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.