The Roman-Byzantine city of Scythopolis, now known as Bet Shean, seems to exist in a different world than the rest of archaeological Israel. It has been excavated continuously since 1986 at a cost of 12 to 15 million shekels; its architects, excavators and promoters are on the point of convincing the Ministry of Finance to commit 24 million more shekels for the next five years of work. If you were to visit the site, you would not see hordes of young enthusiasts in khaki shorts brushing grit from potsherds and paving stones to pass their summer holidays; you would see hardhats in tractors and earthmovers, hauling sandbags on muddy highways through the middle of an ancient town. You would see piles enough of numbered fragments to fill a dozen small museums. And you would see, taking shape in their midst, two great city streets, a large amphitheatre, a gymnasium, shops and gutters and monumental buildings. Everyone says Bet Shean will be another something-great. "A second Pompeii," Rivka Gonen told me. "A second Jerusalem," said Joseph Saltz, who is in charge of developing the site for the Government Tourist Corporation (and, later in the same conversation, another Ephesus or Pergamon). "It will be an international attraction" - and it had better be one fast.

The reason for the project is not the undeniable importance of the site - what's being excavated now is only five percent of a very fabled Roman city - but the salutary effect the project has on unemployment in Bet Shean. As one official put it (more frankly than would most), "We believe that this site, if it's well reconstructed, can give a future to Bet Shean, for Bet Shean has - well, it's a hole. There's nothing good in it." The town has, to its dismay, become the symbol of an utterly lost cause, a backwater, the fourth world; and its touristic development is a symbolic fight against the problem of local stagnation. (That the housing minister, David Levy, is a native son made it a natural place to begin.) Bet Shean is what has come to be called a "national project." The Government Tourist Corporation, which normally builds parking lots and promenades, has been persuaded to foot 80 percent of the bill for Bet Shean. To push the project along, the archaeologists have been persuaded to excavate and reconstruct at the same time. It is as if Faust had been an archaeologist and Mephistopheles a financier.

"It's even wrong, [doing it this way]," said Giora Solar, who was an architect here when he was appointed head of preservation. "Preservation should be done at the same time as the diggings, which means you should do all the work that will prevent deterioration. But not the reconstruction work. Everything that needs more study and research should be done slowly, without the pressure of development." But still, for once, money was available. The architects and excavators managed to work out a system that keeps the pressure within their tolerance. The teams excavating and restoring the bath complex work just ten meters apart; somehow they always keep the tractors moving.

"There is a lot of pressure when you work with tractors," Giora told me. "You have to stand there, and every time you hear something like scratching stones, you stop.... The one good thing about Bet Shean, it's built of basalt, and basalt is a very hard stone."

As the project moves gradually into its restoration phase, he feels more comfortable that he'll be working at a slow and measured pace. But there is the problem of the 100 to 150 workers that might have to be laid off - three percent of the local work force, 30 percent of the otherwise unemployed. The Ministry of Finance would be disappointed if so many jobs closed down, and it might well take out its disappointment by offering the archaeologists less money. "They're talking about a nice budget [now] – 80 percent to digging, 20 percent to conservation and reconstruction. The only problem is that most of the local workers are simple workers; we cannot employ them in reconstruction. We will have to find a way to go and employ 100 workers and still have enough money for the conservation." A small pound of flesh to pay for having the money to keep working.

Preservation by Threat

Since his appointment last November as director of the Antiquities Department's preservation section, Giora has been the man who's supposed to pick up and dust off all the loose pieces: the ruins outside the national parks, the mosaics that won't draw tourists, the Byzantine basilicas that lie outside the boundaries of the current "national projects." (He is also responsible for seeing that the more favored sites are preserved correctly.) You would think such a central position would be accompanied by power. Until recently you would have been wrong. When I first drove up to the Rockefeller Museum to interview Giora, I found him sitting in an ill-repaired office that was entirely empty except for an old desk, a hideous set of green curtains, some rundown wooden shelving and a few spare pieces of heavy equipment that it was quite obvious no one could find a better place for. Strangers intermittently popped their heads in to ask directions to other offices. It had about it the distinct atmosphere of a natural dumping ground, and before I could even turn on my tape recorder Giora was telling me all the things he planned to change.

