Back in the USA

Greetings everyone!! I arrived home safely last night after a very long day of traveling. Again, I want to thank you for being involved in my trip and I hope to be able to share with each of you in person more about this incrediable adventure!

Peace,
Erin

Bittersweet Day...

Shalom! I write to you for the last time in the beautiful country of Israel. It is kind of hard to imagine that I will not see the Sea of Galilee and the Golan Heights and the sunrise and the sunset here in Israel for a while (until I come back!).

It was a bittersweet day at the site today. We finished everything up and just looked at what we had accomplished. Knowing that we were leaving the site, some for the last time, and some for the last time in a while until we return, it was sad to say goodbye to it. After putting 140+ hours into this church digging, cleaning, brushing, and analyzing it, we have all grown to know her well and love her. Every nook and cranny that is in square B4, the South Vaulted Chamber (as Dr. Schuler has named it), I know very well. All of the rocks and each piece of plaster on the floor and every small detail in that room is in my memory forever. But, it is also a very nice thought of coming home and seeing my family!

Today at the site we mostly did cleaning and picture taking. At the beginning of the day we all picked up small stones and cleared away the last bit of the big ruble that littered our site. Next Dr. Schuler divided us up into different sections. Kat and I worked in B4 to clean the walls and floor for the last time in order to take the last photos for the season. I had made quite a mess on the floor yesterday while I was cleaning the tops of the walls, so it is good that we cleaned in there again! While we cleaned other members of our team cleaned other areas of the church.

When we finished cleaning the room Dr. Schuler told me that I would be helping him with the photographs. He had to take digital and film photographs of every wall, floor, and room that we excavated this season. I had several duties for this task; there is a letter board that has removable letters; on this board we put the date, the square, and other pertinent information for the photograph. So for each photo I had to change the letter board to match what the picture was. Additionally, I had to set up an arrow the showed which way was north (using a compass to set it up!) so that when looking at the photos you can tell where north is. I also was the camera holder of the camera that Dr. Schuler wasn’t using at the time. We took pictures throughout the day, but not continuously because we had to wait until the area to be photographed was cleaned first.

After photographing the mosaics we had to cover the mosaics with soft sand and then put felt on them (it is a hard felt, though… not soft felt) and cover them with dirt. This is done for two reasons: first, it protects the mosaics from the weather, etc., and secondly, it protects them from tourists coming and stepping on them and ruining them. We also put felt and dirt on the floor in B4 because that floor is plaster and we want to protect that as much as possible too.

We finished with everything before 10:30. We had the chance to walk around Hippos a little bit and check out the site that Dr. Schuler will be excavating next with his future teams. Our church will probably have one more year of excavation and then the new church will be started! The new church is in the domestic quarters of Hippos and as far as we can see thus far (through all of the ruble and rocks and weeds) there is at least one aps (maybe three!), a cistern in the atrium, an atrium, and several column bases. It looks like it is going to be a big church. It is also in a beautiful location with a perfect, unobstructed view of the Sea of Galilee. I would love to come and work on this church too! (After we finish our church!)

When it was time to leave the site today Kat and I went to say goodbye to our square. We hugged Rita (our cistern) goodbye and told her we would see her soon. Maybe that is dramatic, but it was very appropriate, considering how much time we had spent in that room and how much sweat and work we put into moving those 65 square meters of dirt. (That, by the way, is a LOT of dirt!)

Well, that is all, folks… my last time up at Hippos this season. I hope to come back next year, but we will see. Either way, I look back at this trip knowing I have learned a lot, experienced a lot, been involved in an incredible project, and been in a beautiful land with some incredible people. I know that I am very blessed to have had this opportunity and I am very thankful for all of you that have supported me, prayed for me, and read all of these tidbits about this trip! As I have said before, being able to share this experience with you as it is happening has been incredible. It has added another layer of excitement to my day, knowing that I could tell you what was happening every day!

