Educational Media Reviews Online

The Missing Piece visits archeological digs in Jerusalem and the surrounding area, focusing on what artifacts reveal about the everyday lives of ancient people, and on the passion archeologists feel for their work.

Archeologists explain that they usually work on a site that has been earmarked for construction or modern development. The camera follows them into museums, libraries, laboratories, reconstructed buildings, and even underground to look at ruins, pottery, glass bottles, sculpture, mosaics, jewelry, coins, and grave artifacts and to see how they restore and document their findings. They display individual pieces, telling how the items may have been used and how they were restored.

The excitement of uncovering objects people used thousands of years ago is palpable. A woman reassembling pottery says she forgets to eat and doesn’t want to leave her workbench to go home; each time she matches two pot shards together she’s found one more bit of a larger puzzle. Another researcher considers the lives taken with spears used in the Crusader era. Glass bottles from the Roman period still contain traces of the makeup women used in that period.

Several locations or projects are identified specifically, including Beit-Shean, Mamilla, Operation Scroll in the northern Judean Desert, Galilee, Meresha, and Qumran. The caves at Bet Guvrin are shown but not identified on-screen.

There are a few misspellings in the English subtitles; archeologists and researchers are identified on screen in Hebrew but the subtitled narration obscures their names.

However, this short film conveys beautifully that ancient artifacts or ruins tell part of an ongoing human story, and that learning about the past can give meaning to the present. The Missing Piece is recommended as an introduction to studies of Biblical archeology or history.