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.

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)

Sleeping Beauty

Hello... today was a very sleepy day... when Kat and I got to the worksite today, we saw the benches that I discovered yesterday and we couldn't resist. We laid down on those comfortable, soft, lovely stones and fell asleep all day! Here is a picture of it... (her leg is in the corner)
Well, not really! I went and laid down on them trying to simulate what it would have been like to be a woman in the Byzantine time, but I couldn't imagine it! Apparently they put plaster over these jagged stones to make them smooth, so it wasn't exactly so bumpy!!

Today was a great day at the site, but it went a little slower than yesterday. Besides the fact that we did not ask for a crazy challenge today, it was slower because the floor had so much plaster and mud on it! Today Linda, Kat, and I were working on the rest of the floor to clean up all of the dirt. As we started cleaning, we quickly discovered that it would not be an easy quick task that we thought it might be. Although the space was considerable smaller than what we cleared yesterday, underneath all of the dirt and rocks right on the floor was plaster and mud stuck to the plaster floor. We had to VERY CAREFULLY pick the plaster off and do so in just a way to not damage the plaster floor right underneath. We worked on this all day and we almost finished! We have a little bit more to clean tomorrow and then we will brush the walls and floor really good to get the extra dirt off.

Another exciting thing that we did today was take a field trip! We went to visit the church that the Israeli team is working on. It was a bit of a walk, as it is on the other side of Hippos. When we got there Dr. Seagel, the head excavator gave a us quick overview and tour of the church. Although they just started working on the church this season, there were some neat things there! My two favorite things were the mosaic floor and the chancel screen. The mosaic floor in the right front was very nicely intact and looked beautiful. They were working on cleaning it as we were there, but even so we could tell that it was going to be beautiful when they finished. The chancel screen was also incredible! A chancel screen is a stone slab that boxes in the alter area and has designs carved into it. Although most of it was taken down and put somewhere safely to avoid more damage, the part that was still there was evidence that it was absolutely beautiful when it was all there. That was a wonderful field trip for us because we got a chance to see another church under excavation!!

Well, I must go and analyze pottery now!! We are cleaning pottery at 5:23 today, eating dinner at 6:30, we have a lecture at 7:30, and then I am going to bed! I will be tired by then!! Have a great day!

...Peace...

Flying Dirt!

Shalom! I write to you with exciting news (as always)! Today is officially the day of flying dirt. Let me explain... when we got to the worksite today and got started working, Dr. Schuler gave our square the instructions for Linda, Kat, and I to work on cleaning the floor off and for Mark and Paul to open up the doorway that we have into the church. So, we got started, keeping in mind that Dr. Schuler told us yesterday that he would like at least half of the floor uncovered by today. As the day went on, we worked steadily, I found another bench. (The bench wraps around in the corner like a corner couch! It's not as comfortable as a couch, though.) Mark and Paul finished clearing the door out, so (hooray!) we have a door into our square so now we don't have to repel off the wall to get to the ground.

(The above picture is me sitting on one of my benches!)

After breakfast we were getting ready to go back to work and Dr. Schuler came over and I asked him how much he would like us to get done. He said to do as much as we could, but I told him to give me a challenge and tell me how much he would like. So, he told me that we need to finish all the way past a particular piller, which would make up about 3/4 of the square. Now, keep in mind that we did not even finish half of the square by this time and we had been working on it for two days! I accepted the challenge and we got to work. At about 10:45 when we had an hour left to dig, we realized that we better start going a little faster if we were going to succeed in the challenge that was before us.

This picture is of our square as of today! Do you see where Linda is sitting? That was our cut-off point that we had to dig to. It was so much dirt. All of the space to the right of that ledge is to floor level! That is a TON compared to yesturday!)

Because I am pretty competative (that may be an understatement), I was determined to reach the goal. We started digging so fast that dirt was flying EVERYWHERE and buckets were being filled so fast that they could hardly be emptied in time. We were yelling and encouraging each other and many people had thought we had gone crazy. I think we did for a little bit... Linda, Kat, and I were working so hard and moving so much dirt and sweating so much (sweat was literaly dripping in my eyes to the point that they stung because of the salt in my sweat). We were completly out of breath, but kept working, trying to stay out of each other's way, flying handpicks, and buckets coming from all directions waiting for us to fill them. Dr. Schuler came over at the end and started laughing because we were going so crazy and Mark didn't even want to come into the square because we were moving so quickly. But, finally, when the time ran out, we had reached our goal! The line wasn't exactly straight, but it was straight enough. We fell onto the ground and just looked at what we had done... it was pretty amazing how much dirt we moved! We were all very proud of ourselves, and very tired! But, that just means there is less floor to uncover tomorrow!

(The above picture is Linda, me, and Kat sitting after we finished our monsterous task!)

Well, that is my exciting news for today... when we got back to the Kibbutz we went immediatly to the Sea of Galillee after putting our swimming suits on so we could cool off and clean up a bit. Then we had lunch (yummy chicken sticks and cantelope!) and I showered after that. I am going to go and work on some pottery sorting until 5pm when we will clean pottery as a group, then at 6:30 we will eat dinner, and at 7:30 we have a lecture. I will update you more tomorrow!! Until then....goodbye! :)













(this is a picture of our doorway!)

peace.

(This picture is me relaxing on the stone bench. Doesn't it look comfy?!)

Dirterella!

Greetings, everyone! I have decieded that my name is Dirterella now. (Thanks to my Mom's wittiness!) Today I spent all day scraping dirt off of the floor in our square, which is what I did yesterday, so my Mom and I came up with that fantastic name! And... it holds true for today too. Today was very exciting, as always! As I was digging the dirt from the floor, I found another bench in our room! It is on the north wall of our room and is to the right of our doorway (on the other side of the doorway that the pedestal is that I found yesterday). We have another bench on the west wall, so this was probably a room that people sat in. (Sitting is the best use for benches, I have found.)

So, you may ask, how does one clean a floor that has had dirt on it for 15,000 years?! Well, it takes a little different techniques than scrubbing your kitchen floor with lysol and a mop... I mainly use four tools: a hand pick, trowel, dustpan, and buckets. First, because the dirt is pilled anywhere between a foot and a foot and a half, I use the handpick to loosen up the dirt and get the small rocks (and large rocks) out. I pick in a small area, producing enough dirt to fill three or four buckets. Then I switch my choice of tool to the trowel and dustpan, scooping up piles of dirt and depositing them in buckets. As I did this, I would pull the buckets out of my little valley I was creating and put them on the ledge so one of my other teammates could take my buckets, empty them, and give them back to me to fill more! It is important to use the small tools that I am (instead of using the terea) because the floor is made of plaster and can be very fragile. Additionally, I am working in a lot of the wall areas and like today, when I found the bench, that was plastered too, and we want to preserve as much plaster as possible, so I had to work very careful around that area.

Doing this work is one of my favorites and it is so exciting because I never know what will be uncovered. That is like any of the work, but this detail work is very interesting because I can really see shapes and figures and objects form!

Well, I have quite a bit of pottery to analyze and sort and everything, so I will end this entry! Stay tuned for more exciting updates!! :)

PEACE.

Sunday!

Hello! I know that I have just posted a pretty long entry for while I was in Jerusalem, but I still have to tell you about today! This will be shorter though because I am getting SLEEPY! Today, as always, I woke up just after 4am and got my work clothes and boots on, grabbed my water bottles from the fridge, and headed to meet everyone at the bus. The work day started with an introduction of everything we have done thus far because we have gained three new members! Arny, Jim, and Glenn have joined us now! Bill has left us, though. (Bill, I hope you get home safely! We look foward to hearing from you!) Then we got to work! I worked on the west wall and floor unearthing both of them. That is what I did all day. An exciting find that I discovered while digging was a pedestal in the northwest corner! As I was digging along the floor I came across something that wasn't moving to easily! I dug around it some more and found that it is a pedestal. We are not sure what it is doing there because it is right by the door, but hopefully we will discover more tomorrow! Stay tuned for more details and pics tomorrow!

In the Holy City...

(These are my journal entries, writings, and thoughts while I was in Jerusalem! I will add pictures tomorrow.)

Thursday, July 14, 2005 ~ 4pm on the bus (That is why it is a little spastic!)

