Megiddo & Tel Aviv

I am currently at Megiddo, almost done my third week of excavating! It's been an intense workout on some days, especially the first week when I have to get used to the schedule and the physical activity!

But first, the day's layout:
4:10 am - Wake up! It's still dark outside, but this is the time for a snack and preparation.
4:45 am - The bus leaves for Tel Megiddo, about a 15 minute drive away.
5:00 am - The day's work begins; digging and digging.
8:30 am - Breakfast time; salad, cereals, hardboiled eggs provided in the picnic area.
11:00 am - Water break; work stops for fifteen minutes while we rehydrate.
1:00 pm - The day's work ends, we take buckets of pottery with us on the bus and, at the kibbutz, fill them up with water to prep them for cleaning later.
1:30 pm - Lunch.
4:00 pm - Pottery and bone washing.
5:00 pm - Not every day, but we have occasional pottery reading sessions with our dig supervisors, who look over pottery we wash and look for the diagnostic shards, the ones that have information to give (dates, periods and such).
7:30 or 8:15 pm - There are lectures for people taking the course for credit, but anyone can sit in on them.


And that's pretty much how the day goes, Sunday to Thursday. Thursdays are free days, where there's no work after lunch, so people often go away on weekends, or relax at the kibbutz.

There are four areas of the Tel to work in, and I'm in H. It's a smaller area than others, but pretty deep. We're working in the 12th layer of human activity, trying to uncover the period between Early Iron and Late Bronze ages.
I haven't had a consistent square to work in, as they keep moving me around to different spots. But I've had various jobs - pickaxing, troweling, cleaning of profiles (straightening the walls of the trench so they are easier to interpret) and use of the handpick. We also have a bucket line for the dumping of our buckets. Because our area is up a handmade staircase, we need a way to get it to the cliff's edge and empty our dirt there. First we collect all the full buckets - about a hundred - in one area at the opening of the area. Then everyone stands in a line that does to the edge, and passes each bucket along until it goes to the end and gets dumped. Depending on the work's activity, this means 4 - 6 bucket lines occur in a day, plus a small one at the end for the clean-up and tools. So in the short time I've been here, I'm already getting quite strong! I can't imagine how I'll be at the end of my six weeks here.

Last weekend (Thurs. June 28th to Sat. June 30th) I went with a group of people to Tel Aviv. I had gone initially to try and meet up with the few remaining Birthright people still in Israel - but it was difficult to coordinate so I ended up spending most of the time with the Megiddo folks. I had a really nice time with them; we went to a bar one night, and then the beach for a few hours the next day. The water is so nice but the waves could be tall if you weren't careful to go past the breaking point. We went to a nice restaurant another night, and they gave us free shots, "For Shabbat!" I ended up meeting with two Birthright guys for an hour that night, so I was glad I could manage one meet-up, and actually, I ended up running into two more on the street home from the beach - coincidence! On the Saturday before departure, some of us went to the Tel Aviv Museum. It's a really good museum and I enjoyed the time we spent there. Most people left early, but I hung back with Will, Kanayo and Brad. The Museum actually has a small excavation on its grounds, and visitors are able to wander about it a little bit. At 4:00 pm, we met the bus that would take us back to the kibbutz near Megiddo.

Today (July 4th) I woke up with an awful pain in the side of my neck. I must have slept funny and injured myself somehow, because it was incredibly stiff and I couldn't move it on that side. So I skipped the day's work and tried to rest up. I imagine I'll have to miss another day but at least I have the weekend to recover and hopefully, I can get back to work on Sunday. Here's hoping!