Cistern Diving

Hello!! As the title of this post suggests, today was the day of Cistern diving!! What exactly is cistern diving, you ask? Well, although diving may seem to imply going headfirst into water, we climbed down a ladder into a big hole that was once filled with water! That was our exciting adventure for the day at Hippos. Here is a picture of me (with the awesome yellow hard hat on) climbing down the three meters into a dark, small, cave-ish like hole, full of spiders and beatles. It was very neat to go down in this!! As I have mentioned in previous blogs (when I found the cistern in my square a few weeks ago) that a cistern is a big hole where water was stored. When I was in Jerusalem I saw the third largest cistern in the land at the Garden of the Tomb. It held over 200,000 liters of water, I believe. I can't remember the exact number, but it was a lot of water! The one I went into was found in one of the left (north) rooms on the side of the church and was about three meters deep. It was neat to go into it and see what was down there, although it was very hot and dark. :)

In other news, we finished our room today!! WOW! Looking at our square and what it looks like today as opposed to three weeks ago, I am just amazed... we moved A LOT of dirt, all by hand, in such a short amount of time. The huge stones were pilled higher than the ground level and we are down from the ground level 3 meters in some areas and 2 meters in other areas, and the square is 7 x 5.5 meters! It is massive (especially for a room). We are not sure exactly what it is yet, but considering the gold we found (an amulet and three pieces that went on a belt), the cistern, three benches, arches in the ceiling, and the only enterance into the church, we are guessing it is some sort of a room where they did ritual cleansing maybe after seeing the tomb that lies directly outside of it. (The tomb is of a woman!)

So, to finish the room up today I finished cleaning the floor while Kat worked on some detail work of plater by the cistern. After the floor was cleaned, I had to brush all of the walls to get the extra dirt and debris off of them and then I had to sweep the floor really, really good with the hand broom. That was a lot of work, espeically since I was in the sun and it was VERY HOT today! Andrea helped me with that and I drank a lot of water! By the end of the day we could all sit back on one of the benches and look at our completed square. WOW! What a cool thing to look at!

Next week Dr. Schuler will be moving us other places to start or finish up other projects. We only have four days to work because our last day will be spent cleaning, photographing, and covering everything to protect it until teams come next year! This weekend we do not have any traveling or anything planned, so it will be two days to relax. I have quite a bit of pottery analyzing to do, which I will hopefully complete tomorrow. Besides that, I am looking foward to some time to relax and read, swim, and rest! I can't believe this trip is almost over... I just have a week left. The time is flying by!! Well, I will write more tomorrow! Thank you all for being so faithful in reading the blog and staying updated on this amazing journey that I have been on thus far. It really enhances the experience, knowing that so many of you are reading this at home because I know that I am not experiencing these things on my own!! I have gotten a lot of emails from many of you, but if you haven't emailed me, I would love to hear from you, and if you have emailed me, I don't mind hearing from you again! (thompsoe@csp.edu) Thanks! Have a great day!

...peace...

(the first picture is me going into the cistern; the second picture is me sitting behind the completed cistern; the third picture is me standing in the southeast corner of our completed square)