"The biggest problem [before I arrived here] was that very little was done." The "preservation section" was one man, an architect, without mosaic experts or masonry restorers to back him up. "What happened was either that nothing was done, or that things were done in the wrong way - not through the Department of Antiquities. The department was not considered of any importance." To give it more weight Giora would build up a team of 25 specialists - experts in all the areas the national parks, the kibbutzim and the Government Tourist Corporation would need if they wanted to restore an antiquity. Then he would softly threaten to use the one tool at his disposal: the power to shut down any site where an antiquity was being damaged or incorrectly restored, or to have an excavating license refused to any archaeologist who would not pay for preservation. He would turn his humble office into a professional service and a power that everyone would have to reckon with.

And then he would go out and get antiquities restored. He would do this first by insisting that anyone who has any direct connection to a site has a moral responsibility to restore it. "When a site is within a designated area like a national park or a nature reserve, we go and tell them, `You have to do the work.' This is something that the department did not do in the past.... With archaeologists [our arguments] will be successful, because they need digging permits...." Where morality fails, perhaps exposure to lawsuits would be more successful. When the tower at the castle Montfort was in danger of collapse, Giora wrote the National Parks Authority, "You have to do something, first because it's an important site - we don't have [other] three-story Crusader towers - plus if it falls on somebody and they get killed, we are all in trouble." Where morality and liability both fail, he would make an appeal for donations. For the Nabatean cities in the Negev, he intends "to go looking for some people who want to invest in these places as a tourist business"; for other sites he has thought of offering to put up plaques. Already one couple has paid $250,000 for the restoration of a small Roman stage, in memory of their daughter who was a dancer.

He is unembarrassed by the combination of threatmongering and panhandling as long as it works; the one problem is, the system is based on a bluff that might one day be called. Once after Giora visited Mamshit, a Byzantine-Nabatean city near Dimona, "I wrote a big report about the problems there at Mamshit, and I thought: `What will happen now if I go to the National Parks with this report and they say, "Take it; we don't want it"?' Then I will be stuck with it, and we don't have the budget to do the work."

The ultimate problem is still poverty, but Giora sees two things to make it lighter. The Department of Antiquities is in the process of becoming an independent authority, with the right to raise revenues independent of the government budget. Giora hopes that receiving admissions fees for antiquities sites (some right out of the pocket of the national parks) and professional fees for the services of his specialist teams will give his section enough money to back up its bluffs. In the longer term he wants to set up a Preservation Fund. "What we're going to have to do is get very big donations for a foundation, a fund for restoration. I would not approach the public at large; they are already paying for enough things. But I would appeal to some of the millionaires - and the big collectors who are destroying archaeology. If we have a big fund, we could do good work, and I think good work would bring more money." Still, it is unlikely even this would bring enough (if "enough" was broad enough to include every important ruin in the country).

Dust to Dust

One of Giora's proposals for applying pressure is a new "40 percent rule": To get an excavating permit, an archaeologist must agree to devote 40 percent of his funds to preservation and publication. A little bit on the low side, if you are dedicated to preservation: It costs far more to preserve a site than to dig it up initially. But Giora believes the rule will have one good side effect. "If the 40 percent won't cover the costs of preservation, that's one thing. But some people say if it's higher, people won't be able to excavate. That, I think, is good. We have too many excavations. We are left with many excavations [where] nobody will take care of the site."

To take care of those he wants to take the process one step further, to undo some of the excavation that's already been done. "One of my suggestions would be to cover many sites. That is the cheapest preservation." He described in an offhand manner how he would soon erase the visible remnants of a small synagogue and some ancient houses near Bet Shean. "We'll clean them of rubbish. We'll take pictures. We'll do some preservation work. We'll put [down] a separation layer - it can be a layer of sand - and then we'll cover it. And we'll leave some signs: `It's an archaeological site.' That's it." For the moment, small potatoes like these are beyond Israel's strained budget - "maybe after the wars..." - so the ruins that are insignificant today will be returned where they came from until they might better be appreciated.

He would still have to do the dirty work of triage, deciding what could be saved and what would be left to rot. He was giving himself a year in office to make up his mind. "The problem with archaeology," he added, almost incidentally, "is to say what is more important.... How do you judge? By historical value, aesthetic value, touristic value? There are no answers. No answers." That made perfect sense to me a few weeks later as I stood in my decaying basilica, watching a pot-bellied man tend his flowers and remembering a soldier at his telescope.