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...