Yes, I Facebook Chat With the People Sitting Next to Me

            Another two days come and gone, another pair of socks that will never again be pure white.  Greetings again from the Holy Land.

            Previously on my blog I had to direct everyone to Facebook in order to see all of my photos.  Since Sunday night I have figured out a way to post images to the blog itself in a timely manner.  I will be doing that here in some cases, though I suggest you investigate Facebook for more complete photo documentation.

            This week we got a new square supervisor.  Actually, he’s always been our supervisor, he’s just a week late and will be leaving a week early.  His name is Steve Andrews and he did his dissertation in Akkadian and somehow already heard of me, so we have some stuff to talk about.  Unfortunately, his arrival did not immediately end the fact that our area can best be summed up in the word fustercluck.  The grid was messed up so we didn’t have any secure balk lines, there are pits and fills everywhere, and no one seems to know what the hell he’s doing (this has all since been sorted out).

            While articulating the casemate wall in E-F8, Sam turned up a full vessel intact.  If you look below, however, you’ll see that this was in fact a plastic Coke bottle. 

            This area was previously an exploratory pit dug by the great Dr. Dever in 1990.  The pit remained a pit until 2006 when some old lady named Ruth fell into it from a balk, causing a scare for volunteer safety during which the pits were filled in.  Somehow we spent a whole week in these squares without the knowledge that this happened or the knowledge that this whole corner of F8 would have to be dug out.  Our goal at this point was to look back into the records to see if the previous excavator (Dr. K) had taken a height reading on the bottom of the.  If this were the case, we could just hack through the stuff until that level willy-nilly.

            In the other corner of square F8 were a bunch of stones that were presumably tumble from the casemate wall.  In order to remove a rock you have to confirm that it is in fact “floating” and not resting on anything.  We spent much of the day lowering the level of the square to get under these stones and confirm their floating status. 

            One of the stones was much too large to simply carry out, so Grandpa was called in, our sledgehammer.  Sam took some whacks because she missed out on the other huge block we had broken, then I got to have at it.  Unfortunately, this was a rock that, when hit with a hammer, hits back.

            The shrapnel from the rock drew blood on my in two places.  Its demise was assured, but it decided to cause as much calamity as possible before it went.  I made sure to throw the pieces extra hard into the pile as payback.

            Yesterday evening involved pottery washing and a lecture on the Philistines.  We’ve been playing a lot of hearts and spades lately, so I think yesterday after dinner was a hearts night.

            This morning was the hardest wake-up yet for me.  I woke up around 2:30 and was pumped to see all the time I had left to sleep, but when the alarm went off I couldn’t have been unhappier.

            At the Tel we finally had a better game plan.  Steve and Matt spent last night studying the old material from our area to figure out what exactly is going on.  I admit to being slightly peeved that this is taking place a week into the dig, but whatever, it’s done now.

            The plan today was to try and outline the pit that was backfilled in 2006 and then re-excavate it.  The way one does this is to scrape the surface of the square with a trowel.  There is a distinct difference in the texture and toughness of a pit that’s been refilled.  Philip and I went about this task and scraped out an area roughly one and a half meters by one meter.  We continued to scrape down to try and find the bottom of the pit.  Unfortunately, no one had, in fact, taken a level on the bottom of the pit, so we were going to have to dig until we could feel a difference in the soil.

            It was pretty tricky because we had to not only find the sides, but also accommodate for the fact that the pit was dug in ’90 and had probably eroded on the edges before being filled in.  This meant that some of the sides were not straight across or down and so we had to really let the dirt guide the trowels.  Even though the work was more of a necessity than quality excavation, the practice was good and I felt like I was getting the hang of using a trowel.  It’s actually really easy to feel the difference in how packed the dirt is if you trust the tool to do the work for you.

            On the other side of the pit there was a strip of packed dirt and then more softness around the tumble area.  A lot of the rocks are too deep to call floating, so Becca and Sam started peeling that area back to try and expose what we though was either another Dever trench or perhaps a place where someone took stones from the wall in antiquity.  By the end of the day, we started taking out the piece in the middle to create one big trench in front of the casemate wall so that we could finally call the rocks in our way tumble.  We didn’t quite finish, but that will be the first thing we do tomorrow.

            It’s looking we’ll still be extended F8 to the wall of the barracks and focusing on that.  We’re having a tough time moving quickly because there are only three people in our squares doing the digging the whole time.  I think they ought to give us some more people, especially if they want the squares extended, but unfortunately I don’t run the universe.

            One thing I did accomplish today was emptying goofas all over my shoes a few times.  Gross.

            I have some pictures of Tel Gezer and some other random stuff posted on FB now.  I wish you all the best.  Stay thirsty, my friends.