I first went to Tel Miqne-Ekron during the summer of 1981. My initial visit to the site was a short one, which, curiously, left me more disappointed than filled with excitement and wonder.

That summer I had been working as a supervisor at Tel Lachish at the suggestion of the directors of the Ekron dig, Dr. Sy Gitin of the Albright Institute in Jerusalem and Dr. Trude Dothan of Hebrew University. Neither of these two directors had yet spent a complete summer season at the Tel Miqne-Ekron dig and wouldn’t be doing so until 1984. However, during the spring of 1981, they had opened up a couple of squares for exploratory purposes in a cooperative effort with students from Brandeis University. At the time Dr. Gitin had suggested to me that working at the Tel Lachish dig would give me excellent exposure to the Israeli style of excavating which would in part be used at Tel Miqne-Ekron.1

One of my fellow staff members at Lachish, Julie Krieger, had been with the Brandeis students during their three weeks that spring at Tel Miqne. I was eager to see the site, and after a little prodding, Julie agreed that we could rent a car and drive to Kibbutz Revadim. She had stayed there while digging at Tel Miqne-Ekron, and I also would be doing so during my summers in Israel. She introduced me to Natan Aidlin, a member of the kibbutz and a coordinator of the spring dig. He took us to a bomb shelter turned into an archaeological museum, which was filled with artifacts already taken from the site.

Seeing the artifacts housed there piqued my curiosity even more. We drove through cotton fields, and in the distance I saw what looked like ramparts—a huge fortification wall. What a magnificent site, I thought. This was going to be infinitely better than reading about it.

"Is that it?" I asked.

"No," was Julie’s laughing response. "That’s a water reservoir."

That was also about as far as we could go in the car. There were no roads through the cotton field out to the site, and the irrigation of the field had left the tractor track sloppy, almost too difficult to walk through. But through the cotton field we did walk.

"There it is," Julie said finally. She looked at me with a wry grin.

"Where?" I asked.

"There," she pointed out, "that low rise with the burnt slope."

"That?" I said.

My response dripped disappointment. I had worked at Tel Lachish and at Tell Gezer, both of which have impressive mounds from which one can look down and imagine the ancient highways traveled by merchants and occasionally by unpredictable enemy armies intending their assaults against townspeople. In contrast to the mounds of Gezer and Lachish, this mound was scarcely distinguishable from the surrounding hills.

Serious digging began during the summer of 1984. The numerous sherds of Philistine pottery we soon were finding obliged me to smile at my simple and wrongheaded disappointment. My reaction to the less than imposing mound was far less material than my becoming acquainted with the pottery, which was unique and plentiful. All I needed to do was stub my toe, and there in the ground I’d find another distinctive piece to pick up.

For the archaeologist, the researcher, the student who can’t resist wanting to know the biblical Philistines more intimately, Tel Miqne-Ekron is an unbelievably exciting dig—an unbelievably exciting dig in a mound scarcely distinguishable from the surrounding hills.