Caesarea Maritima Museum, Sdot Yam

Aharon Wegman grew up in Haifa, came through the Hano'ar Ha'oved and Hamachanot Ha'olim youth movements, and joined Sdot Yam roughly a year after the group was founded. When ten members moved up to take hold of the ground at Caesarea on 2 May 1940 he was one of them. The memorial written for him by Asher Ovadiah of Tel Aviv University records the conditions plainly: the kibbutz arrived without land, water, transport or a settlement budget.

His route into archaeology was oblique. The Mandate authorities, Ovadiah writes, wanted to frustrate Jewish settlement at Caesarea and used the antiquities laws to block the building that would have turned a tent camp into a permanent village. Wegman had not come to dig. He had come to build a settlement. What he concluded from the collision was that a new settlement on a historic site could not be built by ignoring the remains lying in every corner of the camp, in the fields and on the seabed.

So he collected, from the moment he arrived, and he kept collecting for the rest of his life. He examined and studied each object himself, patiently, using books and consulting archaeologists and academics, and he did it after working hours. Most of the sorting, cataloguing and display work in the museum was his, done in the evenings and sometimes deep into the night. Yehuda Rotem's memorial preserves the joke Wegman made while serving as kibbutz treasurer: after a day of chasing new money he would calm down in the evening working on old money, the ancient coins.

He had no formal training, and he was still recognised by academic specialists as knowing Caesarea and its antiquities comprehensively. He took part in important excavations at the site, became the standing address for archaeologists and students working there, and used those relationships to bring further objects into the collection. The modest museum building went up with grants he raised from various institutions and with money from the kibbutz.

The 1999 memorial volume is unusually direct about how the collection was formed, and the answer is a portrait of a kibbutz rather than of a museum. Members working in construction and in the fields handed in whatever came out of the ground at Caesarea. The fishermen handed over the pottery jars they brought up in their nets, which they were trawling across the eastern Mediterranean rather than only off this beach. That, the volume says, is how the museum's collection of jars accumulated.

A second stream was purchase. With the small sums the kibbutz treasury could release, Wegman bought pieces from Arab residents of the area and from others. This is not a provenance record any museum would build today, and the page does not pretend otherwise: it is a collection formed in the 1940s and 1950s by a settlement standing on top of a Roman city, under an antiquities regime and a set of professional norms that no longer apply.

One rule ran through all of it. From the start Wegman set the norm, and modelled it himself, that antiquities were not to be collected for private use and that the collection was the property of the kibbutz and of the public. Ovadiah's judgement is that without that rule the important finds would have scattered and been lost, and the museum, which became a cultural and educational asset for the members and for the wider public, could not have come into being at all.

The practical consequence for a visitor is that the collection is broader than a single excavation would produce and shallower in recorded context than an excavation report. Some objects carry a findspot. Others carry only the fact that a member of Sdot Yam found them somewhere in Caesarea, or that a boat brought them up in a net.

Wegman had wanted a catalogue of every item in the collection, and it never appeared in his lifetime. After his death his family and friends decided that a scholarly treatment of what many on the kibbutz still called simply Aharon's collection was the right memorial. Rivka Gersht of Tel Aviv University edited the result: The Sdot Yam Museum Book of the Antiquities of Caesarea Maritima, in memory of Aharon Wegman, published by Hakibbutz Hameuchad in Tel Aviv in 1999, in Hebrew with English abstracts.

Gersht's preface explains the choice made along the way. A full scientific catalogue identifying, describing and dating every object would have run to several volumes and was ruled out mainly on cost. What the editors produced instead is a set of chapters, each discussing a representative selection with an emphasis on context, use and meaning, and leaning towards material that had not been published before. Some categories were already in print elsewhere, the preface notes: the capitals through Moshe Fischer, the gems through A. Hamburger, the coins through L. Kadman, with the Greek and Latin inscriptions due to appear as separate monographs by Clayton M. Lehmann and Kenneth G. Holum.

The contents page is the best short answer to what the museum actually holds, because it is the list a group of specialists thought the collection could support. Reviewing a different Caesarea book for the Bryn Mawr Classical Review in 2003, Hagith Sivan referred readers to the 1999 articles written in memory of Wegman, whom she called the founder of the delightful museum at Sdot Yam that houses numerous finds from the excavations of Caesarea.

The collection is still working material. Sculpture from Caesarea held at Sdot Yam continues to turn up in the archaeological literature, and Gersht's own chapter on sculpture in the 1999 volume is cited in later studies of statuary from the city.

• Sculpture: Rivka Gersht
• The Greek and Latin inscriptions: Clayton M. Lehmann and Kenneth G. Holum
• The Arabic inscriptions: Moshe Sharon
• Coins: Ariel Berman
• The legal and administrative status of the port of Sebastos in the early Roman period: Dan Barag
• Gems, amulets and seals: Shua Amorai-Stark
• Clay lamps: Varda Sussman

Kibbutz Sdot Yam sits immediately south of the ruins, close enough that the kibbutz gate is the nearest gate to the Roman theatre. The museum is nonetheless outside Caesarea National Park, and a park ticket does not admit anyone to it. Visitors arrive through the kibbutz, not through the archaeological site, and the two operate on different hours and different terms.

The separation is historical rather than administrative. Chance finds made at Caesarea and around it were being shown on the kibbutz well before the ruins became a national park, and the display grew from that into a small formal museum. The finds stayed where the finders were.

The building is a modern one, and there are two accounts of who shaped it. The Hebrew Wikipedia entries for Sdot Yam and for the Hannah Senesh House credit the design of the kibbutz archaeological museum to Shmuel Mestechkin, the Bauhaus-trained chief architect of the Kibbutz Artzi movement, who also designed the Hannah Senesh House next door. The 1999 volume's own publisher blurb calls the museum the fruit of the planning and design of Aharon Wegman. The two claims may simply describe an architect and a museum-maker working on the same building, but nothing available settles it, and the page does not pretend to.

The neighbour matters for planning a visit. The Hannah Senesh House, dedicated on 26 March 1950 and reopened after conservation in November 2020, is the larger draw and shares the site, the telephone number and the booking arrangements. Its original programme included a room for a museum of Caesarea antiquities alongside a library, a study room, a music room, an open stage and a performance hall, which is where this collection began before it moved into a building of its own.