Pottery

July 23 - Monday

This morning was a typical day at the dig.  The bus had us at the site at 5.15 am and after a quick sweep of our field and after Jillian had taken the official photographs to record our progress, we set to work.  We definitely need to excavate much more debris and fill from the rooms in our Iron Age 1 house, and that was our focus today.  I worked with a buddy in a small corner of a room adjacent to the ballroom, all in the Iron Age 1 house.  Others worked in the ballroom.  This was the third day that my buddy and I had spent excavating this small space, and by the time we left today we had almost finished.  I had a photo taken for the record.  You can see our equipment at my feet – a guffah holding some dirt, my pick and trowel, and off to the side the ladder that lets us access our space.  We are not yet quite at the floor level but have cleared out all of the mud bricks that had filled the space and are down to some clay and ash, which is what we expected at the bottom.  In the process we have removed a huge amount of mud bricks, rocks and dirt, enough to fill hundreds of guffahs.

When we started excavating this space 3 days ago the surface was at the level of the balk on the right

Today was a good day for pottery enthusiasts.  There were a few odd pieces in our area, but a single collection of large pieces was found by a digger close by.   Some of the individual pieces of pottery were at least 12 inches or more across, and all together they appeared to be the remnants of a large storage jar.  The pieces were all carefully retrieved and kept together for cleaning and analysis.  They will be taken back to the lab at La Sierra University for further study, and will probably be assigned to some student who is a whizz at jigsaw puzzles to attempt to reassemble the jar.

 But most of the pottery found is in small pieces and it takes an expert to analyze each piece to determine its age and function.  Usually there needs to be some feature on the piece to allow full identification, such as a rim, a base, a handle or spout.  None of the pottery is glazed – glazing did not appear until much later in the Byzantine era, but occasionally pieces were painted and that can be extremely helpful to the expert trying to identify the piece.  The term “indicator” is used for any object that has a feature that allows some analysis and identification.  For pottery the term used to describe these special indicator features is a “diagnostic”. 

 A very careful record is kept of every location where a find is made.  Each item retrieved by a sifter is placed in a labeled bucket by each sieve, and at the end of the day all those buckets are collected and brought back to our base so that that each piece of pottery can be washed to clean off the dirt.  After drying they are all laid out on a long row of tables, bucket by bucket, for the pottery guru to inspect, analyze and diagnose.  Careful records are kept by each square and field supervisor about what was found in each location. 

One day's worth of pottery shards laid out for inspection and diagnosis

Our Chief Archaeologist Kent Bramlett inspecting the pottery while the supervisors record