-
Today I had to say goodbye to dear JUC and the remaining students and Dr. Wright and Diane. It was a good morning though, Liz treated me like a Queen, and baked us cookies! We had Mac and Cheese for lunch, with Avocados and peppers. Then we made fresh squeezed lemonade. We played some card games, and went to Teddy Park with Moriah, where we ran through the fountains and got thoroughly soaked! After showers and hanging our cloths out to dry, we drank lemonade in the garden for a while and talked. It was nice, but quite hard to drive off and leave it all. I am at the airport now, and just met up with my professor. It feels odd to be in Ben Gurion Airport and not be heading home yet! I have a feeling it will be hard not to miss home a lot this next month and a half, but it will work out, I'm sure. I'll try and update again after we get to Shimron and start our routine there!

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular Posts

About Tel Shimron

-
Image
Introduction Tel Shimron is an ancient city. It is the largest tel in the Jezreel Valley, and at its height, during the Middle Bronze Age, would have spanned about 19.5 hectares (about 48 acres). Although it is a large site, it has never been excavated, except by Uval Portugali, who surveyed the site and dug a few test pits in the 1980s. Portugali concluded, and our survey last summer confirmed, that the tel was occupied at least from the Early Bronze Age to the Islamic period - but it also was used during the crusader period, and even in modern times became one of the first settlements of Israeli settlers. The Topography Like all tels, Shimron is a man made mound, a result of many cities being built, destroyed, rebuilt and occupied for thousands of years. Generally speaking, the deeper you go, the older the artifacts and architecture you find. However, Shimron's topography is comprised of an acropolis, and several shelfs of land defending from it. Because of this, there ar...
Read more
-
I made it to Tell Shimron! Today was our third day of Surveying. Our first day was a bit rough, we ran into multiple problems. For one, all the "benchmark" markings from last year had worn off, so we had to try and set them again with the GIS Station. That allows us to know right where we are on the tell, and set up an accurate grid. Now that we are in the swing of things, we are able to survey quite a few of the grids in a day. Each grid is 20x20m, but we only do reconnaissance survey on 10x10m of each grid. This means that for 10 minutes we walk over the area and collect any pottery on the surface. We begin at about 5:15, and take a breakfast break at 9:00. After lunch at 1:30 we wash pottery, and the professors and archaeologists read it. Reading pottery means they go through and determine what time period is prominent etc. It is amazing to see how well they know pottery, and how they can tell from a tiny sherd what it used to belong to. Our first day was extremely h...
Read more

In the Field and at Home

-
Image
In the Field Archaeology is sometimes called a 'science of destruction' - an apt name given that once we excavate ancient material you can never put it back just how it was. This is why taking thorough records is imperative. We record measurements, descriptions of soil consistency and composition, elevations, unique numbering etc etc, and take daily notes describing our excavation method and interpretations. Pottery is the primary resource for dating the material we are digging, and to do so accurately we need to record where the pottery is coming from. During excavation, we may have numerous "Units" existing at one time. A Unit is anything from a layer of sediment to a stone wall. We collect pottery from each unit in separately labeled buckets. At Shimron, we use bluetooth printers to create bucket labels. This is a clean system that eliminates all sorts of errors, like bad handwriting, typos and faded or bleeding ink. We print a lot of tags over the course ...
Read more