Digging!!!

So i've been here for 4 days, I've been reminded of how much i love doing this! It's super hot and sunny, you start sweating by 6:30am and feel like you're going to lunch when it's actually breakfast. There tons of prickly weeds and rocks and dirt flying everywhere, you come home caked with a layer of sand you hope is a tan, but quickly find out it's not. By the second day you are sore and bruised and absolutely sick of walking up the stupid tel to the main site and then to your own across to the other side. And then spend hours putting up stupid canopies without the right amount of rope or poles with wind to finally be able to start shooting levels and pick axe the top portion of the unit before it's time to start cleaning up.

It is absolutely wonderful!!!! I love it.

These first couple of days we've been clearing out the weeds and winter fill from the site an setting up the shade canopies , huge tent like things that are beasts which we try to hold up with these plastic poles that threaten to fall on top of us when the wind picks up. We had to make one putting two sheets together, it was crazy , took us about 6 hours in all, but we finally got it up and got to start digging. It was a very exciting day :) The area I'm in is on the west side of the Tel right below the peak and the ruins of the crusader fortress. We're working on the slope and attemptiong to connect the stratigraphic layers, at the moment there are 13, going way back to Early Bronze age period. Our team is divided into groups working in different sectins within that area. In the group I'm in, we get to start two new units to north of the other open pits and try to see how the middle bronze fortification wall extends and if there are any other dwellings around it. there are three of us for that, and we managed to get the section stringed and the points plotted with the tripod, i kinda missed the total station we used last year though. And we started taking off the top soil level, trying to get to a brick level we see in the connecting unit. So at the moment we're not finding quite as exciting stuff, lots of sherds and some bone fragments, there was a cool bead, and lots of rocks. Tomorrow we'll fet that level through and actually be getting to the rich levels we can actually do things with, we are all very, very excited. Jeff makes sure the guys let me have a turn at that pick axe, so all in all it is going great.

We finish working around 1pm then come back for lunch, followed by pottery cleaning and reading, which will actually pick up more starting tomorrow when we're getting more pottery from all the areas. I am slowly starting to pick up the typology of the pottery, there are so many different kinds and people like Jeff and the other supervisors can look at it and pull up some period for it, from early bronze to iron 2b to philistine..., it's pretty crazy. At the moment I have marmluke pottery down (though tomorrow I'll probably get it wrong) and somewhat early bronze. I just have to keep asking and asking and learning to try to take it all in. But I'll get there and eventually be able to understand everything I'm doing. I am really good at eavesdropping (though i guess it's not real eavesdropping when they know you're there) and listening in on conversations between the supervisors and other wise individuals (the funnest are when there are heated debates over certain issues like the david and goliath story or 3D imaging) it's pretty fun and interesting and I am learning bits here and there. On saturday one guy is going to take us to the museum and an antiques shop (though we're not buying anything there!) so we can look at some whole vessels and learn a little better how to differenciate pottery between the periods. i am so excited to be going back to Jerusalem this weekend. k my computer's dying, that's all i got.