One thousand feet below sea level the mountains loom in the background as our bus zips past green shrubs and bushes on the side of the road. The barren desert land stretches for miles. Jordan lies to my right. Spots of green vegetation spring up sporadically, indicating where the water from the drip irrigation system gathered enough water to provide life for these tiny plants. We turn onto a road taking us from Jordan to Jerusalem. This is the journey that the Good Samaritan took in the parable of the Good Samaritan. The hills point the way to Jerusalem as our bus climbs them. As I look out of my window I see the desert where Jesus was tempted for 40 days. We drive through a tense area of Palestine/Jerusalem. Palestine territory lies on both sides of the rode and the rode belongs to Israel. The Judean Wilderness sucks the life out of every plant that tries to grow. High hills and low valleys fill this empty land. Bushes dot some hills now as we drive along and approach Jerusalem and higher elevation. We now pass the sign that indicates we have reached sea level and we spot our first Jewish settlement. These settlements consist on tents that sit upon the hilltops. The closest thing that I can think of to compare this land to is the Badlands of South Dakota. We pass a herd of about 50 sheep grazing. What do they eat? Stones? A mystery to me!! I am informed the Jericho to Jerusalem is 12 miles away and 3500 feet up in elevation. Imagine walking that! We approach 3 towers of the Mount of Olives that we can see in the distance. Some trees and bushes come into view as we approach even closer to Jerusalem. We cross from the West Bank into Israel now and pass several soldiers. That makes me feel safe. Mt. Scopias lies rights in front of us now. That and the Mt. of Olives are the two highest places in Jerusalem. Our last step to getting into Jerusalem is to travel through the big tunnel. The first view of the old city took my breath away. As the sun lit my eyes from being in the dark tunnel I immediately saw blue sky and I turned my eyes down and saw the Dome on the Rock and the rest of this glorious city. We made our way through the Northern part of the city to arrive to the west.



Friday, July 15, 2005 ~ 9pm at our Hostel we were staying at in Jerusalem

Well, the last time I wrote we were entering Jerusalem after a 2.5 hour bus ride from Ein Gev to the Holy City, though the desert land, Judean Wilderness, and many small cities and settlements that dot the highway along the way. Wow… so much has happened in the past 30 hours! We entered the Old City of Jerusalem (surrounded by walls, this 1x1km area is the Old City). Upon arriving we entered through the Jaffa Gate, which is one of the several entrances to the Old City. We walked through the streets that were lined with shops, stands, and a cornucopia of different people – children, adults, tourists, shop keepers, cats, dogs, cars, bikes, taxis. This city gate was an entrance into a world that was competly different that I had ever imagined, but held the sties and memories of the history of my Jesus. It is the holiest of Christian spot in the world according to many, and that in itself produced a great sense of awe and excitement in me. the packed, modernization of the this city immediately hit me, though, as we first walked down the streets. Buildings were jammed so closely together that many of the streets were for pedestrians only. The streets are similar to alleys, lined completely by shops and having hardly any sunlight coming through as a result of awnings and roofs overhead. While squeezing through the bustling streets to our hostel, thoughts of surprise, anticipation and eagerness danced around in my head. I was in Jerusalem! Bust, such a different Jerusalem that I imagined and such a different Jeruslaem that Jesus knew and died and was bured and rose in. As we arrived at the hostel we checked in and dropped out bags off and headed out of explore the city. From almost anywhere I could see the Dome on the Rock. This, several other towers, domes, cathedrals, and remains of Herod’s palace proved to create a unique, memorable, cultural, and beautiful skyline like none I have ever seen before. As I sit in the dark writing on our balcony writing this peering out at the city I am struck at the buildings, architecture, and clash of such numerous different people, religions, and purposes here. I think it will always amaze me how many different religious groups claim this area and occupy this land.

For instance, our first stop in Jerusalem after getting settled in the Hostel was the Church of the Holy Sepulcher. Here six different groups lay claims to certain areas of this massive church: Armenian, Greek Orthodox, Ethiopian, Latin, Syrian, and Coptic. All six of these religious groups have their sections of “territory” in this church and decorate it, etc. as they please. The history of this important landmark dates back a very long time ago… Helena (the mother of Constantine) came to Jerusalem in 300 A.D. and had the church of the Holy Sepulcher built because it is the commemorative place of Jesus death, burial, and resurrection. When we walked into the massive church we first came to a stone that looked like a tomb that was partially in the floor. Above it hung several lamps. Below people knelt to it and prayed, etc. This was the site the commemorated Jesus’ tomb (but not the commemoration of where it was lain). We turned to the right and walked up a narrow, steep, turning staircase which held to an area claimed by the Greek Orthodox that commemorated and is believed by many to be the place where Jesus was crucified. An “alter” type area was created and adorned with tons of gold, lamps, icons, etc. Below on the floor was a glass case with a hole. Knelling onto the ground I was able to reach my hand in and touch the stone. This was a strange experience because I had expected this place to still look like it did back then (at least a little bit!) but to me it was kind of ruined by all of the splendor and symbolic commemoration. We made our way back down the stairs and we walked through this huge church to one of the many wings which led us to a small room with a cave opening. All of this area had been a quarry (a place where things can be carved from) and this cave is very similar to the cave tomb that Christ was buried in. It was nice to have a visual! We also made our way to the center of the church were a building was erected which housed the commemorative site of Jesus’ burial and resurrection. Augustinian monks kepts order in the line that formed of people wanting to go into the 2 small rooms to see this site. Only 4 or 5 people fit into these rooms. As I entered the room where Jesus’ burial was commemorated, I was struck. It was a dark room with light shining on the stone slab (tomb) and some icons, pictures, etc. were hanging. Although this may not have been the exact place of the burial and resurrection, it was still moving because since A.D. 300 Christians from all over the world have been coming to this exact spot to remember Jesus’ death on the cross and his rising from the dead in order to give us eternal life. That evening we also visited the Wailing Wall, which was a place of prayer for the Jewish people in the city. This particular evening there was a political rally going on there, so we stayed far enough away from the wall not to be included in those activities! We also went to a restaurant called “Papa Andreas” for dinner. I enjoyed a falafel with hummus and delicious pita bread. As we ate on an outside balcony we had a perfect view of the beautiful city at night.

