St George’s College is pleased to announce that Dr. Toni Fisher has been appointed as the Curator for the Benshoof Cistern Museum in the grounds of the College, and will be responsible for the care of the Dr. Joseph P. Free Dothan Collection which is hosted in the museum.

Dr. Fisher is an experienced archaeologist, and for many years has served as the zooarchaeologist for the Bethsaida Archaeology Project in northern Israel. She has provided the following outline of her hopes and expectations as she commences in the role of Curator.

I am excited to begin my tenure as the curator for the Benshoof Cistern Museum at St. George’s College in Jerusalem, containing artifacts from the Tel Dothan excavation during the 1950s and 60s. It is not only a fascinating experience to be able to work with artifacts that are 3,000+ years old, but also to work in a city shaped by Jewish, Christian and Muslim cultures, where those cultures continue to be lived realities, is an added bonus!

Dr. Jenks and I have discussed at length the plans to rehabilitate the collection and make it widely available to the students of St. George, to other archaeologists working in Syro-Palestinian archaeology, to visitors to the land and, most importantly, to the people and schools in the surrounding communities. Our hope is that the children in the area will be able to visit the museum, view the exhibits, and leave with a sense of pride for their heritage—and with increased curiosity to explore that further.

Along with the express purpose of making this a museum that will be on the list of ‘must sees’ whilst in Jerusalem, our hope is to reach out to the archaeological community and make St. George College a site for archaeological conferences, with cutting-edge archaeological thought. We are establishing a close working relationship with other institutions that have artifacts from Tel Dothan (Covenant Theological Seminary near St. Louis, MO; Wheaton College in Illinois; and the Rockefeller Museum in Jerusalem), so that we can work together to form a more complete picture of the ancient community at Dothan.

We also hope to be able to bring in archaeological artifacts from other sites as well, and particularly from the Bethsaida Excavations Project, in which St. George’s College is an active partner institution and for which Dr. Jenks is a Co-Director. I have been excavating at Bethsaida, near the northern shore of the Sea of Galilee, since 1990, and am its zooarchaeologist, analyzing the animal bones found there, so I am intimately acquainted with the Project. The Benshoof Cistern Museum would be an ideal place to showcase the 3000-year history of Bethsaida—from the Iron Age through Hellenistic and the Roman periods and to the time of the Crusaders and the Mamluks—in a way that would complement its present fine collection from Tel Dothan.

In recent years, the Museum has not had regular attention and upkeep, so I have begun the process of cleaning up the display cabinets and cataloging all the artifacts that are on display and in storage at the College. With a bit of TLC (“tender loving care”), this museum will be beautiful, creative, motivating and an integral element of the mission of Saint George’s College.