July 11th

I had a lesson today in archaeology excavation strategy 101.  My apologies to whoever opens this blog today but without any sympathy I plan to torture you with the details of my lesson.  If you get bored, come back tomorrow.  I have mentioned the obsession that archaeologists have about recording data and today was a firsthand example of some of the techniques used.  It is traditional for archaeologists to start excavating a new site by laying out areas 5 meters square, all oriented carefully on the 4 points of the compass – north, south, east and west.  Each of these squares will be the designated areas for excavation.  A one meter path, called a balk, is kept unexcavated between each square, to give workers access to the dig as the excavation proceeds.  When a new site is selected for archaeological excavation, such as Umayri, the whole site is not excavated at the beginning, just a few chosen fields are selected, and then each field will have a few identified squares.  There is an experienced archaeologist who is the designated Site Director (the general), and then there are Field Supervisors (captains) and under them Square Supervisors (sergeants).  I am a one of the many privates, assigned to field A at Umayri where we have 6 squares all under the watchful eye of our field supervisor Stephanie, who is an experienced archaeologist.   We are working on 3 of the squares in our field with 8 workers and 4 hired assistants.  

 Until recently the squares and balks were measured with a tape measure and a compass, but not anymore.  Now everything is high tech.  The squares are laid out with the aid of GPS devices, accurate to 2 cm, and as we dig, the depth of our layers are determined with the same devices as height above sea level, accurate to one cm.  The elevation of the floor of our Iron Age 1 house, for example, was measured at 912.91 meters above sea level.  Then as we dig, or come across a “find”, the square supervisors will be recording everything.  All those records, from every locus in every square used to be recorded in work books and then transcribed each afternoon after lunch into big data sheets for subsequent analysis back at the university.  Today the square supervisors enter their data electronically using iPods and that data is simply uploaded into a large data base back at our base camp.  These procedures for electronic measurement and electronic recording were too much like LLEMR (electronic medical records) for me, so rather than volunteering to assist the square supervisors, I preferred just digging and scraping.  This role was warmly reminiscent of rounds on the hospital ward – I check out the patient and the resident keeps the medical record!!   (Unfortunately no longer true, thanks to those compliance folks).

 The Bedouin tent where we sit in the shade and enjoy our second breakfast at 9.30 am,

after 4 hours of hard work

This morning, as our supervisors were doing all the measuring, the workers had to make detailed drawings of everything within each square, as a basis for future reference.  We used a graph paper and drew in every large rock, wall and visible feature.  This whole process of measurement, recording and drawing took us about 3 hours this morning, but once that was done we received our work instructions from Stephanie and settled into some really hard digging.  I was assigned to the already excavated room of the Iron Age 1 house, clearing away a mud brick wall on one side and getting ready for getting into the much-anticipated adjacent room.  That will happen when we start removing the floor of the Iron Age 2 room above it.  There is an interesting feature in our Iron Age 1 room – a single large, heavy stone with a smooth, slightly concave surface and set at working height close to one of the walls.  It obviously was a place for grinding grain into flour, and we assume that the room was a storage room as another adjacent room shows evidence of being a kitchen.  In one of the other squares a worker found a seal with markings on it which would have been used for making impressions in soft clay.

The grindstone in the Iron Age 1 house (30 cm ruler)