LIVING HISTORY - NAZARETH VILLAGE:

The way we were (Jerusalem Post)
By AVIVA BAR-AM


Nazareth Village aims to recreate an ancient site and reproduce the harmony of the times

Two thousand years ago, farmers didn't use herbicides to get rid of pesky weeds. But what did they do? That's the kind of question Mike Hostetler asks himself as he walks through the Nazareth Village, a re-creation of an ancient Jewish settlement in the Galilee. Everything in the village is as authentic as possible, but Hostetler continues to seek answers to posers like the one above.

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It wasn't easy to find the right setting, for he and his team wanted the ancient village to be in Nazareth, where Jesus grew up, studied scriptures, and taught. But noisy, crowded Nazareth doesn't look in the least like a sleepy Second Temple-period village.

Nevertheless, Hostetler managed to find a piece of land in the city. He then enlisted the help of top-notch archeologists, scholars, historians, and designers, both local and foreign. They studied the source materials to learn as much as they could about the Galilee's Jewish population during the Roman era, and the rules by which they lived. Not surprisingly, while surveying the land before construction began, the experts discovered a Second Temple-period wine press, stone quarry, terraces, and shomera - a watchtower of the type described in the Old Testament.

The shomera is across the road from the village, but all the other antiquities have been incorporated into the reconstruction. The result is so credible that when I walked through the working farm watching men in tunics hitching donkeys to a plow, it was easy to ignore the modern-day houses outside the village.

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The article has many more details. An interesting project.