General Tom Foolery: A Synonym for Cinnamon!

            So last we spoke (I wrote, you read) I was describing this cobble surface we discovered.  I understand there is some confusion as to where exactly I am digging, so I will do my best to illustrate it without pictures.  I am digging in a couple of squares adjacent to the “Solomonic Gate” and the “Barracks” in what has been dubbed “Administrative Building A.”  Further to the east resides “Administrative Building B” and, you guessed it, “Administrative Building C.”  These buildings are, as of now, assumed to be public in nature because a) they lack the “four-room house” configuration typical of domestic buildings and b) a similar city plan at Megiddo suggests administrative centers just inside the main gate.  Megiddo is a comparable site because in the Bible it says that Solomon fortified Gezer, Hazor, and Megiddo at the same time, so if we take this to be true, than Gezer may have a similar layout.

            We found this cobble floor just next to the barracks but at a much higher level than the foundation of those walls.  This suggests that the 10^th century walls were reused by this later surface, probably 8^th century, which matches up with an extension to the barracks further north.  Surfaces are good because not only do they provide potential material atop them, but the material beneath them is sealed, untouched, and can be used to firmly date the stratum above.  For example, if we find mostly Iron I pottery directly under the cobbles, it was most likely constructed during the late Iron I or early Iron II periods because it couldn’t possibly be constructed before the pottery was made.

            We had to prepare the area for a photograph, however the guys on top wanted us to not only clean the surface but also weed the adjacent barracks wall and define the stones so that all of it could be captured in the picture.  That project was left for this morning, since there is no sense in cleaning and leaving it overnight before the photo.

            In this picture, you can see the cobble surface towards the top, the eastern side of the square.

            In this one, the cobble surface is at the bottom, the camera facing west.

            Here is our square at the end of Tuesday.

            And here it is again at the end of Thursday.

            That was most of the excitement from yesterday.  There was a pretty amusing scenario though that I thought I’d share.  So one of the guys from a different square is hauling some big rock and Steve warns us not to try and be macho if there is a big rock, but to get another person and haul it out safely.  I made a smart-ass comment: “What if there are girls watching?”  He calls me over and I’m thinking, “Great,” because I hate it when old people take my shit seriously.  He then gathers us around and advises us, from what appeared to be a place of experience, that all a woman cares about really is what a man can do in the “marriage bed” and that if we go giving ourselves hernias we could potentially compromise our prowess in the bedroom.  This was sufficiently uncomfortable and I hope my mother didn’t read this paragraph.

            Last night Akiva and I cracked open the bottles of Arak and grapefruit juice and had a pre-bed drink, which turned into a pre-bed-and-stay-up-playing-hearts drink, but I found my sleep to be restful and I awoke this morning feeling refreshed.  I have to drink before bed more often.

            This morning Sam was back and out first task was to clear out the cobble surface area for a photo.  We were up on the all of the barracks cutting weeds out of cracks and brushing furiously trying to get the stubborn plants to yield.  Finally, the area was clean enough to take a picture of and we all went about our days.

            The herd was back.

            Philip and Sam had the task of removing the cobble surface and digging directly below it, sifting all the dirt for any kind of material remains that might be missed by the naked eye.  It’s amazing how many important artifacts are either rocks or look a lot like rocks, so it makes it difficult to find them sometimes.  Sam found this odd conical potsherd with a hollow in it that I said was probably the leg of some zoomorphic vessel (that is, one shaped like an animal, if you’re not into the whole Greek derivatives thing).  It turns out that I was right and I felt like a real archaeologist for a little bit until I did a victory dance and surrendered the dignity I had just earned.

            I was in the center of F8 leveling another rocky area we thought might be connected to the cobbles and removing many imbedded boulders.  I am not usually one for good detail work, but I ended up pretty pleased with the result.  The hardest part is defining the balks towards the top because they get dried out and crumbly.  I didn’t think to take any pictures today, so you’ll all have to use your imaginations; it’s mostly grey dirt anyway.

            Every Friday after fruit break is a Tel Tour where we get to go around and check out the stuff that’s going on across the field.  Field West (I’m in East) is excavating some of those four-roomed houses I mentioned earlier.  They are also finding all sorts of architecture that hasn’t quite been identified.  Much of Field East is finding a destruction layer full of full vessels broken in situ, so that’s pretty neat.

