Jul 12, 2017

Preservation of Shiloh walls 2017

In June of this year (2017) I had the privilege of working at the Shiloh Excavations with over 100 volunteers. The project lasted 5 weeks with the last week designated for preservation of some of the wall excavated earlier in the month. It was great working with Dr. Leen Ritmeyer, Dr. Phil Silva and Greg Gulbrandsen on the preservation in the final week while everyone else toured Israel. The process was assisted by a mortar gun (see below) that I spotted at the local hardware store. To my knowledge this type of a gun has never been used in this application before and knew it would be a great help from my previous use of calking guns for painting and construction work. It exceeded our expectations once we got the right consistency of the mortar mixture down. Leen dig a great job in mixing the perfect consistency and it went into the small cracks and crevices like a charm. Leen has posted a great overview with pictures at his website ritmeyer.com.

Mortar gun used to fill between the loose stones.

The Preservation Team
From L-R Dr. David Graves, Dr. Phil Silva, Greg Gulbrandsen
Dr. Leen Ritmeyer in front.
This is square AG28 that was part of the 5.5 MB city wall.
I was the square supervisor of this square for 4 weeks.
We reached bedrock on the outside of the wall.


For The Times of Israel on the Shiloh Excavation Article see Blog Post.

For Journal articles and papers see  Follow me on Academia.edu or Selected Works

For Books see Amazon or Amazon

Updated October 18, 2021


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