Guess what we found?

Today was a good day...we found three big installations.
First, the weather has been beautiful, unless you run you dont sweat, and this morning I got chill bumps on the Tel!!!
We started by surveying a large pomegranate orchard. We found loads of pottery and the remains of a mosaic floor from Abu shusha, an old Arab village that was on the side of Tel Gezer after ancient times.
Then we headed to a unkept olive orchard and walked through high weeds!!! About two seconds into it Adam saw a VIPER!!!! He is the first one to ever see a snake while surveying..and this is year four for them!! He said it was very thick and had brown diamonds on its back. He also said it moved very fast away from him but not as fast as I moved. I was in weeds up to my elbows and booked it out. The rest of the day I stayed beside my friend Shannon and we moved as a team!
After that excitement we continued into the field and started flagging tons of bedrock that either had quarry marks, drains or other features cut into them. The first thing we found was a weighted olive oil press with a cistern at the bottom. We started cleaning off weeds and brushing everything off so we could process it. Next we found a rolling stone olive press. You could see where the pole would be inserted in the middle with a stone tied to it to roll around on top of the olives.
About 15 feet Northwest of that we found the largest wine press I have ever seen. It was about 6.0 meters long and probaly close to that wide. There were several vats and drains running off of the main basin. We also found a cup hole to hold a vesse. Those three installations took the rest of the day to process. We had to clean several weeds and clean just a little to actually see the edges of the bedrock. All of these features were within 15-20 feet of each other so you can see that we were probably in the industrial part of Tel Gezer.

On a side note, one of our friends flew over to Israel on the same plane as Rihanna. He was bumped to first class and sat on the other side of her bodyguard!!!