Who is this? Lucas is playing cards.

            Aaaaaaaaaand I’m back, with more exciting news from squares F7 and F8.  I just finished doing a top plan, which has become very complicated.  Not only do we have our original two squares but our plan now includes extensions to both.  It’s just tracing, but it has gotten more tedious.  No matter.  I may have found a wall today.  The general rule is something like “three stones make a wall,” and we have three stones.

            You can see them up against the balk on the right of the picture.  Next to them we also found a large flat flagstone kind of deal.  It's something, we just don't know what yet.  A project for tomorrow.  You can also appreciate how far down we’ve gone since the beginning. Pretty cool.  Sam’s marking where we started.

            Yesterday yielded a number of cool finds.  Unfortunately, I didn’t take any pictures of them.  First Ryan uncovered a chalice smashed upside down near the southern balk of F7.  That was neat because we hadn’t found a vessel in such good condition yet.  I don’t think it was smashed in situ, but it was fun nonetheless.

            Much more notably, and still without a photo, though I may grab one from the dig-house in the next couple of days, was a stamp seal.  These were either stone or clay, in our case stone, which were inscribed with a picture or name or something of that sort and then pressed into clay.  When we pulled it out it was dirty, but Bob somehow managed to see that it was an Ibex or some other horned animal with a man standing next to it raising his arms.  Keep in mind that this seal is about the size of a dime, maybe smaller.  I checked it out today when it was cleaned up and it looks awesome.  It has a hole through it where it was worn on a necklace and there’s a piece of silly-putty or something with the impression in it.

            We also found a ceramic stopper for a jar or something, but that was not nearly as awesome as the seal was.

            Today Phil and I started cleaning off a basin that was dug up years ago.

            They (the people on top) are starting to get things cleaned up for the final photos at the end and they wanted this basin to be nice and visible.  It was full of weeds and dust, but it didn’t take long to clear out.

            For most of the day we were just trying to keep going down.  I think we did an alright job.  Here’s F7 at the end of today:

            You can look back and compare this to earlier photos.  It’s now very hard to get in and out of the square easily.  The best find from today was a large grinding stone.

            This came out in fill as some sort of tumble, so it was probably reused as a wall stone.  This kind of secondary use is pretty common and we (that is, the entire site) have pulled up several grinding stones from walls.  In a separate area, but still nearby in F7, we found a pounding stone, or some sort of worked stone hand tool of undefined function.  It’s basically a smooth, round stone that was used either to hit things or grind things.  These are also very common and look a lot like rocks.  Tomorrow we’re just going to keep digging down and hopefully find more goodies and determine whether or not my wall in the north balk of F8 is a wall or not.

            Yesterday night I downloaded A Clash of Kings, the second book in A Song of Fire and Ice and I can say, “HOLY POOP” after just 150 pages.  HBO fans are in for a treat in the second season of Game of Thrones.  It’s pretty awesome.

            That’s all for now.  I hope everyone had a good Fourth and blew lots of things up.

'MER'CA!

          GO ‘MER’CA! Happy July Fourth to everyone.  I hope you all did fun things on the river or in Maine or wherever you might be.  I left you last at the end of our first night in the Galilee, so I have two more days of touring to cover in addition to today’s digging.

            We ate breakfast in the hotel dining room.  It was pretty much the same as at Neve Shalom, but this place has these awesome cheese crepes with chocolate sauce.  It made for a hearty and delicious pre-tour meal.  Our first stop on the road was Hazor.

            Hazor is famous for a lot of things.  As far as sites go, it’s a huge deal.  Also, it’s really big.

            That whole field is part of the tel.  Hazor is said to have housed something like 40,000 people at one time, which is a ridiculously large settlement by ancient standards.  The Bible also contains several reverences to Hazor.  In one, Joshua knocks it over.  I was listening to the 1812 Overture and during the finale our tour guide starting reading the story of the destruction, which was kinda funny.  Like Megiddo and Gezer, Hazor is listed as the third city fortified by Solomon, and here we find a third six chambered gate.

            

            It’s hard to get a good aerial show at Hazor because it’s so flat, but compare to Megiddo

            and Tel Gezer.