            It’s Friday, so we don’t have pottery washing or anything.  It’s a free afternoon, so I think once I post this I will spend it napping or reading or something.  A lot of folks have been in the pool, but I haven’t really felt like getting sunburned yet.

            This weekend we head south to the desert to check out Arad, Masada, and the Dead Sea.  It looks to be a fun time.  I’ll be sure to take lots of pictures and blog in great detail Sunday night when we get back.

Enjoy your weekends everyone.

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.

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.

It's Not a Big Deal Lady

So this is just a test to see if I can get pictures to work on my blog.  I figure I'll tell a couple stories about some of the kind sales-folk of the Old City.  First, this one guy tries to entice Becca by shouting, "It's not a big deal, lady!" which was very funny.  Another guy greeted us with, "Hey, howdy, how are you?  Give me a chance to rip you off?"  I laughed.  He gets my vote.

Success!

Lo Agvanyot, Lo Spicy (no tomatoes, no spicy)

            Since these photos are gonna take more than an hour to upload, how about some blogging?  This has been one heck of a weekend; let me tell you!

            After I last left you I ate dinner, the contents of which are probably unimportant, though I am sure it included hummus and pita and was delicious, then played a cool new card game with some of the other people here.  It was kind of like multi-team pairs spit, and my partner was named Lucas, and so were team Lucas, and we are losing so far; the game goes to 500 and no one has broken 100 yet.  Then we watched The Princess Bride, then went to bed way late (10:00).

            On Saturday we got to sleep in until 7:30.  That was fun, except I woke up at 5:30.  Anyway, on the docket for Saturday was Herodion and Bethlehem.  We crossed over to the West Bank with absolutely no trouble and heading through the city of Bethlehem to Herodion.  King Herod, the guy who built the Temple Mount, was kind of a megalomaniac.  You can see his fort/palace complex in the distance because it looks like a volcano, a large, steep hill with a flat top.  The truth of the matter is that Herod took what was only a modest hill and made it into a huge one before sticking a fortress on top from which he could survey the whole area.

            The fort was big and round, with three half towers on the three sides and a full tower on the forth.  In the middle was a good ol’ Roman bathhouse, a courtyard, and a Roman dining room.  The dining room was particularly interesting because during on of the Jewish revolts, when they took Herodion over, the dining room was converted into a synagogue.

            From the top of the wall we could see the whole surrounding area.  In ancient times we would have been able to see the Dead Sea, even.  As it was, we could see Bethlehem and the Jordanian desert.  That place looks exceptionally inhospitable.  The desert looks inhospitable, not Bethlehem.  Bethlehem means “house of bread,” so I would consider it very hospitable.  We could also see Herod’s palace down lower on the hill and his gosh dang SWIMMING POOL.  Herod was such a bamf/douche bag that he built a huge swimming pool in the MIDDLE OF THE DESERT.  I was impress.  Fun fact, or not so fun:  the archaeologist leading the excavation of Herodion fell off of it and died.

            I hugged a column in the courtyard, but I think Sam has the picture of that.

            We took some stairs down into a deep tunnel system that served as an interior access point to a water cistern.  Some of the ceilings were really low and we had to duck.  Some corridors branched off but were barred by locked gates, which was a little disappointing.  Dan jumped down into this pit that was barred off to explore some hole, but it didn’t lead anywhere.  We kept following the tunnels and popped out on the side of the fake hill.  We walked around to the front and boarded the bus to head back into Bethlehem for lunch.

            We went to a store that specialized in carved olivewood to eat lunch.  The stuff they were selling was pretty impressive.  They had a ton of olivewood pieces and mother of pearl stuff too.  I saw some ill-sick-nasty bibles with covers made either of the olivewood or mother of pearl, but the English translations were all King James Version, so fuck that.

            I had Turkish coffee and a chicken shawarma for lunch.  It was tasty, but I still prefer falafel.  The tour guide made a really good call doing lunch then and then heading to the Church of the Nativity, because the church is usually packed.  After we ate, it was about noon, so we headed to the church hoping it would be emptier due to lunchtime.

