July 17 – Excavating the Ballroom

The internet service was down yesterday and still is not available. We have been told that it could be unavailable for a day, a week or for the duration of our stay at the Amman Training Center. So I am typing this up as a document that I will save and load it into the blog whenever I get the chance. It will be a retro upload, but I will make sure that the dates of each entry are clear so that the chronology makes sense.

Today Stephanie directed us to focus exclusively on our primary target, excavating the room in the Iron Age 1 house, which I have started calling the ballroom because of the two stone balls that Audrey found there. Today’s target was to excavate a meter of debris in the room. Half of our team, four of us including me, enthusiastically picked up our picks and trowels and went for it. It was hard going and by breakfast at 9.30, four hours after we had started, we had only managed to remove about 25 cm. Not a good dig rate. I figured that the gophers in my back yard could dig faster than that.

Stephanie explained why we were having difficulty and in the process I learned about the construction of the house. It had been built at the transition from the late Bronze Age to the early Iron Age, around 1200 BC. It had been destroyed of course and filled in with debris, then built upon by several later civilizations. Earlier excavations at Umayri had removed those later structures and now we were down to this older house, removing whatever had filled it when it had been destroyed.

The archaeologists had already discovered what had happened to the house by using stratigraphy – the science of reading the layers or strata in an exposed wall. When they had excavated a balk going across a side room of the house they were able to see and identify the material in each layer of debris, from floor to ceiling. It was relatively easy for them to analyze and determine just how each layer of material had accumulated as the room filled. It was reasonable to conclude that what had happened in one room had happened to the whole house. The strata started at the bottom as a thin layer of hard plaster which was the floor. On top of the floor was a well-defined layer of ash and then a layer of clay, perhaps 6 inches or so thick. A rather deep layer of compacted but disorganized mud bricks sat on top of the clay. Over the mud bricks was a top layer of random rocks, dirt and ill-defined debris.

 
The house originally had 2 levels. The walls on the lower level were about 2 feet thick and constructed of carefully arranged stones that had been rather crudely cut into rectangular shapes 12 to 18 inches or more long. The ceiling was composed of wooden beams. The walls of the second level room on top were constructed of mud brick up to another ceiling of wooden beams. Over the beams were layers of branches and other material that supported a thick top layer of clay that formed the roof and protected the house from the rain. The house had been destroyed by fire, presumably set by an invading enemy. As the beams burned they had fallen to the floor, providing a layer of ash on the floor. Then the roof fell in to give a second layer of clay that was now sitting on top of the ash. Then the walls on the upper level had fallen into the empty room creating a deep layer of disorganized mud brick, and on top of that the whole thing had been filled in with random stones, dirt and rubble.

We were having difficulty excavating that top layer of rubble because that had been compacted down because it formed the floor of the Iron Age 2 house built over the ballroom. We had to deal with many large stones and firmly compacted dry dirt. In some places our picks would hardly make a scratch in the dirt. But we struggled on and by the time our bus arrived to take us back to our base and lunch we had removed about 75 cm. The only interesting “find” in this top layer was a skeleton which appears to be that of a small goat or lamb, although we have only partly exposed it so far. When we resume excavating the ballroom tomorrow we should uncover the rest.

Dr Mutwalli enjoying the dig