            You might have to take my word for it that these gates are all strikingly similar.  In any case, it’s a pretty neat instance of archaeology coinciding with biblical history.  Whether or not some fourth Iron Age gate has been found that matches these is unknown to me, so I think we should be cautious and assume everything the Bible says is 100% true.

            Hazor also had an impressive preserved Canaanite palace.  It had two large wooden pillars out front, but those were not original.  Wood doesn’t last very long relative to the rest of the building materials the ancients used.  There was a lot of original mud-brick in the walls of the palace, though.  You could even see individual blocks in some sections.

            There used to be a large pillared building sitting atop the six-chambered gate.  Archaeologists and conservationists ended up moving the whole thing over in order to excavate the gate and keep the pillared building intact.  It was placed right next to another building that contained an olive press.

            The olives are placed under a basket like think and pressed from above by a weighted shaft.  The juice runs into a ring carved in the press and pours into a vat of some sort.  The oil that floats to the top is your extra virgin olive oil.  In the picture you can see the ring and on the right side a cut where the juice could flow out.  The basalt basin you can barely see in the bottom left was probably the vat they used to separate the oil.

            Speaking of basalt, it’s important to note that the northern sites had a lot of it.  Basalt is an igneous rock, so it’s formed primarily in volcanoes.  Down south, there isn’t any basalt, but a lot of limestone.  This means if you find a basalt structure down south the stone is almost assuredly imported.  Fun facts.

            Our next stop was Tel Dan.  Tel Dan was much different from the other sites we visited in that instead of being a barren wasteland of brown stones and dirt it was covered in a lush nature preserve.  There were lots of green plants and running water all around, so we had a pleasant walk.  Tel Dan is home to number of incredible finds, like the inscription below.

            That’s a zoomed in photo of a picture on a sign.  The inscription depicted was found in 1993 at Tel Dan and it says, in Aramaic, DVD TYB (remember, reading right to left), or bet david which translates to the house of David.  While this seems rather bland, it was in fact one of the most significant discovered ever in Biblical archaeology.  Any guesses why? Scroll down for the answer.

            It’s the first and possibly only extra-biblical reference to King David.  This is important because, well, frankly, a lot of folks we starting to think that he was only a thing of legend, which is a tough pill to swallow for the Jews.  Biblical Minimalists hold David’s mythic status as one of their core beliefs and this inscription punches them in the face, steals their children, eats their Hot Pockets, and then uses their credit card to buy its gas home.  Some of them try to maintain is has something to do with some place name or something, but those people are shitheads (pronounced shi-theedz).  I don’t agree with the Biblical minimalist position at all, so it’s fun to see their entire theory being unraveled piece by piece.  They argue that the entirety of Israel’s history is some legendary farce concocted in the Hellenistic Period (3000 BCE), a theory that goes against all reason, as I see it.

            But enough about those turds, check out this other sick-nasty stuff at Tel Dan:

            That’s the Abrahamic gate, so called because that’s how freaking old it is.  While it looks kinda meager in comparison to something like the “Solomonic Gate” at Tel Gezer, appreciate for a moment the fact that it’s even older and has a preserved mud-brick arch.  That arch you see in the picture has been there for millennia, and furthermore it’s nearly one of a kind in terms of its preservation.  You just don’t find stuff like that; it just doesn’t happen.  Well, it does, but you get the picture.  Eric and I were gonna cause trouble and storm the gate, but be thought better of it.

            Up at the top of the tel was presumably where the holy site was.  there was a large steel frame marking the outline of a horned altar, but is unclear what evidence they had for it being there or for being as large as it was (it was taller than a grown man-person).  Up top was also this neat phenomenon:

            A tree was growing around a part of the ancient architecture and slowly destroying it.  Steve Ortiz informed us a similar situation was discovered around the gate at Gezer.  The problem is that all these sites are also national parks, and so removing trees means climbing over, under, or merely cutting a bunch of red tape.  In the case of Gezer, the archaeologists won.  At Tel Dan, the treehuggers (Ortiz’s word, not mine) got their way.  Some people just really like trees.

            We stopped for lunch after Tel Dan.  Everyone seemed much more enthused about this than I was.

