A new Balk

July 24 – Tuesday

Our senior archaeologists are urging us on to complete our primary goal - the excavation of the Iron Age 1 house.  We begin work each morning before dawn, as you can see in the photograph that I shot this morning after the crew had started digging.  The sun is just peeping over the horizon at the left of the photo.  The workers are all in the ballroom and they are going strong.  By the end of work today at lunch time they had dug up, then filled and sifted over 400 guffahs of excavated material in addition to removing dozens of boulders.  So we are making progress, but there is still about 5 feet of debris, mud bricks, rubble and rocks still to be removed before we are done.

Here is our crew beginning work on excavating the ballroom before dawn.  The workers in the team on the right are in the ballroom digging and those on the left are waiting to carry the filled guffahs to the sieves.  The ladder gives us access to the adjacent room in which I worked.  The photo was taken while I was standing on top of the balk that appears in the photo below.  The walls that we took down early in the dig would have blocked the view into the ballroom from this angle.  The Bedouin tent in the background is our welcome retreat for sandwiches and watermelon when we pause for our second breakfast at 9.30 am. 

While the main crew was clearing out the ballroom I worked with a buddy in completing the excavation of a corner of an adjacent side room.  We did complete our assignment just before lunch and here is a photograph of what we left in place - the balk.  The photo is taken from inside our small space and the camera is aimed right at the side of the balk that we had to leave in place.  The balk had to be trimmed vertically so that the successive layers of deposition could be interpreted.  In this case it is quite easy to see what has happened.  Right on top of the balk are 2 guffahs, rubber containers into which we shovel and then carry the excavated material to the sifters working the sieves.  There is a small layer of dirt on top of the balk, but just below the surface is a deep layer of tumbled and broken mud bricks, some of which can easily be seen relatively intact.  Towards the bottom the bricks have been compacted into a relatively solid mass.  Right at the bottom, not visible in this photo, is a layer of clay and ash that covered the floor. 

The new balk after we had excavated our space.  The strings are carefully aligned with the sides of the original 5 meter square.  Some of the tumbled mud bricks are clearly visible and are reasonably intact.  The balk is about 6 feet high.

 

The layer that now lies at the bottom of the space was originally the roof, but when the roof beams burned during destruction of the house, they collapsed to the floor and then the walls of mud brick toppled over on top of the burning roof.  When our excavation of this space began 4 days ago, the whole room had been completely filled with debris.  We began digging right at the surface, level with the guffahs, and dug out all of the rubble and mud bricks right down to the floor.  If we had measured the weight of the material that we had dug out of that space in 4 days it would have been multiple tons, and every ounce had to be dug, scraped and lifted to the surface.  How about that as a great way to spend a relaxing summer vacation!!  When we had finished our work we were able to simply confirm what the archaeologists already knew about what hd happened when the house was destroyed.

Tomorrow everyone gets to work together on excavating the ballroom.  No new interesting artifacts have been found other than hundreds of pieces of pottery all dating to the Iron Age 1 era plus bags and bags of lithics – pieces of flint that had been broken off and chipped into a variety of shapes for use as hand tools.  The term Neolithic, or stone age, refers to the time preceding the Bronze Age when the only tools people used were made out of stone.