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2009 details of pottery shard gifts to friends and relatives.
These pottery fragments are around 2200 years old. They come from a dig I participated in with the Archaeological Seminars group (www.archesem.com) during my trip to Israel in June 2009. The site was in the Bet Guvrin National Park about 20 miles southwest of Jerusalem. When leaving the dig, people are welcome to take fragments that the archaeologists have failed to reassemble.
The earliest written record of Maresha was as a city in ancient Judah. After the destruction of the First Temple (586 BC) the city of Maresha became part of the Edomite kingdom. In the late Persian period a Sidonian community settled in Maresha, and the city is mentioned in the Zenon Papyri(259 BC). During the Hasmonean wars Maresha was a base for attacks against Judea and eventually suffered retaliation from the Maccabees. After John Hyrcanus I captured and destroyed Maresha in 113 BC the region of Idumea remained under Hasmonean control. King Herod was probably born near Maresha as his father was Antipater the Idumaean. In 40 BC the Parthians devastated completely the “strong city”, after which it was never rebuilt.
Houses in the lower city were constructed above hundreds of caves hewn in the soft chalk limestone of the hillsides. Macalister listed sixty-three cave complexes located in his survey in 1900. Recent excavations have revealed ninety more. The principal uses of these caves were for the manufacture of olive oil and for the breeding of pigeons.
Tourists spend the day working in ancient tunnels. Participants do the dirty work, digging and sifting through the ruins, while their fees underwrite the more difficult parts of archaeological work: washing pottery shards, logging finds, and publishing papers in academic journals. About 30,000 to 50,000 people pay to do the dig each year, raising about $1 million. Hundreds of thousands of people have participated in the experience since the project started 25 years ago.
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GEOLOGY OF KILIMANJARO: (Written in 2018, I climbed in February). I brought home many small pieces of Obsidian I collected on the mountain.
Mount Kilimanjaro is one of the largest stratovolcanoes in the world. A stratovolcano is formed by a series of layers of ash and lava laid on top of each other as a volcano goes through different eruptive phases. It is also known as a composite volcano comprising numerous layers of lava, tephra (cinder) and volcanic ash. This is the world’s highest free standing, snow-covered equatorial mountain. It is the highest mountain in Africa, rising 4,877 m above the surrounding savanna plains to 5,895 m and covers an area of about 388,500 hectares. It stands alone but is the largest of an east-west belt of volcanoes across northern Tanzania.
Kilimanjaro has three main volcanic peaks of varying ages lying on an east-southeast axis.
To the west, the oldest peak Shira (3,962 m) of which only the western and southern rims remain, is a relatively flat upland plateau of some 6,200 hectares. About one million years ago molten lava started to burst through the fractured surface of the Rift Valley at the location of Kilimanjaro. The initial lava flows were thin and low viscous magma. Because of this the lava spread out and created a gently sloping base for Kilimanjaro. Over time the lava become cooler and more viscous. The huge pressures behind the eruption pushed part of the Earth’s crust skywards, creating the Shira volcano, the oldest of the volcanoes forming the Kilimanjaro massif. Around 500,000 years ago Shira ceased erupting and collapsed forming the Shira Plateau.
The rugged peak of Mawenzi (5,149 m) lies to the east. The volcano known as Mawenzi formed as a result of another eruption within the Shira caldera. Mawenzi has eroded over the last millenia but has kept some of its volcanic shape. The top of its western face is fairly steep with many crags, pinnacles and dyke swarms. Its eastern side falls in cliffs over 1,000 m high in a complex of gullies and rock faces, rising above two deep gorges, the Great Barranco and the Lesser Barranco.
Kibo (5,895 m) is the most recent summit, having last been active in the Pleistocene. Around 460,000 years ago, a massive eruption barely west of Mawenzi produced Kibo. Continual subterranean pressure forced the earth’s crust even higher and caused Kibo to erupt several more times. This forced the summit ever higher until reaching a maximum height of about 5900 m.