            Yes, they’ve invaded the holy land on a crusade to bring shitty food to all the heathens.  They were charging a fortune too, something like the equivalent of $15 for a hamburger.  I went next door and got some of the best falafel I’ve had so far for the modest price of 15 nis (less than $5).  It had these awesome onions with pepper on it; very tasty.

            After foods, we hit up Banias (also spelled Baniass, but that encourages too many middle school style jokes).  It had a big temple to Pan among other Greek deities.  What made this cooler than other old temples were the arches that were cut directly into the cliff face.  This made for a very neat effect.

            The next stop was probably the best place all weekend if I had to pick one.

            That was taken facing south on the northern tower of the Nimrod Castle.  They say it’s a crusader castle, but that’s kind of a misnomer because while it was built during the crusader period, it was actually build by Arabs to defend against a crusader push from the north.  This is about as north as Israel goes; we could see Syria from the tower, maybe Lebanon too.  I know we could see Lebanon from a couple spots this weekend.  The castle was awesome and totally open to be explored.  We found this spiral staircase that was pitch dark, so naturally we went down it.  It went through two levels, both of which could be escaped through holes in the wall directly onto the slopes of the mountain the castle was on.  That was a lot of fun.  There was also several fantastic views, some old inscriptions, and a dirty looking water system (always a water system somewhere).  Sam, Eric, and I had a blast romping around, occasionally joined by others.

            This was another hole we could have climbed through to escape the castle, but we would have fallen to our deaths.  Castle Nimrod was our last site for Saturday so we headed back to Ein Gev for the rest of the night.

            A bunch of people when swimming when we got back.  I decided to chill in my room and blog instead, even though there wasn’t any kind of internet connection.  After dinner a bunch of us went to the hotel bar for happy our and got a couple drinks before going down to the beach again.  Some other folks had more to drink, but I was taking it easy because I’m a responsible adult.  A bunch of us went swimming in the dark, which maybe is an argument against my responsible adulthood, but no one died, so everything worked out.  Unfortunately it was too dark for pictures to come out.  They decided since we work so hard during the week they were going to let us get up for a 7:00 breakfast instead of 7:30.  hurray.

            Sunday was our last day up north so we packed up our things and loaded the bus.  We only drove a few minutes down the road to the Ein Gev harbor where we boarded a boat to ride across the lake.  The ride was pleasant enough, though they did some weird things.  First they played our national anthem while they raided the US flag.  That was weird.  Then they decided that the music of choice was going to be a healthy mix of terrible Christian music, terrible Gospel music, and some excellent Jewish selections.  I suggested Lady Gaga, but that got shot down (no one believes I really like her!).  Other than the almost humorous soundtrack, the ride was awesome and very relaxing.

            Our destination was a town on the other side of the lake that has a first century boat that was dug up in the Sea of Galilee.

            We weren’t really supposed to take pictures, but we all were anyway, and then they just told us to go ahead.  Good times.  Aside from being cool, the boat also brings to mind the stories about Jesus and the Galilee (or it brings that to the minds of people not me) and other stuff like that.  I just thought it was a neat boat.

            We went to a Catholic holy place next, a sanctuary dedicated to Peter, supposedly right near the site where Jesus appeared après crucifixion to help Peter catch dinner.  That was pretty cool, I guess.  Also, the church housed the rock on which Jesus allegedly served 5000 from five loaves and two fish.  I guess people’s appetites back then were really small.  It was interesting to be in a site that had to remind people not to carry guns into it.  The same was true of the next site.

            The next place was Capharnum “The City of Jesus.”  Now everyone knows he was Jesus of Nazareth but there is evidence to suggest that Capharnum was in fact that city in which Jesus resided much of the time.  The fact is, little is known of his life between 12 and 30, so it’s a lot of guesswork.  St. Peter also lived in Capharnum, and there are ruins of a Byzantine church where his house used to be.  There was a large synagogue and a stray kitty too, but when we asked to keep the cat is sounded like the plan was going to be to eat it, so we decided its chances were better on its own.

            Lunch was a delightful affair.  I am just gonna cut right to it:

            It’s called St. Peter’s Fish and the dig paid for it and it was delicious.

