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[Kay]

Smarter Digs with an Archaeology Lab

By Abigail Klein Leichman
January 16, 2012

Weizmann Institute's unique field lab is part of a 'microarcheology' approach that puts natural science to work for Israeli archeologists.'

"Under the hot sun at Tel es-Safi in southern Israel -- the Philistine city of Gath -- archeologists have been puzzling over life in the Iron Age city and how it was plundered and destroyed by some invading force hundreds of years before the common era.

"It was like a mini-Pompei, a frozen record in a moment of time," says Prof. Steve Weiner, director of the Kimmel Center for Archeological Science at the Weizmann Institute in Rehovot.

Kimmel's unique onsite laboratory helps archeologists piece together the events of the destruction.

"It has changed the whole paradigm of how to solve archeological problems in the field using both what you see by eye and what you can reveal with instrumentation -- the microscopic archeological record, from sub-millimeter scale down to the atomic level," he tells ISRAEL21c. "There's a lot of information embedded in this record.""

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