Week Three

Week Three - Monday, July 15th to Friday, July 26th

Monday: I've been moved to a new locus (the name for a specific area/layer) - this spot has a lot of mudbrick and phytolith floor - actually, the whole area has a lot of mudbrick - so much time is spent brushing and sweeping it clean for photographs. Once the pictures are taken, I can get to work scraping down the layer, and revealing more floor.

Tuesday: It's a very slow day, because of all the mudbrick popping up, there have been various discussions between Yuli and the directors, and also supervisors from the other areas have been dropping by to talk about it. There's more brushing for pictures. I do a bit of section work (where I scrape down the sides of a trench to make it straight) and another task to find the outline of a possible pit. I catch up with Yuli after work, and she had discussed the extreme amount of work that D5 is producing, so I ask if I can help, and she said there may be something. It'll be nice to see another aspect of excavation work.

Wednesday: The day of many bucket chains. Our area has a section of slope, which is generally difficult in terms of stratigraphic context because everything falls down a slope. It'll be a big mixture of potsherds from various periods, so what we need to do scrape it all down until we can get the area to a reasonably clean layer. We still collect the pottery but most of it will get tossed.
After breakfast, the slope-work ceases and everyone returns to his/her locus. In mine, I have to level down this little bump of dirt so that it's more even with its surroundings, and I find another small mudbrick. At the end of the day, there is mass confusion with the bucket tags (each bucket of pottery, or bag of bones/shells, gets its own identification tag) and since I know how to make them, I quickly write them out. Elise, the recorder, likes me to do them because my handwriting is neat. We also receive good news today - since it's becoming too dark to work at 5:00, and we're waiting for the sun to come up a bit, our bus will leave 15 minutes later, at 5:45. We'll arrive a bit after 5:00, and once we finish getting the tools, we'll be able to get to work faster. People are very pleased with the extra 15 minutes of sleep.
I find Yuli later on for that special assignment - what she wants me to do is take a few specific loci and find the layers directly above that correspond to its dirt makeup - I will have to go back into the previous seasons' reports to do so.

Thursday: A normal day, though I'm moved around a little bit. We have to do more slope work. After breakfast, I help at the recording desk, making tags and writing the corresponding numbers/information into a notebook. Then it's mostly cleaning. So at the end of the day, since dirt was moving a bit more slowly but we picked up too many buckets, we have to do one enormous bucket chain. I decided to count them, and came up with approximately 286! It was huge, and we mostly found our groove in the chain, so it went mostly smoothly, so we sort of congratulated each other at the end. I think this was also the day that the tourists came by, stopped and marvelled a while. I saw one guy, down at the rocky shore, standing there for a good five minutes, after which he pulled out his camera and starts taking photographs. We get a lot of tourists wandering around because they can just walk up from the beach, and technically, Tel Dor is a national park now.
Later on, at pottery reading, Elise enlists me to be her sidekick during the reading. I would cut up the tags of those baskets that had nothing worthwhile to keep, or create new tags for anything in baskets that needed to be separated out. It was a very long reading, and ran for two-and-a-half hours.
In the evening, I worked a little more on Yuli's project. I also started preparing for the weekend trip to Masada/Ein Gedi/Dead Sea/Qumran. I would be renting a car with Sarah G., Myr, Hanna and Morgan. Sarah and Hanna went out during the pottery washing to pick up the car so we can be ready to go after the work day tomorrow.

Friday: It's an easygoing work day, as I helped out at the recording desk for a little bit. Since D5 is the place for Israeli archaeology students and we have Haifa University for the first three weeks, each of them has to spend time at the recording desk. It is Asaf B's turn, and Elise asks me to help him make the tags. Though, since his handwriting is not too solid, she has me write out a few of my own. I did some fieldwork as well, just scraping down a small bump next to a three-mudbrick line we have.
After lunch, I take a quick shower and hastily pack for Jerusalem. We will be driving there, and staying for two nights so as to have an easy jumping-off point for our sightseeing. I will write about this trip next post.