            There were also two courses before it, but they were incredibly lame by comparison, though still delicious.  I don’t know what else to say other than I may have eaten it’s brain and people looked at me like I was crazy when I washed my hands with the lime.  I also learned if you cover your hands in lime juice and go into the sun the acid cooks and give you chemical burns (this happened to Sam’s brother, I’m fine).

            Our last stop for the weekend was Bet She’an, which means House of She’an (has everyone figured out the word for house yet?).  It was really hot there, like 104˚ F hot.

            It’s a large Roman/Byzantine city that has had some earthquake problems.  It was really cool though.  The cardo, the main street with covered sidewalks, was excellently preserved and still had shops with intact mosaic floors alongside it.  It also had an impressive theater, though not as big as the one at Caesarea.

            Their hallways were made for short people and I hit my head really hard on the ceiling.  One of the other notable features of the site was a very well preserved bathhouse with a complex system for heating and cooling rooms, though I haven’t any idea why they’d have wanted that place hotter.

            That was basically it for the weekend.  Sunday night was uneventful.  AJ was introduced to the Bible for the first time.  She was taking the whole genealogy thing a little too seriously, so we told her it only got worse after that.

            Today was July 4^th and nothing changed.  We did do some cool stuff in our squares, though.  We’re finally starting to sort out this Dever fustercluck (I know I say that every week, but it’s a little truer each time).  We were digging in all three areas we have in our section (F7, F8, and F8 ext.).  We discovered a trench running along the west side of F7 that might continue into F8.  Our theory is that Dever trenched along a wall, so we were hoping to figure out what he saw.  At the end of the day, we turned this up by accidentally crumbling our balk on purpose:

            So this looks like what Dever may have seen.  It is in line with a wall in F8 and in F6, to the south and north respectively.  I am curious to know if he trenched just on the east side or if we also dug on the west.  In Robin’s square, to the west, E7, there are a lot of large rocks that seem to be from some sort of tumble or destruction.  They’ve smashed some pots underneath, even.  Now, our big rock in that picture looks a lot like a pillar to me, but toppled.  If Dever did not go far enough west, the tumble in Robin’s square could very well have fallen on this pillar and make it look like a wall from one side.  This is kind of my going theory because it’s exciting, but it’s likely we won’t ever know until we take down the balk, which we won’t this season.

            Other than that find, Phil and Sam found another rock of supposedly the same wall we found in F7 in F8.  Matt and Beth turned up deeper courses for the walls in the F8 extension, so it looks like those are all pretty old.  The wall one the west side of the F8 extension abuts the casemate wall; it’s not integrated into it, which suggests it was built afterward, not at the same time.  I forget it I said that before.  Dever also describes and opening from our square into the casemate, but it doesn’t seem like that’s the case.  Who knows?  I hope that wasn’t too technical a description.

            Until next time.  I hope everyone eats a lot of hot dogs today.

The Bible Says A Lot of Crazy Shit

            Happy July everyone!  This is my first post in a new month and that’s a cause for celebration.  I haven’t been with you all for a while, which means this entry will either be really long to catch up or really short because I can’t remember anything.  Anyway, I’m writing from the Galilee for now (Saturday), though I can’t actually post until tomorrow because we have to pay for internet here and I probably won’t finish tonight anyway.  ALSOTHISISHOWENGLISHWOULDLOOKIFITWEREWRITTENTHESAMEWAYASANCIENTGREEK.

            No, seriously, it’s all one big word.  Also, the inscription in that picture is upside down, but since none of you can read Greek anyway, I figured it wouldn’t matter.  That’s from the Roman/Byzantine town of Zippori (Sepphorus), but we’ll get to that later.

            So last entry was on Tuesday, so I’ve got two days of digging to try and cover.  There isn’t a whole lot of exciting stuff going on in my squares on the micro level.  Well, there might be coming up this week, but we’ll see.  We’ve been steadily lowering all the areas of our squares and revealing more courses of walls.  We clarified the wall that runs on the eastern side of F8, the one we used to think connected to the wall on the eastern side of F7, but it looks like it might in fact be a doorway instead of a continuous wall that was robbed out in antiquity. This doesn’t explain the apparent presence of a robber’s trench, though, where the dirt feels like it has been dug out and replaced.  It makes sense, though, since some of the tumble we cleared up in F7, had it fit on the wall where we think it did, would make a nice flat finish, as if it were an intentional opening in the wall.

