July 10th

For me today was not as physically demanding as yesterday.  I was assigned the task of operating one of the sieves, which meant that others were doing most of the digging, lifting and carrying.  All dirt that was scraped from the area where we were working was carried in guffahs to one of the four sieves.  The specific source of the dirt had to be recorded by a locus number and there may be a series of loci in the 5 meter square which we were excavating.  There was a specific, labeled sieve for each locus, and right by the sieve a special, labeled bucket into which we placed all the “finds” – pieces of pottery called shards, pieces of flint and scraps of bone, and occasionally other artifacts.  It was extremely important to keep an accurate record of each locus because the archaeologists can usually determine the date of each location by inspecting and interpreting the “finds”.  Yesterday the workers sieved dirt from 145 guffahs, and today the work load was about the same.

Our Iron Age 2 room with the wall intact

The same room with the wall taken down.  Just beyond the foundation of tht wall note an adjacent room of the Iron Age 1 house that had been excavated previously, and where Audrey found the large pottery storage jar today.  The calibration marker is sitting on the floor of another room in the Iron Age 2 house, and we will be removing that floor and excavating the space below it this season.

The most exciting item found today was a large pottery storage jar.  It was in pieces but when intact it probably stood 3 or 4 feet high.  It was located on the floor of the one room of the Iron Age 1 house that has mostly been excavated last year.  The excited digger was Audrey, an 82 year old who gets in there with the best of them and keeps up with all the young students.  We have high hopes for what we will find in the adjacent room, our target, after we remove the floor of the Iron Age 2 house and finally get to excavate the space.

Audrey scraping the floor of the Iron Age 1 House.  She found the large pottery jar in the dirt in the far right corner

Getting ready to sieve a guffah of dirt.  The sieve is suspended on ropes making it easy to swing it backwards and forwards

We have 8 archaeologist wannabes in our square, assisted by four hired Bedouin workers.  Here are two eager archaeology students with a worker.

Just a brief comment about drivers in Amman.  By now I have had plenty of opportunity to observe the traffic and generally the drivers are reasonably polite – they will almost always give way to a female driver.  But they ignore regular traffic lanes, presumably considering the painted lines as road decorations.  And the Amman drivers apparently consider the traffic lights as optional.  There seems to be 2 kinds of drivers – those that cross the intersection on the green light, and those that cross it on the red.