To wrap everything up, I decided to sum this trip up with a few different categories of my favorites…

My favorite moment here: finding the cistern! I cannot describe how excited I was and how neat it was to find something like that. It was so amazing to be able to connect to the past and be the first person to see this huge object in 1500 years! Time after time I was struck by how incredible it was to be a part of this team and uncovering these things that will help us to learn about the people who once lived here. Dr. Schuler talked once about the saints of the past, Christians who carried on our faith from generation to generation so that today we could learn about this faith. I had never thought about that before: I think of my parents teaching me the Christian faith and I think about my grandparents, Sunday School teachers, friends, and family also teaching me about the Christian faith, but I had never thought about the people who came way before us that we have never met to contribute to teaching me the faith. But, if it were not for the saints who came before us, we would not have learned this faith.

My favorite thing to look at: I have three – the Sea of Galilee, the sunset/sunrise, and the Golan Heights. It is so beautiful here, but these three things are my favorites. I hadn’t seen the sun rise for a while until I got here, but every morning we would see the sun rise while we were working. Beautiful!

My favorite thing to eat here: Well, from all of the wonderful cucumbers and tomatoes, melon, hardboiled eggs, chocolate spread, strawberry banana juice, rice, and other assortments of food, the thing I got most excited about was the cantaloupe. We would get it on rare occasions at breakfast and sometimes we would get it at lunch too. It was such a delicious addition to any meal!
It is weird trying to wrap this whole trip up in a blog entry… but now is the time… I just want to thank you all again for being so faithful in reading this and being a part of my life and experience of this trip. This has been an amazing experience and I could not have imagined it to be better. I will add an entry when I get to the United States tomorrow night so you can read that I have returned home safely! (My flight leaves tomorrow morning at 11am, but a bus will be picking us up from the Kibbutz at 5:30am. I will be flying through Newark and then to Detroit. I should arrive home around 8:30pm.) Thanks again and pray for safe travel for me and my team tomorrow!

...peace...

Pictures:
Picture 1 is a picture of the beautiful Golan Heights. That is the scenery that we feast our eyes on every morning and afternoon while we walk up and down the mountain to the site. It is beautiful and uncapturable by the camera!

Picture 2 is a picture of Dr. Schuler and I taking photographs. He is taking the photographs and I am holding one of his cameras in this picture.

Picture 3 is me at the end of the day. We are gathering tools for the last time. Notice all of the dirt and sweat on me!!

Picture 4 is part of the church at the end of the day today. This area is called the naive, which is the center aisle, and then you can also see the aps, which is the curved portion at the very front of the church. That is the most holy place and only clergy was allowed there. That whole section is called the chancel (the elevated area) and it was only for the clergy during the time of use. In that picture you can also see the bottoms of the columns. At one time those were over 10 feet tall and lined the entire church. This was a beautiful church at one time!!

Digging at the wall...

Shalom! I write to you on my last day of work here in Israel! Tomorrow we will be cleaning, photographing, and putting all of our tools and such away. Like I have said so many times before, I can’t believe we are almost done!!

Today was a fun day, as usual, at the site. In the beginning of the day we did some cleaning of the site: the assignment today was an area to the west of B4 (the room I worked on for three weeks). We were clearing some big stones from that area in preparation for next year. We ended up finding several stones running parallel to the wall of the church, so we decided to check that out and double check that one area of B4 was indeed not a door. (This is the area on the west wall that the wall was crumbling and not in good shape; we originally thought it might be a door, but changed out minds because the bottom was plastered. After seeing the rock formation on the top, we thought there might be a wall close to it, making it very logical to have a door in that spot.) So Dr. Schuler asked me to clear away more of that potential door area to see if there was a door jam stone. I dug that area away, but no door jam showed up! Oh well… next year the team will be excavating that area we cleared away of stones and hopefully that potential wall will be explained!!

For the rest of the day I worked on the top of the wall in B4. I had to clear off every lose stone and all of the dirt from the top of the wall. We also started digging trenches on the other side of the wall in order to find the exterior walls and any walls that might be coming from our room. I continued digging the trenches a little bit. The picture I put at the top of this message is me sitting on top of the wall in one of the areas I was cleaning. Look how tall that wall was!! I had to be careful not to drop rocks off the wall, and of course, not to fall off of the wall!! (I succeeded in both endeavors, although the first one was difficult!)