This morning (Friday) I woke up and had breakfast at the Hostel. Then we headed out, first to see the Wailing Wall during the day and not during a political rally. Then we headed to the Archeologist Park, where we saw the ruins of Herod’s palace. We witnessed some of the splendor of this majestic kingdom where Jesus came upon entering Jerusalem on the first day of Holy Week. It was amazing to see how large it was and to walk on the steps that Jesus would have walked. After leaving there we headed to the Jaffa Gate to catch the bus to Bethlehem. Right when we arrived in Bethlehem (a short 5 mile bus ride) a man got onto our bus. I wasn’t sure who he was, but Kat and I were sitting in the front right behind Dr. Schuler, so I was listening intently to the conversation that the mysterious man and the bus driver were having. That listening, however, was fruitless because I don’t speak or understand much Hebrew! It ended up that he was a tourist police and came to escort the bus to a bus depot and walk with us a little way. As we walked the streets of Bethlehem we saw several tourist police, regular police, and army personnel. That made me feel very safe. Because of the intense conflict between Israel and Palestine and how heated that conflict has become in the past 5 or so years tourism has dropped almost 80%, leaving many without jobs and businesses and has caused the city of Bethlehem to become quite rundown and poverty-stricken. So in an effort to make tourist feel safer and attract tourists these extra measures have been taken. Our first stop in Bethlehem was the Church of the Nativity, where Jesus’ birth is commemorated. It was also the place where Jerome (the writer of the vulgate) worked and where his tomb is commemorated. If you haven’t noticed yet, there are only “commemorative” places for many places here that have been around for thousands of years. In this church we walked through a maze of various sanctuaries, beautiful rooms, and corridors. In one of the sanctuaries there were some original mosaics, original floor, a baptistery and columns with mosaics of various saints on them. I remember one of the saints being St. Olaf. To reach the commemorative site of Jesus’ birth we went through a small door (I had to duck) and descended staircase. We came into a small, hot room (it was in an underground cave area). To the left were people dressed in white robes and were chanting, singing, and speaking. No, they were not angels… they were members of a religious group who were performing a ritual. Since this was Friday many shops were closed and rituals were taking place at the Holy locations. On the right there was a shrine near the ground (I had to bend down to see it) of the place that commemorated Jesus’ birth. It was very moving to be in this place because it was a place that many Christians have been coming for a very long time to celebrate Jesus’ birth. It was also very difficult to imagine this place how it was because of all the adornment there today. As I think about being in this Holy City, I think it would be easy for some to be disappointed in the sense that these Holy places have been changed so much and transformed so greatly that they are beyond recognition of their original form. On the other hand, it is an awesome experience to be in these cities where Jesus was. Although the exact location of these events are not known, the most important thing is that they happened. Another very important thing that I have observed and has been stressed to me by Dr. Schuler is that this city is a land of high tension, religious conflict, and political instability. Although we yearn for peace where there is not, the tension and uncertainly that is evident on every street corner here is very similar to the city that Jesus walked into some 2000 years ago. One group of people welcome Him and praised Him with palm branches on that Sunday of Holy Week. Another group of people demanded that He be flogged, beaten, humiliated, and crucified. Tension was high, like today. After we visited that church we walked several blocks to Christmas Lutheran Church, a Lutheran church that is pastured by a Palestinian man. We visited the art studio that they have there that displays the work of their students. This church offers art programs, etc. in order to foster creativity and provide students an outlet and haven despite the tension that their land is in. In their small gallery paintings of bright colors, flowers, peaceful scenes, and some violent scenes adorned the wall. This program allows students to create a world of peaceful images and to express their frustration or fear in their paintings rather than in other destructive ways. After leaving the church we stopped by a falafel stand and I had the best falafel ever! (Dad, I not only tolerate falafel, I love them!) This one was particularly delicious because they put pickles, cucumbers, and tomatoes! YUM! After lunch we had the opportunity to do some shopping. I bought some tings at one of the shops that specializes in Olive Wood carvings. It is a 3rd generation family business and they were wonderful! They were not pushy or annoying and they gave wonderful discount to me! (They all give wonderful discounts, though.) Then we headed out of Bethlehem on the bus, passing through security checkpoints (a member of the army came on our bus and checked all of our passports and asked a few questions…it went really fast!) and headed back to Jerusalem. We were afforded some free time, so I went with Mike, Kat, Linda, and Andrea to visit the Garden Tomb. The walk to the Garden Tomb took us through the Armenian soke (main street) and went through the Damascus Gate. The soke was a very busy street lined with shops, vendors, and shoppers. It was wall to wall with people yelling, selling, and rushing through. Once we got to the Damascus Gate we only had a few more blocks to walk until we arrived at the calm, empty street that lead us to the enterance. The Garden Tomb is a park run by a preservation group grom England. It is a commemorative site that has a limestone wall (part of a quarry) that has a shape in it like a skull. Although this is not the place where Jesus was crucified (Golgatha, meaning the place of the skull) it both commemorates and provides a visual. Additionally, in this lavish garden there was a cave that a tomb was found that is similar to the place his body would have been lain. This was a fantastic place because it really provided an excellent visual, while recognizing that this most likely isn’t the true location of the events. When we returned to the Hostel we meet the rest of the group and went up to the very top of the steeple of the Lutheran church in town so that we could get a view of the entire city from very high up. That was so neat! (We also walked up almost 200 stairs that were in a tight, dark staircase that wound and wound and wound. I’m surprised I wasn’t dizzy at the end!) After our bird’s eye view of the city we went on the Archeologist’s Via Delarosa walk (meaning the walk of sorrows). This is Dr. Schuler’s way of giving us the tour of the more likely route that Jesus took on this way from his death sentence to the cross while he carried his tomb. The follow day (Saturday) we also took the commemorative Via Delarosa walk, which took us on the 11 stations of the cross, included where he was sentence, where he fell, where Veronica wiped his face, where Simon took his cross, etc. But, I am getting ahead of myself! After our first Via Delarosa walk we went to dinner at Papa Andreas again and then headed back to the hostel to relax and go to sleep. On Sunday I woke up early and could not open my eye! Why you ask? I was bitten by a mosquito on my eyelid and it swelled so much. But, the swelling went down and I could see soon enough! After breakfast Linda, Mark and I went to the Church of the Holy Sepulcher again. It was about 7:30 and very quiet and the only other people there were nuns and monks and people like that. It was really nice to just sit in the quiet. After we had been there for a little bit a mass started, so on the other side of the church I could hear the organ and singing. It was beautiful! Then our team met up and we checked out of the Hostel and started our long hike. We hiked up to the Mt. of Olives, which is on the other side of the city. We had a massive hill to climb. Along the way we passed the Jewish graveyard (that spreads on the entire hill) and several churches and holy sites. After getting to the top we went to the commemorative place for Jesus’ Ascension. On the way down we stopped at two churches. At one of the churches we saw several burial boxes. That was neat!! After that we had some time to walk around and then we walked the commemorative Via Delarosa (like I already talked about). After that we had lunch at street vendors and then went to the church that celebrated Mary, the Mother of Jesus’ death. We also visited the commemorative place for the Upper Room. All of these places were very beautiful with very elaborate and elegant architecture! It was then time to depart the beautiful holy city! We met our bus right outside the Jaffa gate and headed back to the Kibbutz. Overall, it was a wonderful trip and I have many more stories, details, and pictures to share, but for the sake of my aching hand and sleepy eyes, I must stop! Peace and goodnight!

Thursday at the dig...

(I wrote this Thursday, but was unable to post it because we were leaving for Jerusalem... more updates about the weekend will follow, just as soon as my little fingers can type them out for you!)

Today was another exciting day at work! I know that I say that about all of my days that we go up to the site, but it is true. Every day we uncover new things, dig a little deeper, and discover new possibilities and hypothesis about what this church we are excavating may have been like!

Today was the day that we really expanded our square! My goal for the day was to complete the outside of the square by uncovering all four walls. This was going to be a difficult task requiring much hard work and a lot of work in the sun because our canopy would not cover any of that area. Expanding our square 2 meters in one direction and .5 meters in another direction really increased the size of our square, making this even more of an arduous task!

As the day went on we uncovered most of the wall on the west side. This was a difficult task because there were massive rocks that needed to be moved out of the square. The big rocks always take longer to get out because we have to use straps and maneuver it out just right so people don’t get hurt. When we weren’t so deep down in the square and we had a ramp to get out, it was much easier, but now that we are deeper into the square and got rid of the ramp, we have to come up with some creative ways to get those big stones out of there!

Two exciting things happened today: first, I reached the floor!! As I was working around the northwest side of the square by the wall I reached some plaster covered wall as opposed to just the stone wall. This indicated that the floor was near. Dr. Schuler instructed me to dig down in a 1x1 foot area and dig until I reached the floor in that spot. After digging for about 10 inches I reached the floor! This was a very important find for our square because it helps us to gauge where the floor is, how much more work there will be, and what the floor is made out of. The floor that I found was made of plaster and it is not much further down than the level we are at now, so that is great news!! Another exciting thing that happened today was that we did indeed reach my goal and clear out the entire west wall. It is not entirely cleared out, but at the very end of the day I used the hand-pick in the south end of the wall and found the corner and cleared enough dirt away from the rest of the wall to clearly define the wall. This was very exciting for me, not only because it was my goal for the day, but also because I could not see the entire square as a whole.

On Sunday when we start working again we will work to clear out the rest of the west wall to the level we are at now with the rest of the square. Our next step is to use the smaller tools (handpicks, trowels, etc.) to get down to the floor. Since I discovered that it is a plaster floor we will need to be careful in order to not damage any of the plaster and preserve as much of it as possible.

As always, leaving our dig site and walking down the mountain leaves us with hope of new possibilities and development for the upcoming days! I am so excited to find out what else will be discovered.

After we arrived back to the Kibbutz at the end of my second week of working (already it is half over), we did quick preparations for our journey to Jerusalem. I will write more about that in another section!! Peace.

Sunday!

Hello! I know that I have just posted a pretty long entry for while I was in Jerusalem, but I still have to tell you about today! This will be shorter though because I am getting SLEEPY! Today, as always, I woke up just after 4am and got my work clothes and boots on, grabbed my water bottles from the fridge, and headed to meet everyone at the bus. The work day started with an introduction of everything we have done thus far because we have gained three new members! Arny, Jim, and Glenn have joined us now! Bill has left us, though. (Bill, I hope you get home safely! We look foward to hearing from you!) Then we got to work! I worked on the west wall and floor unearthing both of them. That is what I did all day. An exciting find that I discovered while digging was a pedestal in the northwest corner! As I was digging along the floor I came across something that wasn't moving to easily! I dug around it some more and found that it is a pedestal. We are not sure what it is doing there because it is right by the door, but hopefully we will discover more tomorrow! Stay tuned for more details and pics tomorrow!

Another great day!

Hello! Today has been another great day in this beautiful place!! Our workday was very productive and eventful as always. And, despite my very little sleep I had again last night, I feel very energetic.

Our first task when we arrived at our site was clearly displayed. Sometime after we left yesterday and before we arrived today our shelter over our site fell down. After more careful examination, we discovered to our dismay that one of the metal rods broke during the fall. As we took the structure down, Dr. Schuler searched for an extra rod. Although those rods are scarce, he found one that was not being used. We had to rebuild our shelter, which wasn't too difficult, but it just cost us valuable time that we could be digging.