            The Church of the Nativity was pretty impressive.  It was a massive Byzantine cathedral erected first by Constantine and again by Justinian, though you can still see the original floor mosaic through some trap doors in the Justinian era floor.  The church has stood since then, more than 1000 years.  The selling point of this particular church is the claim that it houses a cave system with the manger Jesus was laid in as well as the very rock Mary squeezed him out on.  When we made it through the very long line (though shorter than normal cause our tour guide was super clever) we got to see this rock, though it was covered in marble with a gold star on it.  The manger was equally tepid and so we went back upstairs too admire the Byzantine frescoes and mosaics, because they were way cooler.

            After the church we ditched the tour guide and headed into the Old City for a free afternoon.  Some of us cool kids, though, decided we’d hit up a cheap hostel and spend the night in the Old City.  That way we could do whatever we wanted and experience some of the Jerusalem nightlife.  We walked around and did some shopping for a few hours.  Kirsten bought a blue cape with silver embroidery.  I learned to say lo agvanyot (my transliteration may be off, so sue me), which means “no tomatoes,” thus allowing me to order falafel more efficiently.  The only downside to getting rid of the tomatoes is that some places put a tomato and cucumber salad on the sandwich, which means I lose out on the cucumber too.

            I ended up buying a camera and then celebrating with a six-sheckel falafel, less than two dollars.  Or I might have gotten the cheap falafel and celebrated with a camera.  Either way, we walked out to the New City in search of a hostel we could rent for the night.  We found two places to stay, but both were full up.  Steve Ortiz hooked us up with a place back in the Old City that gave us a slight discount from 100 sheckels down to 90, just under $30.  By the time we started heading back to the Old City, the Sabbath was ending and people were starting to come out in droves.

            By the time we made it back through Joffa Gate there was a party going on in the Old City.  Apparently there was some weird light shot going on.  We met up with Benjamin who took us back through some dark creepy streets on the way to hostel.  I was super lost until we hit Christian Quarter St., which has now become familiar to me, so we were going to have no problem finding our way back.  The hostel was really lovely.  There are pictures on Facebook.  It is hard for me to upload pictures to the blog because it takes super long, but we’ll see what I can do.  We had two rooms, one for the four girls: Sam, Becca, Becca, and Kirsten, and one for the guys: Matt, Akiva, and this guy!

            After dropping our stuff off we hit up some restaurant for my second Turkish coffee and second falafel of the day.  After that we roamed the streets.  There were people juggling fire and all sorts of light sticks flying around.  There were also numerous light shows going on around the city that you could get to by following lighted paths of different colors.  I have pictures up and I might try to load a few videos on the Facebook as well.  We must have walked the length of the city something like four times before trying to head into the New City to find a bar.  We ended up making it to the hostel and then not making it back out again.  It was just as well.  My legs were on fire and I was exhausted.

            I woke up this morning, had my shower, and went into the kitchen for breakfast.  Benjamin had been up all night preparing for an exam and he had for us some sesame bread thing and cheese and zatar for breakfast.  We ate quickly because we needed to get to the other side of the city to meet the rest of the group to go onto the temple mount.

            We had kind of an adventure getting there.  Sam, the Beccas, and I were racing through the city, getting all sorts of lost, so I asked a security guard at a checkpoint that I assumed was to the Wailing Wall the way to the Dung Gate, by the temple mount.  He sent us all the way down the street where we met Steve, who then brought us all the way back to that checkpoint and through it.  I think that guard may have been trolling.  Anyway, crisis averted, we met with the rest of the gang and made our way up to the temple mount.  Security was a breeze since no one brought weapons or bibles, and we made it up in no time.

            The first thing you notice once you’re standing on the temple mount is how freakin’ big it is.  It doesn’t look monstrous from afar, but it is HUGE and flat.  The Dome of the Rock is one of the most incredible things I have ever seen ever.  Unfortunately, since 2000, non-Muslims are not allowed into the mosque.  Fortunatley, AJ is a Muslim, so she was going to go in.  I was thinking about posing as her fiancé with the intention of converting to try and sneak in, but we thought it best to leave things alone.  AJ got some sweet pictures of the inside, so I contented myself with the outside, though I was incredibly jealous.

