This fly is really pissing me off, just saying.
Time for the first post-digging updates! Today we completed our second day at Tel Gezer and things are going swimmingly. As some of you may note, many cities have the word Tel in them. A tel is an artificial hill created by successive layers of habitation at a site, each building on top of the previous one. In the case of Gezer, there was already a hill when it was first established, bit it grew with each subsequent period as well as some previous archaeological expeditions; more on those later.
Here’s a quick rundown of the daily schedule:
4:30 Rise and shine! This would be rough, but exhaustion + jetlag has made it totally manageable. During this time we also eat a small breakfast of bread with some sort of spread on it. I like the chocolate spread because it is tasty and has caffeine in it. Also, the coffee is always instant, hence the title of this post.
5:00 Load the bus and head for Tel Gezer. We arrive at the bottom where we have a locked container with much of our equipment. We load up on pickaxes, survey equipment, and other goodies to haul up the hill a ways to get to the dig site itself. We erect the shade-clothes and get to work right away.
8:30 Second breakfast comes after a brief three hours of digging. It’s called breakfast, but actually consists of cold cut sandwiches, yogurt, and the like. We sit on a very steep hill in very flimsy plastic chairs for this meal, so it’s a battle with gravity to stay upright. I have just been sitting on the ground to save myself the trouble of falling. After 30 minutes, it’s back to work.
11:15 Fruit break. Gary, the high priest of the sacrificial orb, slices many sacred watermelons for us to consume. It’s kind of nice to already be filthy so it doesn’t matter how sticky your face and hands get and whether or not you get juice all over yourself.
12:30 Time to clean up. We drop the shade-clothes at night, so a lot of the equipment can stay hidden under those. The rest of the stuff gets put away at the bottom of the hill and pottery buckets are taken back to the hotel to be processed. There are some apricot trees with fresh fruit in this area, so I munch on those while waiting for the bus.
1:00 Lunchtime! We eat right when we get off the bus, so everyone is smelly and dirty and no one cares. I always forget it’s only lunchtime because I’ve already been up for eight hours and eaten two meals.
1:30-4:00 Free time to swim or nap or blog.
4:00 Pottery washing. We take all the pieces we’ve found and soak them and scrub them so we can see what we’re looking at better. We haven’t done this yet, but we sure have picked up a bunch of pottery.
5:30 Lecture time. There’s a whole bunch of lectures scheduled from a whole bunch of people. Yesterday was about the geography of Israel. I forget what it is tonight.
6:30 Dinner. After our final meal, we get to do whatever we want. It’s still light out at this point, so I’ve been trying to make it ‘til dark before sleeping. I don’t know if I’ll make it tonight.
So that’s the general idea of how the day goes. Things have been a little different just because we only started yesterday. We got a quick tour of the site led my Sam Wolff, one of our esteemed project directors. We explored the water system that’s being excavated, a big dark tunnel carved into the bedrock going downhill to meat a spring. We also looked at the Middle Bronze Age gate and tower along with their accompanying walls. The way excavation works, not a lot is left exposed, as if it remains exposed it gets deteriorated, so it gets covered to preserve it.
Our section of the site is down lower next to “Solomon’s Gate.” That’s in “” because the dating has not been confirmed; finding an appropriate date is one of the goals of this season. It’s a large three-chambered gate typical to the Iron Age. We’ve been divided into two dig fields, Field East and Field West. Guess which end of the site each one is on. Anyway, the two fields are doing different very different things. Field West is digging around a large pillared building, Field East is exploring administrative buildings next to the gate along the wall.
I don’t think many of my devoted readers are familiar with the way Near Eastern archaeology works, so here is a quick run down. The entire dig site is divided into a grid of 5 m. x 5 m. squares. In each square, a half-meter border is left on each side and the team digs in the remaining 4 m. x 4 m. square. The meter wide space between squares is called a balk. These balks are left standing so that the team can see the layers through which they are digging. Field West’s first task is to dismantle some old balks so that they don’t collapse on anyone’s head. I have been working in Field East in the two squares adjacent to the gate. We’re hopeful that our squares will be instrumental in finding a more secure date for “Solomon’s Gate.”
