End of week one. The last couple of days have been pretty neat-o if I do say so myself. As I have said before, we’re working in two squares, E-F7, the whole square, and E-F8, the half square (noted by some to be, in fact, a rectangle). Between these squares lay an old balk with a short piece of wall, about three stones long, in it. We have spent the last two days dismantling that wall.
Yesterday we got the order to clear out the rest of the balk and make it level with the rest of the area we were in. We started on the F8 side of the wall because it only had tumble (stones that had tumbled down, derp) and we didn’t need to measure the heights. While we were waiting to get access to the fancy gizmo we use to measure heights relative to sea level, the other field’s broke and they took ours. This meant that we could not dismantle the wall yesterday and instead had to keep clearing out rain-wash and the tumble. We found a substantial amount of pottery, almost two buckets full, but most of it was small body sherds that don’t really do anything for dating.
The most notable thing that happened yesterday was a jawbone from what was probably a donkey that Phil found embedded just beneath the surface, completely intact. It was roughly ten or eleven inches long and Matt was able to get the entire thing out in one piece, save for the stuff that was already cracked near the end. That was pretty sweet. I am going to add some pictures to the album on Facebook. I’ll repost the link at the end.
Yesterday also marked the first day of pottery washing. If there is a Hell, it’s probably pottery washing alone in a dimly lit room. Fortunately, we wash pottery together outside under a shade-cloth, so it is actually a very enjoyable enterprise. We soak the pottery first to start loosening the grime, then take brushes to them to get as much of the dirt off as possible. You also don’t necessarily wash pottery from your square, though you can, so I got to check out pieces I’d never seen. It turns out that there were some very nice painted pieces from our squares. Unfortunately, they are unstratiphied, so there is no context with which to get a solid date. Either way, it’s pretty neat.
I went to bed almost directly after dinner last night. I had stayed up “late” the night before playing spades with Akiva, Kirsten, and Becca, which I decided was a mistake when I woke up.
Today we got a lot of work done. The big shift in methodology was instead of making a goofa line we started emptying goofas into a wheelbarrow near the squares so only one person would have to take the dirt up to the dump, thus maximizing efficiency.
We decided either today or yesterday, or maybe even the day before, that we were going to extend E-F8 all the way to the wall of the “barracks,” as Dever calls them. That’s a pretty cool prospect because it will, in theory, allow us to reveal a large chunk of architecture and see how administrative building A, the one we’re in, fits into the rest of the city plan. One of the pieces of tel we had to remove had a huge stone from the wall on it and we had no way of lifting it or rolling it away. The only answer was to hit it really hard with a hammer (pics on FB). We ended up using a spike too in order to help split the rock into manageable chunks.
We were also able to dismantle the wall today after taking top levels. The levels are important because you take them on top and after removing the stones, do some math, and come out with an accurate height for the wall. Another important thing that this allowed us to do is collect the pottery from below the wall. Pottery in a sealed location like this is important, because we know it hasn’t been disturbed. It also allows us to date the wall above it. The wall can’t have been built BEFORE any of the pottery below it, so the earliest the wall could have been built is after the latest pottery find. If we found the rim of an Iron I cooking vessel, than the wall was constructed, at the earliest, during Iron I.
Even more exciting was getting the go ahead to start leveling large chunks of F7. In F7 there is a semicircle of stones that Dr. Knauth found a couple years ago, but we don’t know what they are, if anything at all. I started pick axing down to the layer of a wall that was already exposed, but we had to leave. Tomorrow we head to Herodion and Bethlehem and Jerusalem. Sounds like it’ll be a good time. I think I’ll buy a camera in Jerusalem…
Until next time.
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