Even though we had that minor setback, once our shelter was up we got right to work. As I said yesterday in the blog we found the south wall of the room we are excavating, but we did not have time to uncover much of it. We started off our digging day by tearing down that wall all the way across the square. This led us to some interesting discoveries! First we found the stand of another pillister like Paul found yesterday. The pillister top is missing, but we believe that the archways to support the roof were attached by these pillisters.

Next, as we dug a little further down the wall, removing large stones and dirt (and a couple of worms!) we came to a hole in the wall. Now this was unusual and unexpected because the wall had been very well preserved thus far. A hole did indeed appear, though. Upon further prying, digging, and picking, we found that it seemed to be a window. My task then was to clean the window out with a handpick, trowel, and brushes. Dr. Schuler said that I got to "wash the windows." This "chore" turned into a little more than washing windows, however. As I cleaned this area out (an area about 1.5 feet long, 1.5 feet high, and 1 foot deep, I found that it was not a window. As I dug in the back I found a solid wall, creating a little cubby hole in the wall! We are not sure exactly what it is now, but we are certain it is not a window. Most likely it was used to store something in it (I think it's like a shelf or cupboard), but we will find out more once we figure out what this room really is. We have some speculations, but we cannot be certain until we dig down to the floor and see what else history has left behind!

As Kat and I worked on unearthing the south wall, Paul and Mark worked on unearthing the west wall. We are expanding that about 2.5 meters, hoping to reach the wall that we believe completes our room. We have not found the corner of the room yet or the wall on that side, but we have only done a little bit of work on that west wall. Hopefully tomorrow I will be able to give you some news on the west wall!

Speaking of tomorrow... the game plan for tomorrow is to section off another square inside our square around the cistern and Kat and I will dig in there doing detail work until we reach the floor. That will allow us to use the cistern as a guide to dig down and we will be able to see exactly where the floor is. That will help us judge what to do next.

As always, it has been an interesting and eventful day in the ancient city of Hippos at the Northeast Church!

What is on the rest of my schedule for the day? Well, I ate lunch, showered, and did some laundry in the sink (great way to get clothes clean!!), and after I finish blogging I will work on some pottery sorting. At 4pm we have a lecture to attend. The lecture is being given from a professor from the University of Haifa (I believe) about ancient wine brewing, etc. Then after the lecture we are going to scrub pottery by the sea and eat dinner at 6:30. Then tonight we are having a team meeting and devotion at 7:30. Tomorrow after work we are heading to Jerusalem at 2:30. Hopefully I will have time to blog before I leave for Jerusalem, but if I do not, rest assured, I will tell you all about my exciting day tomorrow when I return on Saturday evening.

Thanks for staying updated on my adventurous day! More exciting news will come as it happens! Peace.

The Day of the Beast...

I like dirt! I have to because I get very dirty everyday, but especially today! What a day we had… the dig was exciting and so was our other adventure. But, I’ll get to that later!

First, our dig. We had some exciting discoveries!! I should start in chronological order though... here we go: first, when we got to the site we still had quite a bit of digging around large stones in order to see which stones could be safetly removed. Kat and I worked on that while Paul and Mark worked on moving some of the other stones out. After a while of working (even after breakfast!) at probably 9ish Paul got very excited and when we all rushed over to the southwest corner of our square Paul was digging up a stone pillister! Most likely this pillister was made by the Romans and was reused in our church. We believe that part of it may have supported the arches for the roof. Why do we think that? (That picture above is the pillister that Paul found. It is located in the southwest corner of the church. The first picture is me working today. I was doing some detail work when that picture was taken, so that is why I am using the trowel and dustpan. Right to the left in the picture is the cistern. Yes, she is still there and my team has affectionatly named her Rita. Why Rita, you may ask? Well, we were listening to a Beatles tune when we found her ... I can't remember which one ... but when we were trying to think of a name for her, that Beatles song came into my head... "Lonely Rita, Metermaid...")

Well, our other very exciting part of the dig was that we found some more walls! Our square is officially being expanded to fit the size of the room we are digging. As I have said numerous times, our square is 5x5 meters, which is generally how we excavate the church. However, after some prodding and poking and digging, we have discovered that the south wall of our church lays almost .5 meters beyond that and the west side of the church lays 2 meters further than that. So we started digging up those walls today and we are working on expanding the sqaure to the whole of the room. It is all very exciting! Tomorrow we will continue doing that and hopefully by the end of the week we will have the completed room almost to the floor!

This is a picture of my team (Mark, me, Kat, and Paul) at the end of the day in our new corner! This is the south side of the room and the wall behind us is the wall we found today!)

In other news... we had another exciting adventure for the day. I have entitled this blog "The Day of the Beast..." for this reason... we were all given the option to accompany the Israel and Polland team on a swimming and hiking afternoon at a spring in the Gollan Heights. Kat, Andrea, Paul, and I decieded to represent our team and head off on this adventure to spend some time outside in the beautiful countryside of Israel, get to know some other people, and enjoy a refreshing dip in the spring. Of course, this escapade ending up to be a little more than we bargained for. After our bus dropped off the 20 or so people who came, we started hiking on a path that quickly turned into a stream. This stream was varying depths of a few inches to a few feet. Rocks protruded the surface spontanously and branches and tree trunks provided us with plenty of obstacles to overcome! As we continued through the water walking like apes (feet and hands on the rocks in attempt to not fall...hence the blog entry title "Day of the Beast") I tried so hard not to slip because the wet rocks were so slippery and the river bottom was never consistant! I imagine it was a pretty funny site. After a while of walking Shalomy, from the Kibbutz, who was acting as our tour guide, stopped everyone and spoke many words in Hebrew. We weren't sure what he said, but after some people translated it for us, we discovered that Shalomy was lost and had no idea where we were! Uh oh... he said to turn around and we would get back where we came from! So, we turned around and walked for a while. Then we found a path running beside the stream, so we all got out and walked on dry land back to the bus area. It was quite adventerous. Before heading home we stopped at a beautiful lookout of the Gollan Mountains, the Sea of Galilee, and several farms and we all ate some watermellon. Upon arriving back at the Kibbutz we went into the dining hall to eat dinner. We shared our adventure with the rest of our team and they informed us that we were just getting closer to being more like beasts (because of our poised walking position, I'm sure!), so I call today "The Day of the Beast." Ahh... what a funny story!
Well, I am so exhausted and I have to get some sleep! Enjoy the pics and peace be to you.

P.S. Just to inform you... today at 6:45pm Israel time there was a suicide bomber at a mall in Netanya, Israel, which is about 1.5 hours from where I am staying. Please be assured that we are safe and the incident is being taken care of. Dr. Schuler is confident that we are very safe and if he ever thought we were not, we would immediatly take action. More information on this story can be found at http://www.cnn.com/2005/WORLD/meast/07/12/israel.blast/index.html . Please pray for all who were involved and as always, pray for us. I am confident in Dr. Schuler's discretion and we are very connected with what is going on, so we will keep ourselves updated and informed. Thank you!

Monday News

Happy Monday! Although many of you reading this are just starting your week off today, I started my work week yesterday. As you probably read, my team found a cistern yesterday and today we did more work in our square in order to try to understand this cistern business a little better. The picture below is a picture of my square as of the end of the day today. When I took this photo I was standing facing north in the upper right corner of the square you can see the cistern... is is the object that stands off the ground and has two stones on top of it. The entire square is 5x5 meters and when we started it was just a pile of rocks, weeds, and dirt. We have dug over 1.5 meters down in this entire area so far! I'm sure it may be difficult to visulize what this looks like exactly, but hopefully the picture will help!

As I mentioned above, my team started the day off by carefully cleaning the loose dirt around the cistern. There were several large stones laying around the cistern and before we pried those out and moved them, we had to clean carefully around each one in order to see them better and make sure they could be moved. Especially since this cistern is in an odd location, we needed to be extra careful not to remove anything that should not have been removed. As we cleaned and dug this morning, we discovered that the many rocks that surrounded the cistern could indeed be moved.

Upon removing those stones, I moved to a different location, which was just to the left of the cistern. In the above picture you can see where this is by locating the two stones that lay perpendicular to the upper wall and right up against the wall. (They are near where the pole is in the picture.) One of those stones is the stone I refered to a few days ago that we thought may be something. Well, today we affirmed that fact that that stone certainly is something! We are not sure what it is yet. As I carefully dug around that stone, I discovered that there were several stones in a line that curved right by it. Each stone was a few inches apart. This was a very odd pattern and later we discovered that these stones may have been part of an archway that fell during the earthquake. We are not sure yet, but we are keeping them in the ground until we dig away some more. (A lesson I have learned about archeology is that patience is very important! If you are not sure about something, you must be patient and dig around it and try to see more clearly what it is!) Below is a picture of those stones more closely...

