Saturday, June 6, 2009

Down and Dirty

Before I sign into Blogger, all of my blogger.com sites have the menu bar in Hebrew. This presented a bit of a problem as I kept choosing options on the righthand side in order to sign in, before I realized the "Sign In" link was going to be on the left in accordance with the way the Hebrew language works.

If I wrote Hebrew instead of English, I bet I wouldn't get the giant pencil smudges and have to do the wrist crook around binder spirals to write on the front of pages...

Anyway. It's Shabbat again, so I have the luxury of a bit more time for writing and reflection. The first three days of the week were rough - we worked in the field from 5am to noon, then washed and read pottery until 5 or 6 in the evening. Tuesday was particularly bad for me, since my assistant and I had to sort about 50kg worth of pottery sherds and I was literally on my feet for 13 hours, minus the half hour from 2:00-2:30 when I ate lunch. Finally sitting down and relaxing in a chair at the end of that day was the best feeling. Wednesday, our director had to go down to Jerusalem, so we couldn't excavate by law, and instead worked on clearing and cleaning the site out in anticipation of aerial photos at the end of the season. While we will certainly thank ourselves later, when it's July and 95 degrees and there are a thousand other things to be done and clearing is the last thing anyone wants to do, it was still an exhausting, hot, boring day. I entertained myself with fantasies about Mike Rowe coming to do archaeology as a "Dirty Job."

Exciting week in my trench, though. We found a few floors and a drain that appears to run under one of the walls and floors. I'm excited to take up some of these surfaces next week and try to get good, datable material from underneath in order to determine the date after which these floors must have been constructed.

Tonight, I'm going over to visit the Omrit-ians. I can't wait to see them and hear about all the goings on at the site this season and generally catch up.

2 comments:

  1. I love looking at the finds of the week. Sending cool thoughts your way, which is a challenge from Cedar Park. The temperatures here are already in the upper 90's with 100 degrees predicted for highs this coming Thursday and Friday. Yikes!

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  2. sigh . . . i miss you.

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