            We had some interesting material finds in the last week.  I don’t really remember which find was which day.

            This is a large piece of tibun in situ.  Tibun just means “oven” and it was a thick ceramic dome with a fire underneath that is used to cook bread.  We find pieces of these all the time, this just happens to be an especially nice chunk.  We didn’t even save it, but it looked nice, so we cleaned it up and took some pictures for ourselves.  Ian pulled some little disc out of the F8 extension, which I guess they’ve decided, is a game piece and are displaying it with a game board another square turned up.

            The most exciting thing we’ve got is in the northwest corner of F8.  Phil and I were just doing a pass there and I noticed a few carbonized olive pits.  Phil also pulled out a large piece of some cooking ware.  Olive pits are good for carbon dating because the lab can crack them open and get uncontaminated samples.  Also, it’s unlikely an olive would be around for a significant number of years, so the date we get would be relative.

            Normally we don’t save olive pits because as a one-time deal they’re probably just an anomaly in fill.  Steve told me not to bother unless I found five to ten of them, so I pulled out somewhere around forty from an area of about a meter squared.  I’m hoping this means that we might be getting close to a significant layer, so we’ll see what this upcoming week brings.

            Thursday afternoon was a pretty awesome time.  Some folks hadn’t gotten a chance to check out the crusader castle yet or the monastery, so we made a trip out there after pottery washing.  There’s this white dog that has been hanging around the town, probably stray, for the last few days.  She has this habit of picking fights with other animals, and is a female dog, so Eric and I christened her Bitch.  Sinéad decided her name would be Jemima.  British people are weird.  Bitch followed us throughout our whole trip that afternoon, which was kinda neat, even though she’s a bitch.

            The monastery is really lovely.

            It’s a very quiet, peaceful place with a bunch of French monks.  The sanctuary was really neat.

            We also wanted to hit up the gift shop since the monastery is famous for making its own wine, honey, olive oil, and brandy.  They had several different varieties of wine at really reasonable prices.  I bought a bottle of wine for 25 nis (New Israeli Sheckel), or about eight dollars.  With all our shopping done we headed back up the hill to the crusader castle.

            I already described the castle in an earlier post (June 12^th) so I am not going to do it again.  I do have a couple pictures though since I didn’t have my camera last time.  Most of them will be on Facebook, but here’s a teaser:

            That’s a view of Neve Shalom/Wahat al-Salam across the valley through a window in the castle and another shot of the monastery from higher up on the hill.  We explored more, showed the new folks around the stuff we’d already discovered, and headed back in to town to get clean before the big party.

            We had Friday off this past week, so Thursday night was our 4^th of July party.  It was a good time.  We ate cookout food on the lawn and had a kind of talent show.  Apparently this kind of show is a tradition at digs and at the Idallion dig in Cyprus it actually counts towards your grade! Yikes.  The best thing about this party was that the hotel was providing free beer!  Leave it to a bunch of Baptists to make me feel like a heavy drinker.

            The rest of the tables:

            Our table:

            That’s Eric there on the left.  He drank all of those by himself.  But seriously, doesn’t anyone know how to have a good time these days?  The talent show was fairly entertaining.  Someone did some fantastic impressions of the directors and stuff.  There were a couple songs rewritten to be Tel Gezer related.  Our square went last and we read the whole group Good Night Moon by Mary Wise Brown.  I thought it was pretty silly.  Everyone else thought it was pretty weird, but I had enough beer in me by the time we went up there that I didn’t care.

            Even though we had to get up at 7:30 for our trip up north, everyone was in a party room, so we took it to the girls’ porch (girls being Becca, Annie, Caroline, and Sinéad).  We ended up with a lot of people up there drinking and singing along to oldies.  Sam Wolff, dig director extraordinaire, showed up with a bottle of whiskey he said he was not going to leave with.  The best part of the whole affair, though, was that this entire party took place among Jon and Laurie Byron’s drying laundry because they were borrowing the girls’ clothesline.  That was funny.