Well, anyway! I can't think of much more to tell you about the worksite. After we got back to the Kibbutz I cleaned up, ate lunch (another lunch of some sort of chicken stuff, a peach, rice, and juice), went and showered, and finished my book. It is very hot today, but I didn't go swimming. I felt like showering and just laying on my bed reading. After that I came and wrote in this blog! Soon I will start sorting pottery chards, glass, bones, and other small finds and then at 4:30 everyone is coming to clean pottery chards. We will have dinner at 6:30, a lecture at 7:30 tonight, and then I will probably head off to bed shortly after that!

Today I took some pictures of each of the teams... here they are!

Team #1 ... in square "C0": Bill, Marc, Rachel, and Andrea

Team #2... in square "E4": Linda, Mike, and Nancy

Team #3... in square "B4": Paul, Kat, me, and Mark

Well, that's it for now! Also, if you are checking this blog, I would love to hear from you! Please email me at thompsoe@csp.edu and I will respond!! Thanks!

PEACE

FOUND...Cistern!

Exciting news!! I found a cistern today! (A cistern was used to store water underground because they didn't have refrigerators.) So, this is what happened... We were digging today after breakfast (well, we were digging all day, but this story occurs after breakfast). When we dig we try to keep the square even so that we are taking off layers of soil, not going really deep in one area and not digging in another. I had been working in one area most of the morning with the terea (I found out that I am spelling terea wrong, but I'm not sure how to spell it; I will just keep spelling it my made up way because then it is consistent, even though it's wrong!). After breakfast Dr. Schuler wanted us to start digging in another area to even out the square. We decided that I should work in the northeast corner of the square and after about 10 seconds of digging with the terea I came across a medium-sized rock (about 12x6 inches). I picked it a little with the terea and popped it out. I was just calling Mark over to move it so I could keep digging up dirt into the buckets (that was his job at the time), but lo and behold! There was a hole! I yelled for Kat and Paul to come over quickly and I rolled the stone over and discovered quickly that it was a cistern. Upon measuring it we found it to be about 2.5 meters deep. After my team sat in awe starring at our discovery and after Paul's instructions to be very quiet about our find, he got up and yelled "wahoo!" and yelled that we found a cistern. The rest of the team came rushing over and also looked in awe, congratulating us on our fantastic find. We were so excited, especially since Kat had just said at breakfast as we were walking back to our site how sad she was that we hadn't found anything cool yet. Well... today was our day! We found quite an enigmatic find.

Why is this an enigmatic find? This cistern that we found is the third one in our church. (We thought we might have to call this church the Cistern Chapel...hahaha...that was for you, Abby!) It is quite rare to have that many cisterns in one church. Secondly, the location and elevation of this cistern is odd. It is located about 1.5 meters from the top of the wall that we are excavating. We know that the room we are digging in is an interior wall because there are remnants of plaster on the stone, indicating that it had been plastered to be made smooth, which is common for inside walls. We have not dug to the floor, yet this cistern has already surfaced. As I dug around the cistern to poke and prod and find clues to answer some of our questions, I discovered that it rested on a stand that was square and it seemed to elevate the cistern from the ground. We aren't sure how far this stand is from the ground or why it is in this room or where the floor is now, but hopefully after more digging around and moving the large stones that surround it we will figure out this mystery!

As I mentioned in my blog yesterday I found a rectangular stone piece that lays perpendicular to one of our walls. This stone is somewhat close to the cistern, but we have kept many of the large stones around that area because we were expecting something to pop up in order to give us some clues to why that stone may be there. I am guessing that maybe this cistern is a water source for a baptistery and maybe we will find a baptistery as we keep digging. That would explain why the cistern is there. Also, in a few of the churches that we have toured around there have been cisterns and baptisteries in the side rooms of the church. This may or may not be the case, but it is my guess for right now! My hypothesis to why it is up so high is an idea from Mark, one of my teammates, who said that maybe the cistern area is elevated and their are stairs to go up to that area. This makes sense because we know that the floor is probably lower in the west side of the room because we have what we believe to be a doorway into the main part of the church going into our room. All of this, of course, is speculation, but we like guessing what will come of our room!

Look! I am staying hydrated! (This picture is for you, Mom... I am drinking lots of water!)

This was quite a bit of excitement for the day! I am including pictures in this blog so you can get a better idea of what I am talking about.

Other news for the day... after we got back from digging we ate lunch and went swimming in the Sea of Galilee. Kat and I sat outside for a little bit by the water talking and then I headed back to our room to shower, change, and clean up. We are scrubbing pottery at 4:45 today, we will eat dinner at 6:30, we have a team meeting/devotions at 7:30, and then I will probably be heading to bed soon after that.

I am so excited to go back to the site tomorrow and learn more about this room we are excavating!

...peace...

This is a picture of Mark, Paul, me, and Kat with our newly found cistern. Isn't it cool?!

Hello, friends! I write to you after a wonderful day of relaxation, touring, and a little bit of work. Today was another beautiful, hot, sunny day in Israel and was perfect for seeing some sights. Today we traveled to two National Parks of Israel. The parks here in Israel seem to be very different that those in the US because these parks are homes of archeological sights, historical/biblical sights, and ancient cities. National Parks in the US tend to consist of more beaches, nature trails, trees, and wildlife. Interesting...

(This picture was taken at Beit She'an today. I am in front of the entire city. You can see the columns of the main street right behind me on the left. That mountain/hill behind me is what we walked up today, as explained further on in the blog...)

But anyway, we went to two parks: Bet She'an and Zippori. We visited Beit She'an first and it was just incrediable! Beit She'an is located about 40km south of Ein Giv. We had a short bus ride where we passed thru the Jordan River Valley (a very fertile and beautiful land). Beit She'an is an ancient city of the Decapolis and has been excavated and rebuilt partially in the areas that were ruined. Many of these cities that we have visited (and others!) were destroyed by earthquakes.

This picture is of me on an ancient toilet! The men would sit on those stones jutting out and do their business while doing... other business! It was quite the social place where all business was taken care of, politics were discussed, etc. What a different experience!!
Beit She'an was incrediable! It has two bath houses, a huge theatre, shops, houses, and other public buildings. We walked up and down the main streets and went inside the partially built bathhouses, theatre, and shops. In one of the shops there was even a beautiful mosiac of Tyche, the goddess of the city. Another place we visited in this city was the public lavatories. Many of the public buildings (including the lavatories and excluding the theatre) were primarily for men. The lavatories were wonderful meeting places where men went to chat about politics, religion, philisophy, ect. Using the facilities in our culture is a much different experience then it was back then! While we were in Beit She'an we also climbed 172 stairs (roughly...Andrea counted them, but she may have missed a few!) up to an area where we could see the city from an ariel view. Also up there was a building that the Egyptians use. It was the Nile building that the Egyptian governor lived in while he was in Beit She'an. It was so neat being in this city because it looked a lot like Hippos, but this city looked a little bit more like a city than Hippos does yet, so it was a great visual aid for me to see what Hippos may have looked like. As I walked through this city I tried to imagine what it would be like to live here and walk up and down the main street, go into the shops, and live in this ancient city. What a different lifestyle!

That other picture is Kat and I in front of the city in Zippori. This city, like many, where ruined by an earthquake so many of the columns are fallen. Archeology teams similar to mine have reconstructed many parts of this city so visitors can have a better idea of what it may have looked like!

We also went to Zippori (Hebrew), which is also called Sepphoris (Latin or Greek, we're not sure which one). This is most likely Mary, Jesus' mother hometown. It is located about 4km from Nazareth, where Jesus grew up. Most likely Jesus worked in Zippori when he was old enough to get a carpenter's job because in Nazareth, a town of about 20 families, there was not many building projects to do. But Zippori certainly had a need to builders because their city was destroyed by an earthquake and needed to be rebuilt. The first place we saw in Zippori were the Jewish living quarters. We knew they were Jewish because there were about a dozen mikvaoth (Jewish ritual baths that are underground and accessiable by stairs). We also went to the synagouge, a building with several mosiacs in it, ruins of the city, public buildings, and other things similar to Beit She'an. This city was smaller, though.

After touring we came back to the Kibbutz and I worked on some pottery and finished up by sorting, analyzing, and labeling of our small finds! That was wonderful because I had so much to do! It is nice to be caught up. For the next three weeks I will be doing that everyday for just a little bit and just organizing/sorting/etc. what we find that day, not spend a day to do the whole week, so that will be much better for me.