After I posted the pictures from our sunset cruise last night, I realized that I had not explained what those were! Last night my team, the Polish team, and the Israeli team went on a sunset cruise on the Sea of Galilee. It was beautiful, if you can’t tell by the pictures!! We want on a huge boat and traveled the seven miles across the sea and then back again. We were gone for about 1.5 hours. We left at about 6:45 and the sun sets at about 7:30 every day, so we got to watch that… it was so lovely and breezy out on the water! It is amazing how quickly the sun sets here. I don’t know if it is faster here than other places, but it sure seems to set quickly!

Well, it is time to analyze and sort pottery! I will update you tomorrow on the last day of the dig and I will hopefully be able to give you a complete update on the entire excavation, according to Dr. Schuler. (That is our lecture this evening!) Have a great day!!

…peace…

Sunset Cruise...

Here are some pictures that I took tonight! Enjoy!!

Digging Again!

Greetings!! I write to you with my last week more than halfway over! It is so strange that the trip is so quickly coming to an end, but looking back at this past month, I have certainly learned a lot, experienced a lot, and dug a lot of dirt! Dr. Schuler calculated the amount of dirt that was in the room that I dug in for three weeks: it was a lot of dirt!

Today at the site I was digging again! It was nice to get back to the dirty work. In the beginning of the day I was working with Paul and Mark in a square called E2. It is in the back of the church (to the west of the aps, or the front) and is where the atrium would be on a normal church. This, however, is not looking like a normal church right now! We have been digging back there for about a week, looking for a floor or some signs of an atrium, which should be there; however, we are not finding anything! So, I worked in a small section in the morning. My section is directly to the right of a wall. The wall separates the area we were working from a series of a couple of rooms that were excavated for the past two weeks. To the right of the wall were I was working, it was starting to look like there was evidence of a staircase because about 1 meter has been dug down from the ground level and this staircase seems to ascend to that. I cleared around where we believe the staircase to be, but we're still not sure if it is a staircase or not.

After breakfast and after not finding much in the square, we decieded to do a probe in this area. A probe is when we dig down in a small area to figure out what is below. This way we didn't have to make our way down slowly, slowly, slowly with the whole area, but just work on a small bit. So after breakfast Marc (a different Mark from this morning) and I worked on the probe area. We got down about a foot in a 2.5x1 meter area. It was slow work because there is a lot of plaster we have to hack through, but hopefully tomorrow something more will come up. Thus far, we haven't found much!

So, that is about it for today... it was a day of hard work and a little dirt moved. Tomorrow is our last day of work and then on Thursday we will all turn into Dirterellas, cleaning the sqaure and taking photographs of it! Stay tuned tomorrow for the closing developments of this digging season!!

...peace...

(the picture at the top is the square I was working on today in the probe area... sorry I don't have any more pictures.)

Monday, Monday

Shalom! I am writing to you on a cooler, lovely day in Israel! This morning when we started working there were actually clouds and it felt breezy and wonderful! By late morning the sun was shining full force, but we certainly enjoyed the small break in the early morning! These top two pictures are pictures of me working. The picture that shows me without my shoes and socks on was yesturday. I was getting a little bit crazy and hot from working there, so I needed to give my feet some breathing room. That was only okay because I was just sitting where no rocks or scorpions could get on my feet! The other one is me today lying down in an attempt to find a comfortable position to work! Sometimes it helps to lay down and get very close to the tiles because after a while they all tend to blur together! Tip of the Day: Concentration and good close-up eyesight is key to good mosiac cleaning!

Today I worked on the mosiac floor all day again. The picture directly below is a portion of what I did yesterday. This is the cross! The black part in the middle is the cross and then around it is a design with pink mosiac pieces.

This picture is the floor that I worked on today. It is a common design that is often found in churches. It is mostly black and white with some yellow pieces. It is only a very small portion of the floor. This is a project that will probably take years to complete because the work is very long and we have quite a bit of mosiac floor in place.

In other news... Marc, Jim, and Glenn are working in a pastorfory (that probably is not spelled right, but I spelled it how it sounds!). They got down to the floor today and they have a beautiful mosiac floor that is very nicely restored (and not super dirty!) and it has two large crosses on it! That is very exciting.

Today after work we ate lunch and Nancy, Paul, Mark, Kat, Andrea, and I went swimming together. It was a lot of fun and we played with a raft and two water balls that Linda brought. It was fun to make up games and just goof around (We do a lot of that here... especially Kat, Nancy, and I while we are scraping away at mosiac floor all day! We have to have something to do!). Anyway, I will write more tomorrow! Have a great night.

