvitz found these underlying, earlier structures. We know through historical records of Akko being a major seaport, but we couldn’t find evidence of this earlier harbor.

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PBN: What was significant about your participation?
KRIEGER: We believe that Israel’s coastline has changed and the coastline today is probably a-meter-and-a-half to two meters higher than the waterline was in the Roman period. You may not think that two meters is a big difference, but it’s about 12 feet and it radically changes what the beach is like. This is not evidence that the Mediterranean as a whole has changed, but regionally at Akko, there is good evidence of this.

PBN: How did the discovery come about?
KRIEGER: The Israel Antiquities Authority was doing a conservation project on the walls of the old city. The walls were underwater. They created an artificial dam and drained water away from that section of the wall. We saw where coastline was during the Roman period and we started to find things that were harbor structures. They had found some sections of what looked like pavement sticking out from underneath a wall.

PBN: What were your discoveries in relation to the 19th-century shipwrecks?
KRIEGER: That’s another part of our project in studying the harbor. Even if 19th-century ships aren’t what we were looking for, we’ve been using new technology that’s proven to be a very effective tool. My colleague Bridget Buxton has taken the lead on that part of the project.

PBN: Can you describe the new technology?
KRIEGER: We’ve been testing out a StrataBox made by SyQwest, a Rhode Island company. It’s underwater-sensing technology.

PBN: How do you use the StrataBox?
KRIEGER: We attach it to our boat as we go through the harbor. It can sense disturbances under the water and under 15 feet of sand. It tells you if there’s something that’s not like everything else around it.

PBN: Are there other locations you’re interested in?
KRIEGER: There are a number of other missing harbors from this period, up and down Israel, and there are similar sorts of questions. The work we’ve done in Akko shows that these elusive harbors can be found.

PBN: Is the Israel Coast Exploration project going to continue, and if so, what’s the next step?
KRIEGER: This is definitely a continuing project. We are publishing our findings and are continuing to present them at academic conferences. We will be going back to Israel to continue our work at Akko. •INTERVIEW
William Krieger
POSITION: Assistant professor of philosophy, University of Rhode Island
BACKGROUND: In addition to his academic degrees, Krieger has extensive international teaching and training experience, including serving as field director and faculty at Tell el-Far’ah, South Field School and survey coordinator for the Northern Negev Survey Project, both in Israel; lecturer at California State University at San Bernardino, and professor at the Academy for Jewish Religion in Los Angeles.
EDUCATION: Bachelor’s degree in biology from Columbia University, 1991; bachelor’s degree in philosophy from Jewish Theological Seminary, 1991; master’s degree in philosophy from Claremont Graduate University, 1996; Ph.D. from Claremont Graduate University in philosophy in 2003.
FIRST JOB: Farmhand on a small sheep farm in Ohio
RESIDENCE: Providence
AGE: 43

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