Tonight I sat by the Sea of Galilee watching the sun set and reading a book a bought at one of the sites entitled "Jesus of Galilee" by Y adin Roman. It is a small book with about 40 pages and it has several pictures and information about the sites that pertained to Jesus' life and ministry. Many of the pictures I looked at a saw where a stood while I visited them! That was so incrediable. Other pictures I could look at in the book and then look up and see the site as I sat there. WOW! I am continually amazed at the richness of this land in history and just personal meaning to me because Jesus was here and did so much of his ministry here! It is incrediable to see the past and the present collide and the historical and biblical come together. A quote from the book by Roman a alluded to earlier is this: "The manifestation of God's divine presence to humanity has not only a recorded history but a physical geography, and whereas the former is woven into the long tapestry of the ever-evolving human saga, the latter remains constant. The student in search of a deeper understanding of Jesus' revelations can attempt to wade through the historical records, always obscured by time and interpretation, or he can try to get a feeling for these events by exploring the sites and landscapes where they took place" (2). I am that student that Roman is talking about, searching these sites of history for a glimpse to the past in an effort to understand more about what really happened when God became human and walked this earth. I continually am awed and amazed by the reality of being here and experiencing the wonder of God's creation in addition to the sites where my faith is based from. Wow.

Enjoy the pictures! I am heading off to the site to keep digging, so I will keep you posted about what happens tomorrow at the site. On Thursday about an hour before we had to stop working for the day I found a stone that lies perpendicular to one of the wall of the room we are working on, so one of our agenda items for my square is to figure out what that is from! Stay posted and find out!

PeAcE...

Isn't the architeture of this beautiful?! This is a picture of part of the theatre in Beit She'an. I love the intricate adornment on the top of the columns especially. The tops are called capitals, as I have learned since I have been here.

Watching the sun set over the Sea of Galilee

Hello again! I just came inside from watching the sun set on the Sea of Galilee. What a beautiful sight! Looking at the sea everyday is one of my favorite things about being here. Whether I am up at Hippos in the morning working or swimming in the sea or reading by the sea, I am often awed by it's presence and beauty. There are so many stories about Jesus that center around it and there is so much meaning to this body of water! Besides that, it is absoultly beautiful to watch the sun set over the mountains by the sea. Included above is a pictures taken about 15 minutes ago... it is kind of dark, but there I am sitting by the Sea of Galilee at sunset.

Today was a great day, but busy too! I slept in until 9:00 today, which surprised me considering I have been up every day at 4am! But, I was up until 1am last night. Since the internet came on I was on the computer updating, returning emails, and of course, talking to Mom on line. It was so good to be in contact again with you all!

At 10:30 I came down to the lab to work on pottery chards. As the small finds registrar, one of my duties is to sort, anylyze, and record all of our small finds, including pottery chards, bones, class, roof tiles, ect. There is paperwork to be filled out, pieces to be sorted through, books to reference, and fun things like that! I worked until about 1 when I took a break for lunch. From about 1:30-4 I worked more in the lab and then I took a break to go and swim in the Sea of Galilee. What a refreshing treat! It was hot today, so taking a dip in the water and feeling the huge waves crash against me felt very good. The sea is so beautiful! I know that I keep saying that, but it really is! It is also shallow for a very long time, so it is wonderful to walk out into and just float relax in. Often in the afternoon the waves are high, so that adds a little pizzaz to an afternoon swim. Tonight I watched the sunset after dinner and I am planning on working in the lab a little longer. Tomorrow we are leaving at 8:30am to do some touring, so when I get back from that I will write to you about that!

peace.

Here is a picture of me in Caphernaum. We went there on Saturday while we were touring around the Sea of Galilee. I am standing in front of a house that has been excavated. Right next to it on the left is a house that they believe was Peter's, one of Jesus' disciples. In this house right in front of where I am standing is a likely place where Jesus healed the paralytic, according to the story in the Bible when the man was lifted down from the roof. Caphernaum was a very interesting place to visit!




This other pictures is of me working! Isn't my wall cool?!

Another post for today

Hello! I just posted a long entry, but I thought I would post another one because I didn't include a post from today or yesturday. I didn't write yesturday because I was so exhausted and I was going to write today, but then the internet was working, so I haven't yet. (So now I am.) Waking up at 4am causes me to be very tired by this time of night, so please forgive me if my spelling is worse than usual or if I am not very eloquent. These past two days at the dig have been great, as usual. In our area we have really been moving a lot of dirt! We are about a meter and a half down on the entire square and we are recovering of wall very nicely. I'm not sure if I mentioned this before, but one of the biggest surprises for me coming here was what exactly we would be doing. I thought we would be carefully going through a small square looking for pottary chards and bones and things like that; while that is part of what we will be doing later on in the month, right now we are looking for not pottary or bones, but actual WALLS! I think that is pretty neat. We found a doorway from the room we are working on (on the right side of the church) into the main area of the church, we believe. We will continue digging and we will see what comes of all of our speculations. I have also learned that archeology is a lot of guessing, speculating, making hypothesis, and changing your mind about everything every 20 minutes when you move a little more dirt! Overall this first week has been incrediable and we have moved a lot of dirt and stones! My muscles are certainly getting bigger and I don't have to worry about getting any cardiovascular workout in because I am working out and doing vigerous digging, lifting, and working for 7 hours every morning! I am absolutly LOVING this and I am looking foward to these next three weeks and finding out more of what we find. Tomorrow and and Saturday we will not be working due to the Sabbath, so I will have some time to sleep in (maybe if I am lucky I will sleep past 6!) and relax a little bit. Because I am the small finds registrar (called "The Pottery Priestess" by some members of my team) I will be working in the lab for several hours tomorrow documenting all of our pottery we have found for the past week. On Saturday we will be touring around a little bit and visiting several places. You will hear all about those later! I will write tomorrow and let you know how working in the lab went. I will tell you a little bit more about my job as the small finds registrar then because all I know about it now is that I am in charge of our daily pottery cleaning that we have been doing and making tags to organize our chards at the work site. Anyway! It is bed time for me. More tomorrow...peace.

FINALLY INTERNET!

Hello all! I am in Israel now! I have been here for six days, but unable to use the internet because it has been down on the Kibbutz. But, I have been faithful in writing a blog anyway. I wrote each day on my computer and I am now going to paste all of those writings in this post. This will certainly be a long post, but I hope you enjoy reading it! In summary of this week so far, it has been incrediable! I love Israel and I love digging and working on this site. I have learned so much already and seen so many amazing sites. It is pretty neat to be able to swim in the Sea of Galilee and tour around and dig in a church and discovery secrets of the past from centuries ago! I am looking foward to writing to you EVERY DAY now and hopefully the internet will stay working. Here are my posts for the past week...

SATURDAY, JULY 2, 2005
Shalom from Israel! I am so excited to be writing to you from this beautiful place, rich in history, magnificent beauty, and historic, mysterious places that we will be delving into in order to understand the past better and our ancestors of the faith.

We arrived yesterday (Friday) at about 4:30pm Israel time. For those of you in Michigan it was 9:30am and those of you in Minnesota it was 8:30am. (Sorry if I am leaving out any time zones or states!! J) When we flew into Tel Aviv’s airport, Ben Gurion, I caught the first glimpse of this country. Although we were far on the outskirts of Tel Aviv, I could see it in the distance. After the 9.5 hour flight from Newark to Tel Aviv and an 8 hour time difference, I was a little bit tired upon arrival, but the bright sunshine and my excitement outweighed my fatigue. We boarded a bus after we found our luggage (and searched for Mark, another member of our team … he was stuck in Paris and will be arriving today). As we rode from Tel Aviv to En Gev (meaning “Springs of Gev”), Dr. Schuler pointed out several places from the Bible.

Throughout the ride we got a little taste of what Israel is like; the mountains run east to west in Israel with valleys between them. There were areas of flat plains and areas of rugged mountains. Our two hour bus drive ended after we passed the Golan Heights, the mountain range that is internationally recognized as the separation barrier between Israel and Syria. Our Kabutz is located right on the eastern side of the Sea of Galilee and from my balcony I can see Hippos (the city we are excavating) and the Golan Heights to the East of me and the Sea of Galilee to the west of me.