            After most folks left we decided to go for a walk.  Luckily we didn’t get far and only got up to the parking lot where we wash pottery.  There were some guys from Neve Shalom hanging out around there drinking vodka and Red Bull and smoking hash out of some sketchy homemade water bottle bong.  We hung out with them for a bit, then another guy and his girlfriend showed up with their dog Mary and we all had a jolly good time until Mary and Bitch got into some really loud dogfight.  That Bitch is such a bitch.  The guys said she was abandoned in the town a week ago.  Sad, but seriously, that dog sucks.

            Around this time I went to bed.  Despite it being a later night out, I think I hit the hay around 12:45 at the latest.  Funny the way that worked out.  I had to get up early and was avoiding some of the super intoxicated people I was with so I didn’t have to be responsible for carrying them down to their rooms.  Mission: successful.

            Friday began like the other tour days.  Early to rise, dine, then hit the road.  We had to pack for a two-night stay in the Galilee, which is why none of you have heard from me for so long.  We had a bunch of sites to hit before everything shut down for the Sabbath at 3:00.  I have to consult the photographic record to remember what order we did everything.

            AHA!  First on the list was the city of Caesarea.  King Herod built it in order to funnel wealth into the Levant by constructed a massive artificial breakwater, creating a harbor where there hadn’t been on and then lowering the taxes to encourage traders to port there.  It’s a pretty neat spot.  It hosts a large Roman theater as well as a hippodrome, an arena for racing horses.

            The theater:

            The Hippodrome:

            Unfortunately, a series of earthquakes has destroyed the breakwater so it no longer functions.  Caesarea changed hands several times after the Romans, particularly during the crusades.  Once the harbor disintegrated, though, its value dropped significantly.

            On our way out we stopped by an old aqueduct that used to run to Caesarea.  The city didn’t have many reliable sources of fresh water, so they trucked it in.

            The next stop on our journey was Tel Megiddo.  Megiddo is special for a number of reasons, one of them being that it has been occupied since at least the Calcolithic, if not as far back as the Paleolithic.  That’s at least 6000 years ago.  Megiddo is also one of the three sites that Solomon supposedly fortified, along with Gezer and Hazor, and lo and behold, a six-chambered gate, just like the one at Tel Gezer!

            There wasn’t a fantastic place to get a picture of the whole gate like at Gezer, but I did my best.  The gate is very big.  There were some other notable features at Megiddo that we’ve seen for years in slides at Lycoming.  First is a giant round altar that dates to the Bronze Age.  We’re guessing Middle Bronze, but I’m too lazy to look it up.

            The second was the water system.  I’ll post more pictures on Facebook in the next few days (there’s like 300-400 of them) but here’s a taster:

            This thing was huge.  There was a huge hole, then a deep cavern (pictured) and then a loooong tunnel that led to a spring.  It was super cool, though I felt a little naked without a hardhat for safety.  We walked the whole thing and then popped out on the side of the tel to get whisked off to the next site.

            Our next stop was Sepphoris, a Roman/Byzantine city full of mosaics.  That’s where the Greek mosaic up top comes from.  The Byzantine street was still intact and we walked along it to a covered area with a large mosaic in it.

            This is the “Nile Mosaic” that has a ton of scenes on it.  It’s one of many mosaics in just one small area, the rest of which will be posted on Facebook.  This one shows a number of different scenes all celebrating the Nile and how freaking awesome it is, but there were lots of other ones showing different gods and Amazon’s fighting and stuff.  It was very sweet.

            We went to an old synagogue too that had this mosaic on the floor:

            Can you guess what it is?  It’s a zodiac!  Pretty wild, right?  There is a few other cases of zodiacs in synagogues, but they are extremely rare.  In fact, and image in a synagogue at all is rare (second commandment, bros).  That was pretty neat.  I wasn’t really listening to the tour guide about anything important at this site since we all know CE stands for current events, and who bothers with those?

            After Sepphoris we heading to Ein Gev, a kibbutz with a lovely little resort right on the Sea of Galilee, which is actually a lake.  We went for a swim almost immediately and after dinner all convened on the beach with wine we brought from the monastery.

            Here’s a view of Tiberius, the city across the Galilee.  After we all drank to our hearts content, or until we ran out of wine, we called it a night.  We still had to wake up at 7:30 the next morning to hit up more sites.