A further huge eruption from Kibo 100,000 years later led to the formation of Kilimanjaro’s characteristic shiny black stone – which in reality is just solidified black lava, or obsidian. This spilled over from Kibo’s crater into the Shira caldera and around to the base of the Mawenzi peak, forming the so-called Saddle. Later eruptions created a series of distinctive mini-cones, orparasitic craters, that run in a chain south-east and north-west across the mountain, as well as the smaller Reusch Crater inside the main Kibo summit. The last volcanic activity of note, just over 200 years ago, left a symmetrical inverted cone of ash in the Reusch Crater, known as the Ash Pit, that can still be seen today. It consists of two concentric craters of 1.9 x 2.7 kilometers (km) and 1.3 km in diameterwith a 350 m deep ash pit in the center. Between Kibo and Mawenzi there is a plateau of some 3600 hectares, called the Saddle, which forms the largest area of high altitude tundra in tropical Africa. There are deep radial valleys especially on the western and southern slopes.
The mountain is a combination of both shield and volcanic eruptive structures. Over time different flows have produced a variety of different rock types. The predominant rock types on Shira and Mawenzi are trachybasalts; the later lava flows on Kibo show a gradual change from trachyandesite to nephelinite. There is also a number of intrusions such as the massive radial and concentric dyke-swarms on Mawenzi and the Shira Ridge and groups of nearly 250 parasitic cones chiefly formed from cinder and ash.
Since 1912, the mountain has lost 82% of its ice cap and since 1962, 55% of its remaining glaciers. Kibo still retains permanent ice and snow and Mawenzi also has patches of semi-permanent ice, but the mountain is forecast to lose its ice cap in 2030. Evidence of past glaciation is present on all three peaks. The mountain remains a critical water catchment for both Kenya and Tanzania but as a result of the receding ice cap and deforestation, several rivers have dried up, affecting the forests and farmland below.
OBSIDIAN:
Obsidian is a naturally occurring volcanic glass formed as an extrusive igneous rock.[4][5]
Obsidian is produced when felsic lava extruded from a volcano cools rapidly with minimal crystal growth. It is commonly found within the margins of rhyolitic lava flows known as obsidian flows, where the chemical composition (high silica content) induces a high degree of viscosity and polymerization of the lava. The inhibition of atomic diffusion through this highly viscous and polymerized lava explains the lack of crystal growth. Obsidian is hard and brittle and therefore fractures with very sharp edges. In the past it was used to manufacture cutting and piercing tools and it has been used experimentally as surgical scalpelblades.[6]
… among the various forms of glass we may reckon Obsidian glass, a substance very similar to the stone found by Obsidius[i] in Ethiopia.[7]
— Pliny the Elder, Naturalis Historia (AD 77)
The translation into English of Natural History written by Pliny the Elder of Rome shows a few sentences on the subject of a volcanic glass called obsidian (lapis obsidianus), discovered in Ethiopia by Obsidius, a Roman explorer.[8][9][10][11]
Obsidian is the rock formed as a result of quickly cooled lava, which is the parent material.[12][13][14] Tektites were once thought by many to be obsidian produced by lunar volcanic eruptions,[15] though few scientists now adhere to this hypothesis.[16]
Obsidian is mineral-like, but not a true mineral because as a glass it is not crystalline; in addition, its composition is too variable to be classified as a mineral. It is sometimes classified as a mineraloid.[17] Though obsidian is usually dark in color, similar to mafic rocks such as basalt, obsidian’s composition is extremely felsic. Obsidian consists mainly of SiO2 (silicon dioxide), usually 70% or more. Crystalline rocks with obsidian’s composition include graniteand rhyolite. Because obsidian is metastable at the Earth’s surface (over time the glass becomes fine-grained mineral crystals), no obsidian has been found that is older than Cretaceous age. This breakdown of obsidian is accelerated by the presence of water. Having a low water content when newly formed, typically less than 1% water by weight,[18] obsidian becomes progressively hydrated when exposed to groundwater, forming perlite.