Today was a very exciting day! We had breakfast together (yes, Dad, I ate humus and will be forced to enjoy it!!). We all boarded a bus at 8:30 and headed for our first destination of a long and interesting day of touring around the Sea of Galilee. Our first order of business was to check out the site! We drove up the mountain to the Sussita (meaning “little horse”) National Park, which is where the ancient city of Hippos is located. Prior to this trip, I did not have much of an idea of what this ancient city or church looked like. Any prior ideas I had about the site were completely different! I was very pleasantly surprised and hugely impressed. We hiked a bit up to the site; during this hike (in the very hot and humid temperatures of Israel!) Dr. Schuler pointed out several interesting things along the path, including a stone pipeline that the ancient people built, going more than 10km in order to bring water from the Golan Heights to Hippos. A city must have two things: water and a defensible location. This fixed the water situation and we could clearly see that the defensible location was already taken care of! Hippos was located on the top of a mountain (300 meters above sea level … does that make it a mountain? I’m not sure, but that is the elevation). On the south and north sides of the city there are plummeting cliffs that kept the enemies out. There was also evidence of a mote (different that medieval castle motes with water … these were big trenches that forced the enemy to build a bridge in order to get to the city). After hiking up to the city, we first saw the entrance and saw where the main road of the city was reconstructed. Apparently in these cities the main road would run north to south, but in this city the main road ran from east to west instead because of the location of the city. In the ancient city of Hippos there was a cathedral, temple, and at least two churches. This city was destroyed by an earthquake; by looking at the remains of the cathedral, you could tell this very easily because the huge pillars that were in the church all fell at the same angle. The site was fascinating! There has been much archeology work done there already. From looking at the different sites of the cathedral, temple, and two churches we could already tell a lot about what this ancient city probably looked like. The site that we are excavating is one of the churches. It is the Northeast Church of the city. It was so exciting going and seeing what we could be digging! Much has already been uncovered there and there is still much to discover. All of these buildings are in different stages of the archeological process and it was so neat to compare them and see what may be discovered and what the church we are excavating may look like after we dig some dirt up!

After leaving our site we went to several other sites today, including the commemoration sites of the feeding of the 5000 and when Jesus caused a demon-possessed man to be cured by making the demon go into the swine. We also visited Capernaum, Jesuis’ hometown, and saw were Peter’s house likely was located. That was so amazing! It was incredible to be looking at the Sea of Galilee and be walking down the streets of where Jesus grew up and walked everyday while he was here on earth! We went to a few other churches and a reconstructed church at a monastery of what the churches that we are discovering at Hippos most likely looked like. What I found interesting was the layout of the churches. The front part of the church were the alter is located is called the aps and the aps is a half-circular area where the alter would be. Then there are three aisles in the church, separated by two rows of columns (the columns on the cathedral in Hippos was most likely 5.5 stories high … this is calculated because the columns were 9-10 times high as they were wide) and those columns consist of a base, the pillar, the capital (which is the decorative, top part of the pillar) and then a piece that connects all of the pillar together (I can’t remember the name of that). Then on either side of the churches there were often rooms where oil or olive presses may have been or rooms to store pottery. One of the projects we will be working on at our church is to excavate one of the rooms on the north side of the church because we have not unearthed it yet. We have no idea what we will find there!

I am writing this at 10pm on Saturday night. I am so exhausted from the day (and only getting a few hours sleep last night because of the time change). I just set my alarm for 4:20 so I can be out in the parking lot to head up to the work site at 4:45 tomorrow. I am very excited for tomorrow and the first day of the excavation! Stay posted!! Peace.

10:0 pm Sunday

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SUNDAY, JULY 3, 2005
Well, one day of work is over! What a fun and exciting day! Kat and I woke up at 4:30 and got dressed in our work clothes, wool socks, work boots and headed out to the parking lot in the dark with our backpacks on our backs and our 4 liters of water in hand. We soon found at (as we were walking toward the parking lot on the pathway that connected all of the buildings on the Kibbutz) that Andrea and Rachel were locked inside there rooms.

I guess I haven’t explained the room situation to you, have I?! Our team has been given several “apartments” on the second floor of a complex. We have all five rooms on the floor. Andrea and Rachel live in the first one, Kat and I live in the second one, PJ and Mark live in the third one, and Bill lives in the fourth one. The fifth one will be occupied when more of our teammates come in later weeks. On the first morning (yesterday) Kat and I had an especially difficult time getting our door open! You see, locks here in Israel lock the doors from the inside and outside with the key. It took Kat and I almost 15 minutes to get our key to work to get out of our room! Andrea and Rachel had the same problem this morning, except their key broke while it was inside the door! Finally by breakfast time (halfway into the digging day) they were freed and able to come and work.

Anyway … back to the day! We boarded the bus without Andrea and Rachel and rode up to the site with the Polish team and Israel team. Upon arriving at the site it was just beginning to become light and by the time we made our way up the mountain to the entrance of the ancient city it was bright (and 5am!). I was so surprised how quickly it got light and how light it was so early in the day.

At the site we started by pulling weeds in the church and on the walls of the church that has been excavated thus far. There were some large plants that were very difficult to dig up and some picky plants. I now have a brand new perspective on the story that Jesus told about sowing seeds in rocky soil, thorns and thistles, on the path, and in good soil. I certainly have experienced all of that already! Just a side note: there are so many small details about life or the land or things that I experience that help to clarify and give me a much better perspective about Biblical allusions. That is one of the neatest things that I have discovered so far! Anyway, as I go back on track … after weeding we carried several large poles and tools, etc. from the headquarters area (where we also eat breakfast) to our site. It was about a 300 meter walk from the two areas. We used the large poles to create tent-like structures (squares or rectangles) over the work area that we will be digging in order to create shade while we work. Shade is such a wonderful asset to any work site and it almost crucial in order to be able to work. By 6:30 or 7 the sun was blistering hot, but that shade certainly was helpful. After we got the shade up we worked on two work areas: one was on the left side of the church near the back in one of the outer rooms. They believe it was used as a kitchen because in previous digs the pottery chards that were found were from kitchen pottery. The other area that we worked on was on the right side of the church up at the very front. This is where I worked all day and the first thing that we had to do was to mark off the 5x5m area. Our entire worksite is divided up into these 5x5m squares that I use for recording the findings, etc. (I am the site registrar for small finds. I’ll tell you more about that later!) This area that we were digging in was completely covered with huge stones, weeds, small stones, dirt, and debris. We cleared it off by first pulling some weeds by hand. Then we got tereas (a special kind of hoe; pronounced tu-ree-a; it rhymes with Maria) and did some more hard core digging and pulling of weeds. Then we made our first big and exciting discover of the year! Kat, PJ, and I were digging in our area attempting to clear the debris and we found a wall! The wall is parallel to the wall on the other side of the church, but finding this wall (several large rocks places neatly next to each other in a smooth fashion) indicates to us that there is probably rooms on this side of the church too! That is so exciting because that means that there is so much more to dig up and discover. And Dr. Schuler was very excited and proud of us, so that was nice too. We continued clearing the debris. When we overturned the large rocks to move them, we had to check and make sure that there were no scorpions underneath them! I saw one scorpion today, but he got away before I could kill him. That was probably the scariest part because I don’t like poisonous, creepy, black, huge BUGS! Eh … I am learning to defend myself against those mean guys, though. For the rest of the day we cleared out that area and shoveled a lot of dirt and rocks out. It looks good for one day! Dr. Schuler was pleasantly surprised with how much we got done today.

Oh, I forgot to tell you about breakfast! All through the day it seemed much later than it was because we started so early. When we ate breakfast I felt like we were eating lunch because we had already been working for 3.5 hours. (I did eat a granola bar before going to work that morning, though, because I was hungry and until you eat something your organs don’t wake up and I wanted to make sure my organs were awake during those first three hours of work!) For breakfast, though, I ate bread that was prepared kind of like French toast, a hard boiled egg, cucumber and tomatoes (diced and mixed together … this vegetable mixture is apparently the typical “Israel breakfast”), a peach (it tasted like a peach-apple, though), and some sautéed onions. Talk about an interesting breakfast! I’m trying to get all of my food groups in though, because I want to make sure I am eating nutritionally and healthy.

After work as we were heading down the mountain to the bus to go back to the Kibutz my boot decided to fall apart and the entire sole came off! That was terrible because the layer between my foot and the ground was very soft. It felt like I was walking in slippers all the way down the mountain on the rocks! But, my feet didn’t cut too badly. At the bottom of the mountain my other sole fell off! It was quite disastrous for my boots today, but I did surgery on them when I got back. Good thing Bill brought “Shoe Goo.” I am attempting to repair them, but I might have to go to Tiberius and purchase some new boots. We’ll see how this goes!

Right now I am sitting in my room after lunch. Kat and I are going to go down to the Sea of Galilee for a swim and then we are going to shower before we have pottery cleaning at 5:30 and supper at 6:30 and church at 7:30.

Overall, it was a fantastic day! I am so excited to continue working and discovering what else is at our site. I am also very excited to see where they wall leads to that we found today. Even after just one day of work I can tell this is going to be a very exciting, rewarding, and adventurous experience with a lot of unpredictability. Until later, peace!

