East Again

Here are some photos from throughout the week, just a glimpse of the day to day :) Sunday evening coffee and chats Our impressive dump pile, and the sifts   A tag - we make these for all our buckets, chipped stone, material culture etc etc

Tonight we visited a bedouin town, Zarzir, to be served a delicious dinner! The people living in Zarzir are descendants of bedouin from the north, who ended up settling here. The meal, maklube, tabule, hummus, olives, etc etc with cardamom coffee and baklava afterwards reminded me of the bedouin dinners I had last year! I want to find a good maklube recipe when I get home. maklube means "turned" in Arabic, and is called this because they cook the meat, rice, cauliflower etc together in a pot, then flip it out onto a tray to serve. Here are some pictures of the meal. Mario translated for our host as he welcomed us and told us about the history of Zarzir.

Grid 92 Square 97! What a week this has been! On Monday we had just begun our 5x5 probe, and at the end of today we had made some fantastic progress, and have finally moved out of the modern phase! (Check out the Tel Shimron Instagram to see a roman oil lamp we discovered in my square today). Today was the last day for our three-week volunteers, it was sad to say farewell to three of the people working in my area. The other Grid 92 Square supervisors and I made a cake fashioned to look like our squares, which we brought out into the field for a brief farewell party.  I've grown fond of my team, and will be sad to see three of them go! In excavation it is important to keep the "sections," the earthen sides of the square clean and vertical, so that any stratigraphy can be seen, and so the square stays neat and the right size. I've been told several times the sections in my square are fantastic, probably the best on the Tel! This was due to two of my volunteers who ...

Today we hauled dirt! It got up to 100 degrees at the Tel today, and it was humid - but we made some serious progress dropping the depth of my square. We are now excavating only a 5x10 meter section of my square, which speeds things up considerably. Still, it was a lot of work, and a job well done. Our most interesting find of the day was a gecko. :) After a shower and some updates on my notes, I went over my stratigraphic summaries with Mario, one of our dig supervisors. A long day of work! But in the end satisfying, and lots to be grateful for!

Today I tagged along with my professor and his family to the beach at Caesarea to do some swimming. They had goggles for me to borrow, and the water was so clear there were many neat things to see! I especially enjoyed observing the fish swimming in and around the kurkar rocks not far off the coast. They were quite small, but cool looking. My favorite were the yellow ones with blue stripes down their sides! It also was nice to lay in the shade and read my book, The Count of Monte Christo. I'm reading it on my kindle, which has proven to be quite convenient. Tomorrow we begin another week of digging, but I feel rested and ready to face it head on... especially since we stopped at Ramat Yashay and I got a big bar of dark coffee chocolate for the afternoons :)

This weekend I opted to stay at Nahalal rather than join the volunteers touring in the Northern Galilee. I’ve been to the places they are visiting at least once before, and I wanted the chance to catch up on rest and work. Currently, I am enjoying a free iced coffee at Nahalal’s café stand. They treated everyone on the excavation to a free drink, a brilliant marketing strategy I must say… because they serve good coffee, and most places in Israel offer only instant coffee! The past week went quite well, starting out rough but improving as we went. My square had quite a bit of modern architecture which we had to excavate and record, which was good practice in excavating and recording, and also quite interesting to reconstruct modern history just like we would ancient history. However, the past two days we pic axed through it all, and will hopefully come down on Middle Bronze material before the end of next week when the half-term volunteers leave. It is nice to start getting some de...

Dr. Wright and I at Caesarea Although I had originally thought I would be able to go to church in Nazareth on Sundays, it didn't work out. I decided instead to go along with the volunteers on their field trip. Dr. Wright, the president of Jerusalem University College, was leading one of the busses, so I went with him. He taught one of my classes last year, and is a phenomenal tour guide. He knows the sites well, but also knows how to appreciate and address their theological significance. It was fun to learn from him again. We went to Legio, Megiddo, and Caesarea. I've been to those places several times before, but there is always something new to lear, or re-learn. However, it did remind me of the times I had gone to those places with my JUC classmates, and made me miss it some! My class was smaller, and more attentive than this group. While sitting in the Hippodrome, looking out over Herod's man-made port and the turquoise Mediterranean, I began again to think about ...

A lot has happened in the last two weeks, it feels like I've been here much longer! My trip to Jerusalem was lovely, although very busy! I played a few roles, from getting volunteers from the airport to the hotel, keeping an eye on some of the children in the group, helping people who had lost luggage buy more cloths, and tipping the bus driver on our way down here. I also got a little bit of time to see my friends from JUC, but hope to head back there at some point, to be able to roam on my own more, and spend more time with some friends there. However, as a staff member I got my own room at the Notre Dame Hotel...which was lots of fun! I even had a large balcony to enjoy! My Balcony Honey for Breakfast at the Notre Dame Hotel The day we returned from Jerusalem we went straight to the dig for Seminar day, where several of the Staff members teach the volunteers about various equipment and methods for the excavation. I lead three sessions on the drone, but to be honest ...

As fair waring, this post is quite long! I’ll try and be more frequent and less lengthy in the future! All things considered, I am having a lovely time, learning a lot, and also glad I can contribute some. It’s hard to believe it’s been only three days, so much has happened! Also if you'd like you can check out the site's Blog at: http://www.telshimronexcavations.com Excavating Our first two days were spent primarily with clearing off the topsoil of our grids. Each grid contains 100 squares, 10x10 meters each. In the grid I am in, grid 92, we are only excavating three squares, all adjacent to each other. We have a grid supervisor who oversees all three squares, and a square supervisor for each of the squares. My square is 97. As I said, we’ve worked mostly with clearing away the topsoil, which is very dusty and stony and covered in dry grasses.   Our goal was to level the sloping ground enough to make it an even area. We also had several groups of local school c...

It's 9:30 p.m. local time as I'm sitting in "Cafecafe" for a late dinner and a quick post. We arrived in Tel Aviv earlier today, and after gathering our luggage, equipment, and renting a van, we drove up to the Jezreel valley. It was dark by time we entered the Megiddo pass, but as we entered the valley, it was exciting for me to recognize the shadowy shapes of Mt. More, Mt. Tabor, and the Nazareth mountain ridge! I guess all the mapping we did with Dr. Wright paid off! It is fun too to be back at Kibbutz Mizra, in the very same cabin, and eating food at the familiar Cafecafe. Tomorrow we leave for the site at 5:00 AM to begin opening grids, so I need to head back to the cabins soon. But I learned that I will be a full blown square supervisor (not an assistant supervisor) which both excites me, but also intimidates me somewhat. I'll be in a Middle Bronze grid, working under Dr. Aja, and with my professor Dr. Miglio, a former Wheaton Student, and a girl who has ...

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...