Wpg Free Press: Hot diggity… donkey?

As the Winnipeg Free Press feature story begins:

It’s rare you get a kick out of a 4,500-year-old donkey.

More astonishing is to find out the animal was deliberately buried under a house floor that ancient people would have walked on every day. Yet there it was — a perfectly arranged collection of bones lying undisturbed since its owners carefully placed it in the ground at the time the pyramids were under construction.

A prehistoric version of covering your ass, and only half a metre deep.

My co-workers — many from the University of Manitoba — and I had begun our third day excavating a neighbourhood in an early city in present-day Israel. As a career journalist who recently retired from newspapers, I’d always wanted to get my hands dirty with an archeological field school by probing the remnants of primitive civilization….

The project, run by St. Paul’s College and the U of M since 2008, was funded by the Social Science and Humanities Research Council of Canada. Sadly, the 2017 season was the last at the site. Tractors have covered the houses with fill. They’ll remain hidden until perhaps another university resumes the excavation a generation from now.