My square leader, who some of you may know, is Matt Martin, a Lyco grad from the class of 2010. Dr. Knauth is running the squares next door, so that’s a pretty good time. Yesterday our job was weeding all the plants that had grown in the two years the site sat dormant. This was a hard task because unlike normal gardening, we couldn’t just rip the roots out. We had to carefully tug and clip the plants so that the layers beneath wouldn’t be disturbed and the fragile balks didn’t crumble. I ended up in a trench that extended beyond our squares that was dug down to a much lower layer. I was charged with cleaning up a forest of waist high shrubs, some of them with points like daggers and roots like mountains. It took a long time. The good news was that it was nice and breezy; the bad news was that it kept knocking over our shade-clothes. Because we had the tour in the morning and a brief training session, we didn’t work for very long.
Becca and I played Magic after lunch and showers then we played two-deck Bullshit for too long after dinner before calling it a night.
This morning was the beginning of our first “real” day at the site. We started work around 5:30. Our goals for the day were to finish weeding and establish our balk lines, which means measuring our exactly the square we’d be digging in. The weeding was tedious, but we got it pretty much done during the time before second breakfast. We put all the dirt/rocks/weeds/refuse into these rubbery buckets called goofas. No one is quite sure what the plural of goofa is, or how to actually spell it, but that is inconsequential.
After breakfast we kept weeding but were also establishing our balk lines for the two squares we are assigned. It’s really one and a half squares, because the second meets the casemate wall midway through, but it doesn’t really matter (A casemate wall is constructed of two walls running parallel, creating a series of rooms. During times of battle, the space in between was filled with rock, dirt, and gravel, forming a thick, solid wall.). Some of the lines were hard to make because it requires staking string across the squares and the wall and left over trenches made finding good places for the nails difficult.
During this, we were charged with dismantling a section of balk that separated our two squares to be level with the floor of the half-square. This meant only taking it down 5-7 inches, but there was a wall in the balk, so we didn’t want to accidentally destroy a potential continuation of it below. It’s actually very difficult to do the digging part of archaeology. There is a fine technique not just to carefully extracting artifacts, but even just removing and leveling piles of dirt. Speaking of artifacts, there’s pottery everywhere her. On the roads, in the woods, on the Tel, you can just pick it up. While in our balk we ended up pulling out a handle with a very clear potter’s mark on it, the maker’s signature. It’s relatively rare to find one of these, so that was pretty neat. We also found a pair of scorpions hanging out in the dirt. We tossed them aside to keep digging.
We eventually leveled the balk off and discovered the wall was not continued through it. We though maybe it would have connected with the wall in Dr. Knauth’s square, so we spent some time looking for a robber’s trench. A robber’s trench is created when the rocks are removed at some point to be used else where, and then the space is filled in. If this is the case, when leveled off there is a slight difference in color between the dirt where the rocks used to be and the surrounding material. In this case, there was nothing that suggested that rocks had been removed from the wall. Running perpendicular to the wall though, there appears to be something that could be another, skinnier piece of architecture. We didn’t dig down enough to tell, but by the end I think I could see the formation continuing into the balk and out into our full square. This is the pitfall of the novice digger, though, always seeing things where there are none.
I am proud of myself for seeing a very slight change in the color of the dirt while we dug down in the balk. It can be hard to see whether or not we’ve reached a new layer. By the end of the day I had also figured out how to better use the trowel and brushes to dig cleanly. It is hard, especially when taking down a relatively large section, to keep the area you are working in clear enough so that you can see the things that are going on, like subtle changes in dirt color. We left off after leveling the balk. I don’t know exactly what we’re doing tomorrow.
I had an apricot on the way to the bus. I am very happy a scorpion didn’t sting me. Sam told us a story of the time he was stung, and it sounds extra shitty. I was working without gloves until I saw the first scorpion in our square, and even though it was a lot smaller than I was expecting, I put the gloves on right away.
Until next time, dear readers.
MOAR
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