An international team of anthropologists has discovered that early humans in East Africa had — by about 320,000 years ago — begun trading with distant groups, using color pigments and manufacturing more sophisticated tools than those of the Early Stone Age. The newly-discovered activities, described in three papers in the journal Science, date to the oldest known fossil record of Homo sapiens and occur tens of thousands of years earlier than previous evidence has shown in eastern Africa. These behaviors, which are characteristic of humans who lived during the Middle Stone Age, replaced technologies and ways of life that had been in place for hundreds of thousands of years.
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November 2018 Dad’s Obit
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Dad’s Funeral Eulogy Notes
Ed Eulogy 11/18/2018
Thank you Rabbi. And thank you to everyone here today. It means a huge amount to Ed’s children and grandchildren that you are here to support us. It has been a busy and difficult few days for Lisa and myself. Thank u Lisa for doing all the funeral and lunch arrangements. Thank u Mary for editing and sending in the obituaries to the newspapers. In retrospect I shouldn’t have worked on Wed and Thur but as a doctor (even a semi retired one) we never think of taking a day off. At first I told Lisa that I would just make a very brief statement after the Rabbi. On further thought though I realized that as Ed’s only son I am obliged to give an actual Eulogy. I will keep it short though. One can only write so much on an iPad during a one hour flight. I have decided though that this winter I will write a full biographical account of Ed’s life so that Jon, Ben and Alex will be able to maybe know and understand him better and share it some day with their children. Oral history gets lost so easily over the generations. By the time one is mature enough to appreciate and take an interest in their elders they are sadly often gone.
My wife Mary has done extensive genealogy research on her family back many centuries, reviewing census records, translating documents and using DNA. She has also done some for the Shapiros back a few generations to Europe and will do more but Jewish genealogy is hard for those ancestors like ours that fled Europe during the 19th century as depicted in Fiddler on the Roof.
I will just start with Ed’s paternal grandparents Louis and Hessie Shapiro, they were born in Kiev, Russia in the 1880s and came to the US as young adults. They had four sons; Herman, Joe, Seymour and Mandy. Herman, a dentist, died in 1962 at age 56. Seymour and Mandy lived to very old age and both were very sharp up until the end. I got a nice verbal history from Mandy in a tape recorded phone conversation I made with him about a year before his death. Joe, Ed’s father, died in 1972 at age 65. He and Bertha had only retired to Florida a few years earlier. She lived another 30 years, long enough to attend my medical school graduation in Albany and to see her great grandsons Ben and Jon. I was only 8 when Joe died. I remember him as an incredibly lovable, funny man, who would make his thumb disappear and pull coins from behind my ear. I always remember hearing some other adult in Florida saying that Joe was the person who would always insist on driving someone to or from the airport at midnight rather than having them take a taxi. Joe loved to play cards and and go to the horse track.
Amazing that Ed will be with his parents and grandparents only a mile from
Where he graduated high school.
The four Shapiro brothers had a total of 7 kids, the Shapiro cousins. With Bonnie and Ed now gone there remain Lenny, Alan, Harvey, Paul and Arlene. Alan and Harvey have sent their love and support both during Ed’s surgery and now. They could not be here due to long travel distances, age and the holiday season. Ed was excited to recently reconnect with Arlene via email and facebook. As a young child I have fond memories of get togethers with the Shapiros but by the time I was a teen my parents had little contact with them sadly. Partly it was that Bonnie, Lenny and Alan lived in CA and Harvey in Atlanta by then but it was an unusual void in retrospect. I didn’t even know that Bonnie had died until I asked the other cousins for her contact info last year when I had a genealogy question that I felt she would be able to answer best as the eldest cousin and Hermans only child.
All of you have seen the Video of Ed’s life that I made last year for his 80th birthday so I don’t need to go over all the dates and places of his life’s milestones. Instead here are a few snapshots from my memory in no particular order.
