Armed to the Sphincters

            Well well well, ladies and gentlemen of my vast readership, it would appear that the last two days have been full of fun and excitement.

            Wednesday brought with it a large leap in progress for our squares.  Thanks to Jay, the architect, we were able to string our balk lines.  Up until then, we had been avoiding the edges of our square or imagining balk lines without any clear definition.  With the limits of our square defined, now we can dig more aggressively and monitor the stratigraphy much more easily.  We ended up stringing a balk across the two squares, where the small wall had been originally.  There was a balk here originally, which we lowered, and there was a question of whether or not we’d be keeping it there.

            We also extended the balk like between F7 and F8 to go all the way to the wall of Dever’s barracks (I call them Dever’s because that’s what he called them, though there isn’t any apparent evidence for what exactly the use of that structure was.).  This meant that were officially extending F8 to the barracks and that Philip and I were clear to start taking the section down in 10 cm. chunks.

            We had to weed first then we started hacking away with the pickaxes.  After the top layer is loosened, we used something like a hoe to pull all the dirt and rubble into goofas, picking up significant pieces of pottery as we saw them.  I am not sure how much I stressed the abundance of potsherds in Israel.  When you walk on a dirt path, you will find pottery.  It isn’t going to be 3000 or 4000 years old, probably, but it could be as old as 2000 years.  The fact is, body-sherds, the ones that are smooth and curved and come from the body of a vessel, are practically worthless unless they contain an inscription, painting, glaze, etc.  Much more appealing are the rims, handles, and bases of vessels, as those are the most easily datable features of a piece.  In the first few days, we were picking up body-sherds that were bigger than our thumbnails.  Since the first pottery washing session, the average size of a sherd we collect has risen dramatically.

            There wasn’t much pottery but there were a ton of rocks and rubble to hack through.  This made the going very slow and also encouraged us to dig unevenly because the dirt near the wall was much looser and came up with a brush.  By the end of the day, we had created a three-tiered area because the space next to the wall was lower and we didn’t have time to move all the way across on the next highest level.  We were suffering not only from a lack of manpower (only two of us were trying to dismantle this section) but also a pressure from those in charge to work faster but still keep things clean.  There is only so much the two of us could do in that respect, and we voiced our concerns to Steve.  He told us just to do our thing and he’d protect us from the big bad archaeologists who demanded immediate results, so that was nice.

            While Phil and I were dismantling this balk section, Sam was articulating and leveling in the southeast corner of F8.  There are numerous rocks that we think are just fallen from the walls, but in order to remove them we have to pick around them and see whether or not they are actually part of something.  Sam was doing a really good job, just sayin’.  She’s much better at the details than I am, big surprise.

           

            During the dig, we also were visited by some friends:

They pooped all over the tel, but they made funny noises and amused me to no end.

            Yesterday was store day.  I got sunscreen and some kind of licorice liquor called Arak.  A local delicacy, they say.  I dunno about that, but you’re supposedly supposed to mix it with grapefruit juice.  Akiva and I split the bottle and were gonna crack into it last night for a pre-bed nip, but then I had to draw top plans for our square instead.  Drawing top plans involves getting the plan from the day, then tracing it onto a new piece of graph paper to be used the next day.  That copy is edited according to what is found or removed, then the copy is copied and filed, and so on.  It’s not difficult, but it took long enough that neither Akiva nor myself was interested in staying up later.

            Today Sam was sick, so we were down a person and had a lot of work to do.  We borrowed someone from the next square, so she was able to keep leveling and articulating the area Sam had been doing.  Phil and I leveled out our area and continued to go down.  Our herd of friends visited and made silly noises, which was fun.  We kept hitting rocks and stuff and ended up clearing the whole area except one little path of really hard packed plaster.  We brushed the area off to assess it and it turns out what we had was a cobble surface.  This is cool for a number of reasons that I will post tomorrow.

I wish you all love and pancakes.