Our knowledgeable and lovely Field Supervisor - Stephanie
After carefully measuring,
drawing and photographing our site yesterday we were ready for serious work
this morning. Stephanie outlined our
goals for today, and assigned tasks to each of the crew. Before breakfast I worked with Audrey on
clearing out the mud brick wall that had been built between the two rooms of
the Iron Age 1 house. The old bricks can
easily be seen in the photograph because of the bright orange color on the
wall. Amongst all the dirt, mud brick
remains and stones in this area I found a nice piece of pottery and Stephanie
said that this was such a common item that she said I could keep it. It was a piece from the top rim of a large
bowl, and judging from its arc the bowl would have been about 30 inches in
diameter. The edging of
the rim, with its simple hand-turned lip meant that our pottery guru, Kent
Bramlett the site director, was able to assign an age to the piece. Any pottery shard that has some detailing
such as a spout, handle, rim, base or surface decoration or marking that makes
it possible to age the piece is called an indicator. My piece is an indicator and was from the
Iron Age 2 era, made around 800 to 700 BC.
I will be taking it home with me as a souvenir.
The remains of the mud bricks can be seen in the far wall. The grindstone is in the foreground and my two co-workers are standing on the floor of the Iron Age 2 room where we started excavating
later this morning
After breakfast we started
on the project that I am most interested in – removing the floor of the Iron
Age 2 room so that we could start the excavation of the room below it. This room of course will be filled with
debris, tiles from the fallen roof, stones from the walls, litter and waste
that tumbled into the room when it was destroyed. But amongst all that rubble we hope to find
artifacts that can tell the archeologists something about the people who
actually lived in this house. There is a
strategy that we have to follow when starting to excavate a new area. We were instructed to dig and scrape carefully
in even layers about 10 cm deep so that any unearthed item of interest would likely have a close relationship to
other items around it at that level.
Once that is done then we could start on the next 10 cm. This morning we excavated about 15 cm and
found 2 very interesting items. They
were found together by Vera who held them for me in the photograph. They were two round stone balls, obviously
smoothed by hand for a purpose. The
larger one was perhaps a little bigger than a baseball, and the smaller stone
was about one and a quarter inches in diameter.
Their purpose – not sure, but they looked like missiles to me. The smaller stone would be perfect for a
sling shot and the larger one – well if it were hurled at me and I didn’t duck
in time I would be spending the rest of my life in a long-term care facility.
A our 9.15 am breakfast
this morning we had a visit from Dr William Dever, a world authority on
biblical history and archeology in Israel and Jordan. He chatted with us for a bit and told us
several stories, and explained just how much more we now know about the civilizations that lived in this
area of the Near East, and how that knowledge has expanded on what we read in the biblical record.
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