Ed was a great tennis player, he taught it as a camp counselor and taught me as well. He played every weekend in lake success (usually with a cigar in his mouth) and even competed and won trophies in the Great Neck wide Alan King tournament some years. We played in the father-child tournament several times in Lake Success once making it all the way to the finals where we lost to my schoolmate Kelly and her father. He often took us to watch the US Open at Flushing Meadows, I remember sitting on the ground by an outer court while Ille Nastase yelled at a ref and the amazing chance to watch my idol Bjorn Borg lose to John McEnroe in a finals. Once he started playing golf Ed completely stopped playing tennis. He tried to interest me in golf but I found it too tedious to play although I enjoyed watching it on TV with him in the days of Jack Nicholas. He was never as good a golfer as tennis player but enjoyed it greatly, his cigar smoking and cursing made it harder for him to find foursomes in SC and CA and he sadly stopped playing at all a few years ago.
Every summer we would always spend time in the Hampton’s at the vacation home of Barbara’s brother Steven and his partner Richard (who are still together and now married after 57 years) Dad and I and later Lisa would always go fishing. Whether just from the embankment of the locks (where we caught mostly sea robins, an inedible fish) or from a rowboat with an outboard (for flounder or fluke in the bay) or on a party boat out of Montauk for either mackerel or bluefish it was so special to me that I got to spend time with Dad. We would rise before dawn and often stop at a diner to get egg salad sandwiches. Ed was an EARLY riser, something Lisa, Myself and Alex have inherited. It is a great trait for fisherman, golfers and anesthesiologists. EVERY Father’s Day since she was 5 Alex and I have gone fishing at dawn, I was always so proud to send Ed a photo of her with a fish.
Every winter we visited Bertha for our vacation. Lisa and I would stay with Bertha while Ed and Barbara stayed at a motel. Ed would take us for walks along the Hollywood beach boardwalk to the trampoline place or to rent inflatable floats for the ocean. Ed could swim but because he was almost blind without his glasses he was never very comfortable playing in the pool or ocean with us. Ironically after needing his cataracts removed he got corrective lenses implanted and didn’t wear glasses for the last years of his life. I remember us meeting the Shakter’s in FL several times for trips to the beach and to a park with tennis courts. Ed loved animals and he and Mom took us to Marineland, the zoo, the monkey jungle and the Everglades on our Florida trips.
When I was around 13 I did a one day learn to ski bus trip from school at Hunter Mtn. And then after that at a week at the Pines Resort in the Catskills Lisa, Ed and Barbara learned on the tiny slope they had there. For the next 5 or 6 years we would spend time every winter in the Berkshires skiing at Jiminy and Brodie. Later Barbara and Ed joined a ski club and would go out West for real skiing. The Samuels skied with us a lot.
EVERY JULY 4th was spent at Bayville. Phyllis’ mom, ? Mrs. Constantino, had a cute house just a block from the beach. I remember fishing there with dad both in a boat and off the beach. And also collecting mussels from rocks to be cooked in the pasta sauce. Fireworks were illegal but dad always bought sparklers on the street in manhattan for us kids to run around with.
Ed inherited his love of the Yankees from his father Joe and passed it on to me (and Lisa until she switched to the evil Red Sox) and now even Alex is a fan. We spent endless hours watching the Yankees on channel 11, listening to Phil Rizutto on the radio and going to so many games. Lisa and Ed heard, but didn’t see, Reggies 3rd home run get hit on their way out to beat the traffic. I remember being at the final winning game of the World Series in 77 or 78 and asking Ed if I could run on the field to get a clump of grass but he said no as the police on horses were holding clubs.
Ed was an enthusiastic photographer from his days in high school and college on. He shot thousands of photos of family and his travels with Barbara around the world. Most were on slides that languished in the basement in Lake Success but I ended up with them and have scanned many. I was given his old Nikon in high school and have always enjoyed photography, Alex inherited this love also which Ed really appreciated.
