Monday and Tuesday

By this point on our trip we are well into the excation process. We are getting used to the daily routine, Israeli culture, and Kibbutz life in general. Let me describe for you briefly what a Kibbutz is like. There is a road that goes into the Kibbutz through a gate. Barbed wire fences provide security for the residents and us. Most of the buildings of the Kibbutz though are connected through a spiderweb of sidewalks, and it took some getting used to to find where we were going! There are dogs roaming around all the time, most of which just mind their own business. (One of them I named "carpet" because of its shaggy white, carpetlike coat of fur. And at one point I almost kicked him off the sidewalk because I thought he was a dirty piece of carpet!) This Kibbutz makes a lot of its money off of dairy products, so out back there are huge pens and buildings full of cows. There is also an ostrich pen! Nearby the residential area of the Kibbutz are fields of Banana trees and date trees. There is a good sized grocery market in the Kibbutz, and for the most part we can tell what everything is without knowing how to read the Hebrew wrappers! Israel also does not have a drinking age, so one could theoretically walk in and buy a beer as if it were a juice or a can of pop (theoretically). Our group had a little celebration on the 4th of July--nothing to draw attention to ourselves, no fireworks, just some food, beer, and Andrea and I whistled the national anthem.

The best part of the Kibbutz would have to be the beach. Now it's a good beach, but certianly not the best one I've ever seen. But... the lake is the Sea of Galilee, where Galilean fishermen once fished and where our Lord once sailed. Looking out over the water during a swim makes the imagination run, but in a real way. Jesus' words calmed these waves, crowds listened to Jesus' messages while he stood offshore in a boat, Jesus walked on water somewhere out there, and Peter fell in.

Time for notes on the digging for the day. First though, you need to be acquainted with the layout of our church. A schematic of the Northeast church can be found on the virtual dig site under "public pages" and then "basic info". Here you can also see the grid we use for labeling squares. From east to west the squares have letters, and from north to south they have a number, for example B4. A "square" is a 5 meter by 5 meter section of the site; a lot of dirt to move! We continue to find doorframes and walls throughout the church. Square E4 has found a doorframe and part of a road, which ran right up next to the church. In addition, and this is late breaking news, they found another cistern of some sort!! Dr. Arthur Segal of the Polish team, who coordinates the sites, simply said to Dr. Schuler jokingly, "You're really overdoing it!" It's true; four cisterns in and around our church is very, very odd and surprising! A newly opened square in C0 found the wall of a side room adjacent to the sanctuary. Meanwhile in my square, B4, we have been in the process of removing material, hoping to eventually reach floor, as well as intricate work exposing the rocks near our cistern. Today though, we started to actually extend the square to the south, attempting to reach the outer wall of our room. We (I) actually stumbled across a Roman Pilaster-- this piece would have originally been used in the construction of a Roman temple to the Greek gods, and it was reused in the building of our Christian church. It is probable that our church's site originally housed such a temple. Toward the end of the workday, my team did reach the wall we were looking for. We have a lot of material to remove, but this side room promises to be very interesting in the end! My daily survey work has also been going well, and my measurements have been very accurate as of late; within one centimeter. For the purposes of dating and relating levels in different parts of the church, precise elevation readings are critical.

That's it for now. Future entries may include descriptions of the landscape (including plant life and climate), more about our digging techniques in general and specific finds, a failed trek to find a swimming hole in a tributary of the Jordan River that the all the excavation teams at hippos did together, and a complete report on my running campaign in Israel (heat and hills gallore!).