The TRAVELER'S JOURNAL: September twenty-seventh excavating Armageddon.

It's easy to understand why biblical prophecies predict the last great battle between Good and Evil will be fought on the dry plains of Megiddo, in what is now north central Israel. For 5,000 years, armies have met and murdered each other here, and peace is still elusive. Canaanites were not the first to sacrifice animals to their gods in the temple of the fortified city that grew along early trade routes. Megiddo was one of King Solomon's three power centers. Though the tide of commerce shifted elsewhere, and Megiddo was abandoned three centuries before Christ was born, the city never lost its mystique.

Like onion-skins, the ruins of over 20 layers of civilized construction and destruction have been compressed into a 100 foot high hill, Har Megiddo. Now, under a program run by Penn State Univ. and the Univ. of Tel Aviv, archaeologists and vacationing volunteers spend long hot hours in shallow pits, scratching gently at the baked earth. Rising before dawn to avoid the searing heat, they use knife-edged hammers and dental picks to carefully unearth clues to a past, which is older than human memory. By noon, they're heading back to the kibbutz to kibitz, clean and painstakingly catalogue the day's find.

What sort of vacation is this? What compels amateurs to pay to participate in three weeks of brain-blasting heat and nail- splitting labor? Simply, it's the indescribable sense of connection that comes with hands-on-history in the Holy Land. It's finding a bone from an ancient sacrifice or a trinket lost before time began. Artifacts in museums are fascinating, but when lifted from the ground, they're somehow alive.

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