Ed definitely spoiled Lisa and I. I don’t remember him ever saying a toy or game or bike we wanted was too expensive. He indulged us with pets from hamsters, to guinea pigs, a cat that quickly ran away to finally Ruben, our beloved red dog. He always asked me what to get Alex for her birthday or Hanukkah and the one year I told him she was fascinated with squirrels he sent her two displays of taxidermy squirrels. She will always think of him in years to come as she displays those lovely dead squirrels on her mantelpiece.
By the time Alex was born Ed had already moved to South Carolina and then even further to California. His visits to us were fewer than we would have liked but he spent a great week with us at the Finger Lakes in 2010, fishing off the dock with Alex and playing board games. We played tennis with Alex which meant a lot to me. On his last visit to us a few years ago he really enjoyed going with me to our dog Fifa’s doggie swim club. And he got to see Alex perform in her Camp Broadway finale. Luckily with the advent of FaceTime and video sharing he got to see many of Alex’s activities from live streaming of soccer games to musicals and recitals and fishing or skiing.
The last few years we saw Ed much less than we wanted but I was fortunate to see him last December at his 80th birthday and I combined a visit to him in June with the Escape from Alcatraz Triathlon. I took him to Muir Woods to see the amazing Coast Redwoods, tallest trees in the world. It was a quiet weekday there and a zen experience quietly walking in the Cathedral Grove. He was getting his medical work up for his shortness of breath then so we just did the flat one mile loop together and then I left him on a bench to do a shorter hilly loop. As I looked back from the path I took a photo of him. It captured perfectly the idea of each of us being just a small speck compared to the enormous majestic world we live in. He thanked me many times for taking him there, only an hour from his house but he had never gone. Although it was not the best circumstances my trip to CA for his surgery was very special. I met him at Fishermans wharf as he got off the Ferry from Vallejo and walked him to my hotel where we had dinner together (for once wine for me and not him) and then spent the night in my room before our 6am Uber ride to hospital. It was like a sleepover. But Neither of us slept well and at 4 am we got up and talked a little. The stressful hours I spent with him at the hospital in CA during his recovery were special also. Probably the most time we spent alone talking in the last 30years. Luckily the Yankees were in a tight playoff run and we watched several games on TV and he got to watch them win the wildcard game. I was totally aggravated that he insisted on watching and thrived on the continual Kavanaugh nomination news and hearings. He had never been much into politics despite once running for Comptroller in Nassau County back when it was impossible for a democrat to win but they needed to field a candidate every year. He was disgusted by Trump and sent many emails with outrageous stories. He made so many sex jokes to the nurses that he was the worst dirty old man in the hospital. Before each one he would say “I shouldnt’ say this because it will embarrass my son” but then went right ahead. But he also told every nurse, doctor and aide that I was a doctor who had studied at Johns Hopkins and the Cleveland Clinic and about my marathons and triathlons and my climbing Kilimanjaro. No matter how old we get we are always seeking our parents approval and praise and it was very special to hear it with my own ears.
Once he had recovered from surgery Ed said he really appreciated all I had done for him, that I was a great son and that he wanted to not miss any more opportunities to see family and hoped to see his cousins , Arlene had suggested a cousins reunion. He was excited to have survived and wanted to go to Benjamins college graduation next year and Alex’s HS graduation in 2020. I had looked into places I could do a week every few months of anesthesiology work in the Bay Area so as to see him more. His recovery from surgery went so well that I was totally unprepared for losing him. It certainly proves the point that we must cherish every day, every moment we have with our loved ones and not miss any chances to spend time with them, tell them how we feel and not be angry for all the little things that mean nothing in the big picture of life.
February 2021 Boca Raton Visit Journal
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Summer 2021 Recap….
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This is the letter I wrote regarding Buffalo again making a long-term mistake in civic planning.
