Fun in the Sun

So, I like to keep it spicy with keeping my posts spread out every couple of days. I am by no means a Kinzie, diligently documenting every day in great detail, but I do like to envision myself doing better than some other fellas. Sorry guys. Let's start out by picking up on Tuesday. It was similar to Monday because we were up at 4 looking for sunlight so we could find our way around in the fields. We finally found it around 5 and began by going back to the tomb we had found the previous day to do one more measurement that we forgot. Then a local guy drove by and stopped, usually they are just interested to know what we are doing. However, this guy actually owned many of the fields that we had surveyed in the previous year. We were looking for two wells this year that needed to be put into the GPS database for a book someone is writing. The only thing we had to go from was two pictures taken back in the early 8os. The guy in the picture happened to be this guy so he was able to tell us the location of the wells. The first well was located close to the Arab village that used to be on the western side of the tel in the early part of the 20th century, Abu Shushah. His dad had blown up the well entrance though after they gained rights to the land because the bedouin were coming there and watering their animals that were eating all their crops! The second well was located further away from the tel and he actually took us there to the spot where it was. This well was closed off back in 1917 so he didn't have a great grasp on where it was exactly, but he said in the winter time it overflows and there is quite a bit of water coming out of this spot. So we GPSd both locations and continued on our day. We worked on a few orchards and found pottery here and there. Then we called it a day. By the way our word of the day for Tuesday was acerbic. It was used at least 7 times in different contexts. Good job guys.

Wednesday we started out the day going close to the spot of the tomb to work on a field that had recently been bulldozed off. This provides us with an almost 100% visibility. What we came to notice though is that it was difficult to spot the pottery pieces because they were turned over with the dirt and took on the same color of the dirt. We did find some interesting pieces that should provide some interesting times during pottery reading. We then continued on to a new orchard that we thought had not been covered. This came to be not true. Mainly because we found the same cistern that had been previously noted on their survey map from three years prior. After figuring this out we took a break where I found a grinding stone and other neat pottery pieces. Then after break we continued on down the hill to cover a berm. If you don't know anything about berms the one thing you would be sure of is that they are never groomed or taken care of in any way. There are usually boulders pushed from the fields to these areas and covered in very high weeds, but they produce some of the most rewarding things. Well, this berm was no different. We found a few more cisterns and perhaps even a tomb. Unfortunately after we found all of these the GPS crashed and so we had to call it a day. It was around 11:30 though and close enough to the end of the work day. Since I had not been to the grocery store since I got here we stopped by at Karme Yosef and I was able to pick up some goodies to last me the rest of the time. Mainly bread and fake Nutella. We also had a little time to swim since they pushed lunch back to 2. After talking to Kinzie and the kids a little bit as you can see in the previous blog, the rest of my day was busy. Basically a full day. The word of the day was propitious and as you can see earlier was used to describe many opportunities we had during the day.

Today was a little different because we went out to the field 30 mins. later and that made all the difference in being awake and ready to go. The sun was already up by the time we got there and we started by going down to GPS some of the features we located the day before. Then we ran into some emergency bathroom time and hoofed it to the other side of the tel to hit up the porta-johns. After a few minutes there taking time to give the excavation a grace of our presence we headed out to cover a large field that seemed to go on for forever. It almost did because it lasted us the rest of the day to complete. I think we pulled ALMOST 20 pottery pieces out of it. Which for that size is very few. We then came back to Neve Shalom and took showers and ate lunch then immediately after lunch we went straight to work washing pottery and then cataloging the material culture remains (which is everything that is not pottery but fashioned by humans). This took us straight up until dinner and then here I am writing you the story of Survey in Israel. We didn't have a word for today. Maybe tomorrow. Hopefully I have kept you on the edge of your seats. If it helps please turn your air conditioning off and put on 20 pounds of extra weight to get the sense of walking around in the fields all day. Maybe throw in a few thousand bugs and the threat of coming upon a palestinian viper or two. There you have it, what you have all been anxiously awaiting.

I will leave you with a link to some new pictures and check out these others I have posted since last blog.