Archaeology is really, really dirty work. Though this statement may not seem profound, it so entirely true that it approaches an understatement. Ancient civilizations are buried under foot after foot of dirt, fill, rocks, and boulders. All of this must be carefully dug and hauled away in order to expose the structures, possessions, and even bones of societies that date back hundreds of years. Large and small pick-axes, masonry trowels, buckets, and turrea( a backwards shovel that scoops dirt and small rocks into buckets) all come in handy as archaeologists excavate metered squares surrounding known and unknown ruins. The most important though is patience; dirt is removed one bucket at a time while great care is taken to spot buried pottery shards, glass, bone, and walls. I digress……haha, I was talking about dirty work: dirt everywhere, even up your nose, ewwwwwwww. It comes off—in the Sea of Galilee yay!!!!
Today was the second day of the dig, exciting huh? I have the esteemed privilege of working with Queen Rachel our fearless leader, to uncover the street near the northeast church, CSP’s main project. As said before archaelogy is very slow, dirty, physically exhausting, and overall satisfying work. Our square is 5x5 meters and now about a foot or so deep—and chock full of boulders! Apparently, the area we are digging was previously filled with large rocks, either to block something, or to get them out of the way during earlier excavation (I’ll have to find that out). Pottery shards are common and range in size from one centimeter squared to several inches; it’s exciting to find the pot handles, but not the scorpions, nasty little buggers. We have also found several pieces of roman glass, usually blue green in color and covered in a whitish dust. Though other squares have recovered bones, we have not yet, and likely will not as our area is a street and not near the burial chambers which were discovered. Time to scrub pottery! More on that tomorrow. Sorry about the lack of pictures still, I’ll get that figured out soon.