            Outside the Dome of the Rock on the temple mount is a place that is considered to be a secondary possibility for the Holy of Holies from the Temple.  Unfortunately, the most likely candidate is also the Rock of the Dome of the Rock from which Mohammed ascended into heaven, hence the controversy.  We also looked at the eastern gate of the mount, which has been sealed up.  Both Muslims and Jews believe this is the site at which the Messiah will return, so there are vast cemeteries of both faiths just beyond it to ensure a speedy ascent when Messiah comes.

            We left the mount and walked part of the Via Delarosa, the way of the cross, and ended up back at the Church of the Holy Sepulcher, which was nice because I didn’t have any pictures of it on my new camera.  We had some free time to grab lunch (I got some delicious falafel, but it was 15 sheckels) and then met the bus.

            Our afternoon activity was a trip to the Holocaust Museum.  I’d rather not go into the experience, but they have some truly horrible things on display there and it was not fun to walk through.  The only plus was that I ended up with a swell construction paper kippa to wear, but other than that I was miserable and on the brink of tears the whole time. 

That about sums up the weekend.  I’ll be able to provide picture through Facebook to illustrate some of my stories, and I’ll be providing info in the descriptions, so I suggest that you all check it out.  If we’re not friends, send me a message.

Love and Peace from the Holy Land.

PS.  Falafel count is up to 5.

Last One Off the Tel Has to Fight Off the Wadi Dogs

            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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Am I Tan Or Is This Just Dirt?

            Day three of digging is over.  We’re still clearing the rain-wash off of our squares, so the actual digging hasn’t turned up much, but it’s been a hard day nonetheless.  The two squares next to us were dismantling large sections of balk, which meant many pounds of dirt were being loaded into goofas.  We dump the dirt a ways up the Tel, so the most efficient way to dump all of the goofas is to form a line, kind of like a bucket brigade.  These travel uphill and are out in the sun, and we did many of them, moving hundreds of pounds of material, maybe more.

            There was a bit of confusion in the beginning of the day in regard to the stringing of our squares.  When I say stringing, I mean using string to measure and mark the areas of the balks and the space that we will excavate.  Apparently something was off so our grid wasn’t matching with that of previous excavations, which is problematic because when we take final measurements and try to do drawings and stuff, it won’t all match up.  There was also talk of combining the square and the half square into one area to be dug together.  I was busy doing stuff, so I am not entirely sure of how the problem was solved, but we ended up moving some strings 16 cm. over or something; not my department.

            Out primary task today was to finish clearing out the rain-wash, the accumulated run off from the last 3-5 years that our square lay fallow.  We had to clear about 5 inches off of a 12 m² section of our square.  We performed this task by swinging a pickaxe to loosen the material then brushing and scooping it into goofas.  While we did this we had to extract pottery sherds of notable size or shape and put them into buckets with tags.  This task took most of the day, combined with the goofa lines that happened every twenty minutes or so.  The only good thing about goofa lines is the water break that comes afterwards.

            After we finished up digging we went to a supermarket on the way home.  I didn’t end up getting anything because nothing really struck my fancy.  We all know I can always eat, but I was uninspired and the project is doing a really good job of providing us with frequent meals (5 a day!).  I was thinking about getting some beer to have in our fridge for some post dig relaxation, but it was something like 45-60 shekels a six-pack, roughly 15-20 dollars, and it is not worth that much for beer, much less the questionable product they sell here.

            Tonight the hotel is having a kind of welcome dinner for us.  They are barbequing out on the lawn, but I don’t have any idea what kind of food Israeli barbeque constitutes.  I managed to import a few pictures that Sam and I took with her camera, and I going to see if I can post them here.  I am switching out of Word to Blogger, so we’ll see how this turns out.

Here's a link to the album on facebook, it's only three pictures.  I ended up only using ones Sam took, so all credit to her.
http://www.facebook.com/media/set/?set=a.10150650683650722.700221.736660721

The one of the Gezer "high place" does warrant some more explanation than I felt like doing on facebook.  It's basically the Stone Hedge of the Near East.  It consists of ten standing stones, of various sizes, some no longer standing, and a stone basin.  The purpose of this site is unknown, though archaeologists speculate that it may symbolize some sort of agreement between several tribes, represented by the stones.  I believe it dates to the Middle Bronze Age, or 1950-1550 BCE to you layfolk.

PS. I'm tan...ish