National Geographic News Photo Gallery: Ancient Church Found at Israeli Prison

I love archaeology. :) The process of finding things is a huge pain in the backside, the analysis and graphs are another pain in the backside, but just to see something like this is incredible. It makes you wonder who built in, what was the purpose of the structure, what was their life like, etc etc.

I once had an exercise in class discussion period in which we were to imagine ourselves arriving in a world that had been abandoned. The only evidence of people were the building structures and items discovered during our explorations. We were given a list of "discovered" items and had to come up with possible uses for them. For example, say you'd never seen a flourescent beer sign before. You're standing there looking at this strange tubular thing that is hanging on a wall and you wonder "What was the purpose for this?" It could be a clan symbol, a religious item, anything really.

I think half of archaeology is just being able to use your imagination.