P.S. Just to let you know, Mom, my first and only blister is on my finger, not my feet!! I’ll send you a picture later. J
P.P.S. Thanks already for all of the emails! I would love to hear from you, so email me at thompsoe@csp.edu and let me know that you are following the dig. I will respond to you all, but it may be short. Thanks!!

3:24pm Sunday


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MONDAY, JULY 4, 2005
Today was yet another wonderful and exciting day! Unfortunately, when I woke up and checked my boots to see if my surgery on them was successful, I saw that it was not. The soles on both of my shoes came off yesterday and I cleaned the surfaces and applied “Shoe Goo” and put rubber bands on them and put them under lots of pressure (a chair and a bench!). To my disappointment, the goo did not stick in the front and both soles kept popping off in the front. Luckily PJ had some tennis shoes that almost fit me, so after two pairs of wool socks, I was ready to dig! I am leaving in a little bit to go to Tiberius in order to buy a new pair of boots.

Today the dig site was very exciting. Despite the poor traction with the tennis shoes, I worked very hard and the team got a lot done. We worked in the same areas as yesterday, so I was back to the southeast front corner of the church. At the beginning of the day about a meter of the wall was visible on the surface and by the end of the day we dug a meter down and had 4.5 meters dug out. We are working in a 5x5m area and almost the entire square is level about 1 meter down from the top of the wall. It is so amazing to be a part of this! One of my misconceptions about this trip was that we would be digging for pottery chards, glass, tiles, bones, etc. That is not really the case! We certainly do find all of those things and we keep them and record them and analyze them, but the big part of this dig is actually digging up the walls and finding the floors, etc. That is so much more exciting! Today was especially rewarding because we went from having almost nothing uncovered to digging down a whole meter. Dr. Schuler was very impressed with how much we dug and I was surprised with how much quick progress we made! This job was not easy, though. The digging was rigorous, especially in the heat and sun. There was hardly any wind today (we could even see that the Sea of Galilee was not moving at all!). Anyway, today we mostly used the tereas to move the dirt, stones, and rocks out of the way. We made a huge pile of dirt and stones. Some of the stones were incredible heavy and many were huge! There were many stones that were stuck in the ground pretty deep and we had to wedge them and pull them and push them and maneuver them until they came out. According to Dr. Schuler we had to “have a love conversation with the rock” and provide it “a little gentle persuasion” … apparently this is very technical archeology talk … or just crazy talk! Hahaha, just kidding Dr. Schuler!

We also found a scorpion today! (Again!) This time I found it and I let Dr. Schuler kill it. Kat scraped the remains into a bucket and threw it on our dirt pile. It was a huge one, though! It was 3 inches and very black and nasty. We have to be careful overturning the large rocks. The crawl fast, but the Crowbar (as we call Dr. Schuler) swiftly killed it. Speaking of little critters, there are a lot of bugs around the site. The most interesting one (I think) are the beetles. They are huge! They are bigger then any junebug I have ever seen in the states; they are about 1.5 inches long. I generally try to dig around them because they get kicked out of their homes when we dig up the dirt, but sometimes I accidentally chop one of their heads off. We also see a plethora of different types of spiders, centipedes, smaller beetles, bees, flies, and other insects. I used to be pretty paranoid of any type of bug (especially spiders), but my trips overseas have definitely helped cure that phobia a little bit. This trip especially! I think that I am most cautious of the scorpions (because they are poisonous), so the other bugs and arachnids don’t really bother me anymore.

After we got back from digging we cleaned up a little (cleaning up for me includes washing my hands) and went to lunch. After lunch Kat, Rachel, PJ, and I went swimming in the sea. It was such a beautiful day! I love swimming in the Sea of Galilee. It is so refreshing and wonderful. After swimming for about an hour Kat and I went back to our room and took showers. Then I wrote this down and I am leaving in a few minutes for Tiberius to buy boots! More later. Peace.

Monday 4:24pm

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TUESDAY, JULY 5, 2005
Whew! What an exhausting but fun day! When my alarm rang at 4:15 this morning I knew it was going to be a loooong day. My body ached when I sat up in bed and I had to fight to keep my eyes open and not reset or ignore my alarm. After I woke Kat up we stumbled out of bed and got ready for the day. Of course, one exciting part of the get-ready routine was my new boots! Yes, I went to Tiberius yesterday to purchase a new pair of boots to replace my broken-soled boots. That was quite an experience in itself! One of the members of the Kibbutz, Yo-val (spelled phonetically… I have no idea how to spell his name!), drove myself and three members of the Polish team to Tiberius. It is a 25 minute drive because we have to go around the south shore of the Sea of Galilee. (Tiberius is right across the lake from the Kibbutz.) When we got there we parked and walked to the shoe store together. We had to go to a few stores until I found a store that sold anything that resembled work boots. Finally we found one that had Coleman work boots. They were originally 439 shekels, but because it was summer he gave me a deal and sold them to me for 380 shekels. What a deal! He spoke all Hewbrew and I don’t speak any, but Yo-val translated for me and all went smoothly. So, I got my fabulous, comfortable, well-working boots!

Anyway… today was such a crazy day because of the weather. When we first got up to the site it was very cloudy and it wasn’t very hot. According to the weather report on the radio they were expecting the all-time low temperature of the summer. That report came true and the thermometer clocked in only a mere 85 degrees by 9am. It was “cool” all morning with a slight breeze, cloud cover until about 10:30, and it even sprinkled for a few minutes. Dr. Schuler, in his five years of working here, has never seen in sprinkle in the dry season. (Israel has two seasons, rainy season and dry season; rainy season is from November thru February and dry season is the rest of the year. It seldom rains in the dry season!) But, all this weather nonsense has a point… the day was a beautiful day to work because it wasn’t as hot or sunny so we could work a little harder without getting so dehydrated and tired. But, like I said before, I was tired when I woke up, so I was quite tired when we finished work anyway.

Speaking of work, we did quite a bit of that today! Every day is just more and more exciting because we are making such quick progress and discovering so many things! Today we worked on defining out square a lot more. Yesterday we had two sides very well defined and about 1 meter deep, but the other two sides were not defined or even marked out very well at all. So we focused on those two sides and we evened out the entire square. That was quite a bit of hard work and precision because those two walls are not walls of the church, they are just walls that we must create in order to maintain our 5x5m square. After we get that dug out we will continue working on the rest of the site and see what lies beyond our square, but we cannot do that yet because in archeology we have to work the method and stick to the method. (As Dr. Schuler said, but in different words.) So, we did a lot of picking (with a big pick, which is a very large and heavy tool with a very pointy end that we can get into small areas and wedge rocks out, etc.), removing large stones, and removing dirt. We remove the dirt and smaller rocks with the tereas and hoe the dirt into buckets to remove it from the site. Then there is someone who is responsible for just carrying the buckets to the dumping site. There are four people working on this square (myself, Kat, Mark, and Bill), so we rotate between picking, tereaing (That is a made up work by us… it is only supposed to be a noun, but we like using it as a verb. Dr. Schuler says we shouldn’t make it into a verb, but we like it as a verb. Two people terea.), and carrying the buckets.

After working today we all went to lunch and then Kat and I decided that we ought to wash our clothes in the Sea of Galilee. We wanted to wash some of our clothes because the laundry services here at the Kibbutz aren’t very good for the nicer clothes. So we bought some laundry soap at the general store and headed to the sea with our dirty clothes. It was quite an interesting process. It entailed Kat and I going into the sea with all of our clothes and coming out completely soaked, although we were only in about 1.5 feet deep! Besides our part of this process, we had quite a few onlookers who were looking at us like we were crazy. There was one particular lady who kept looking at us the whole time. I suppose it was a pretty funny sight to see two Americans washing their clothes in the sea and getting soaked by the huge waves coming ashore! But anyway, our clothes got fairly clean and I just got them off the clothes line and they dried, but it is not a pleasant feeling to be washing our clothes with wet shorts on! But, clean clothes are in our closet and we survived! I’m sure we’ll be out there again with our dirty clothes.

This afternoon after washing our clothes Kat and I tided up our living quarters because a new member of our team, Linda, will be arriving this evening. We cleaned pottery chards this afternoon and ate dinner and relaxed for a little bit. Then we showered and ready for bed. It is now 9:08 and my bedtime because we have another day of work tomorrow! So long and farewell.

Tuesday 9:08pm

Technical difficulties

Hello to all of those who have been trying to follow the trip!

I am fulfilling a request made by one Erin Thompson to let you all know that there is currently no internet available for the Hippos crew. They will update as soon as possible. If anyone is worried, rest assured, they are safe.

Keep checking the blog and praying for the crew. God bless.