In 1999, while working as an intern at the Cobb Institute of Archaeology sketching artifacts, Dylan Karges and a friend idly picked up some clay and began making caricatures of each other. Little did he know at the time, he was discovering a hobby that would consume much of his time for years to come.
Soon, the 2000 MSU graduate found himself creating miniature men inspired by statues from the many excavations in Israel in which he has taken part with the institute.
"It started out to be a small-scale project. The intention was to have a group of 25 that would have been the whole thing," he laughs. "The more I started to experiment with the clay, the more I got exposed to the history and religious chronology of the region and started to make some associations."
Karges, still working with the Cobb Institute, makes the little men whenever he has a bit of free time, and his collection has blossomed into an entire village of more than 1,500.