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…