Excavation Days

What follows is a rough outline of the weekdays here:
4:00 - wake up, have coffee/tea and biscuits,
4:30 - board the bus to Dor, about a 20-minute ride.
5:00 - bus lets us off at the beach entrance (Dor borders a kibbutz and they wouldn't appreciate a group of people stomping through at such an early hour); when we get up to the Tel, we make two lines outside a shipping container and pass down buckets and tools to a collection area. Each group gets a section of tools and people take them down to their areas afterward.
7:00 - pre-breakfast of more coffee or tea (which is made from geranium leaves) and chocolate spread/peanut butter with bread.
9:00 - we cross the beach once more to reach the Glasshouse and have our breakfast outside of it; breakfast is usually a sandwich of your own making from bread, hummus, cucumbers, tomatoes, tuna, and a pudding/yogurt cup. We have to be back on the Tel by 10:00.
11:00 - small food break, usually fruit (apples, nectarines, plums). On Fridays, we get popsicles.
12:30 - start sweeping down our areas, returning tools to the Container and crossing the beach to a path through the kibbutz to a road where the bus will pick us up.
1:30 - board the bus back to Kfar Galim.
2:00 - lunch in the Kfar cafeteria
4:00 - pottery washing; the buckets of pottery collected get filled with water and soak for 24 hours, so we wash the previous day's pottery. Pottery readings also happen at the same time.
6:00 - lecture given by various staff or outside experts - usually this is for the benefit of students attending the field school for credit but all are welcome.
7:30 - dinner
9:30 - my usual bedtime, though people sometimes go right after dinner, others stay up later.

The first few days of work are all spent cleaning. The Tel is covered in overgrowth and dirt. We go around with hoes and clippers trying to clear the space and see it better. Each specific area had been covered with plastic sheeting on the last day of the previous season, so we have to clean all the dirt on top without disturbing what's below the sheets. For these few days, obviously there is no pottery washing because anything that comes up is disturbed material without stratigraphic context.
We deposit the dirt collected into buckets and we have to get these up a slope to the dirt pile. The way we do this is by bucket chains. Each bucket is only half-filled with dirt. Why? To make throwing them easier. Each person stands a few feet apart and tosses the buckets between them. Naturally, it takes a few days to get the hang of throwing properly, and to get past the muscle aches that occur afterward! Megiddo's buckets actually had handles, so we could pass the [full] buckets to each other, but most of these buckets have no handles - therefore, we throw them. It's kind of mad.

On Friday, July 5th, I'm about to settle into some reading time on my new Kobo when my roommate enters with another girl, Midori, and asks if I want to see a hedgehog. Of course, I immediately say yes and off we go on a hedgehog hunt. They're nocturnal creatures and tend to prowl the fields around the Kfar. So we meet with Midori's friend (who is not working on the dig) and the four of us start prowling this field. The difficulty is immediately apparent when you realize you're trying to looking for a dark spiky creature amongst dark spiky grass. After a few minutes of searching, though, I come upon a dark patch that looks like it could be a hedgehog and it was!
I bend down to look at it and get a peek at its cute little face before it realizes there's an intruder nearby and folds into a little ball. I call the others over and we all marvel at this little guy. Midori's friend carefully picks it up and moves it over to the light so we can see it better. I run off to get my camera and when I return, they've moved it to the sidewalk which has made it open up and walk around a little bit. I was able to pet it for a little bit, and a few other people came by to see our discovery. We eventually let him go, and watched him scamper off into the field.

The group of us continued our adventure by going to the beach that borders the Kfar. the waters here are unsafe so it's not a swimming beach but it was nice to hang out there for a while. Someone even got the idea to make a fire, so wood was collected and papers tossed into the base. Someone else uses his lighter to set the paper in fire, which lights the kindling and spreads to the wood. We kept that going for over an hour. It was a really nice way to end the night, and a great way to begin the season.