...peace...

Mosiac Scrubbing

Hello! Today was a much more laid-back day at the worksite today. All day Nancy, Kat, and I worked on the mosiac floor in the center of the church. Because no work had yet been done on the floor, our first task was to clean it. Because over 1500 years of dirt was on this floor, we had to use scalples and dentist tools (like the ones your dentist cleans plaque off with!) to scrape the dirt off of each of these 1x1cm tile, one by one. Needless to say, it was tedious work, although it had to be done!

One exciting discovery that I found was a few crosses in the mosiac! When I started working this morning all of the tiles looked gray, but once I started scraping, I found that they were white, black, pink, yellow, and even some blue! It was kind of tough for me to sit there and scrape tiles all day, espeically since the scraping sounded like nails being run down a chalkboard, and I like the "heavy" work of moving dirt better, but this work today has yeilded good results and will allow us to see a more complete view of the church because the designs and pictures on the mosiacs are so important.

(the picture on the right is me right after I took all of the notes while the pottery expert was here; can you tell my hand is sore from writing so furiously?! hahaha)

In other news... I went swimming in the Sea of Galillee today after lunch. I also ate a delicious orange today. Yum! We often have peaches (although they are more firm and less juicy than peaches you find in the USA), cantelope, and watermellon during our meals, but at the store we bought some oranges and apples, so when I get one of those, it is a treat!

Well, that is about all... today at 5:30 we will clean pottery, eat dinner at 6:30, and have a church service at 7:30. Before then I will be analyzing the pottery that we found on Thursday! (Those are the only pottery sherds that I have yet to analyze, besides the ones we found today and the ones we will find for the rest of the week!) Anyway, have a good day and I will update you more tomorrow!

(the picture on the left is one of the beautiful sunsets here over the Sea of Galille!)
...peace...

(the picture on the left is a few of the bags of pottery that I analyzed and bagged; the picture on the right is me during one of the many times I analyzed pottery.)

Mountains of Pottery!

Hello! I'm sorry I didn't write yesturday. I thought I would just have a relaxing weekend, but that wasn't really the case!! On Friday I was expecting to catch up on my pottery, which I did! Today I was expecting to spend all day relaxing, which I really didn't do! Oh well, we got a lot done in these past two days!!

Although I am the "small finds registrar" I haven't really told you much about that or what that entails... so, I will! I will start from the beginning:

As you know, we find a lot of pottery chards while we are digging. At the beginning of each day each square is assigned a number and I create a pottery bucket for them, which I attached their pottery tag to. Additionally, throughout the day if they find any bones or glass in their square, then I will create a bone or glass bag for them. These bags are just white lunch bags that I write on. Almost every square needs both bone and glass bags each day!

When we get done digging for the day we carry the pottery buckets down the mountain and I take them back to the lab when we return to the Kibbutz and start them soaking in water. By 4 or 5 every night we gather together to clean the pottery. We all sit in a circle by the Sea of Galille and clean pottery. This pottery cleaning circle is often accompanied by much intruiging conversation, laughter, and sometimes even songs by some of our teammates!

Then I get to analyze, weight, sort, count, record, and bag all of the pottery sherds. If this seems like a lot, you are probably right! But, I usually get some help from my trusty teammates who know how to count and it goes by much faster!

So, that is what I was doing all day yesterday. I had 15 bags of pottery to do, and I finished all of them! Today was a different story!! Since all of the pottery was sorted thus far and the pottery expert was coming in to analyze some of our pottery professionally (I am not a professional!!), we had to organize all of the organized bags into sections for each square and get them ready for her to look at. She came in at 10am and commented on many of our diagnostic pieces (rims and handles), which I furiously wrote down all of those notes! After she left I had to type up the notes I took (only FIVE pages!) and then get some pottery pieces ready to send off to her to further analyze. We are sending if off for her to analyze to see if these pottery pieces are consistant with other churches similar to ours.

After all of that, we took pictures of all of our diagnostic pottery so that we would have a record of it.

Today I also did something exciting, though!! After dinner Kat and I went swimming and we watched the sun set from the water. It was beautiful! The waves were huge and it was a lot of fun. Anyway... I should go to bed now. It's late! More tomorrow. PEACE.