Thousands of years of history come alive in the unexcavated cave systems at Israel's Beit Guvrin-Maresha National Park. Little messages from antiquity are to be found among the buried artifacts that people are welcome to discover during supervised excavations.
"Digging down in the earth, exploring something that hadn't been touched in 2,000, 3,000 years - it's pretty impressive," one amateur digger relates.
"It was really awesome," adds another visitor. "We first went into a really deep cave, and found some bits of pottery and bits of bone.
Says tour guide Ian Stern: "When it comes to the size of this site itself we are only touching - if we have 5,000 caves out here, and we've been digging for 27 years - maybe three to four percent of the material out here. There's a lot more to be found."