Doodles in the Dirt

So I guess I can tell you a little more about yesterday's find than I thought when I wrote yesterday's post. No pictures yet, but I can share with you that the item I found was a limestone building-stone that bore, on its plastered surface, a painted image of a woman's face. And not just any face, either, but the face of the goddess Tyche, or "Fortune." It was easy to tell it was her, because she's wearing her characteristic corona muralis, or "wall-crown"--a crown which, instead of having points along the top of it, has a series of zig-zags like the walls of a city. That's why she was the patron-- the specially adopted deity-- of many cities in Roman times.

Here she was, maybe ¾ life size, painted in red and yellow on the white plaster covering this stone! It's not a complete portrait, but most of her face is present and about half of the crown. And the artistry is simply stunning, just beautiful work. The eyes are so vivid it's amazing.

I can hardly describe what a huge shock it was to see her. I turned over a stone like a thousand others and couldn't help crying out, "It's a face!" Of course we instantly called Doc Schuler, who took one look and instantly called Arthur Segal, who's the head of the whole Hippos project. Both of them were ecstatic. Doc Schuler, in fact, was visibly moved; the portrait seemed to have quite an emotional impact on him.

To some extent I think that was because the image is so well-done, but mostly because a human image of any sort is just the kind of thing archaeologists dream about finding. The power of a face is automatic: one glance and you feel a sense of connection, across 13 centuries. I was thinking about that later. If this was a painting of anything else-- an animal, a building, a scene in nature-- it would only have a fraction of the power that a human face has. It could have been something far more significant, archaeologically or historically speaking, but it wouldn't have the instant drawing-power or emotional impact of a face. Isn't that true?

The painting came to the surface about 7:15 yesterday morning. The rest of my work-day was consumed by that find--mostly, painstakingly and gingerly combing through the surrounding area looking for more bits of painted plaster that might help Eva, the head conservationist, reconstruct a bit more of the portrait. Arieh the ceramicist helped me for quite a while on this project; I learned some helpful tricks from him since I hadn't done such delicate work before.

Arieh, Russian-born ceramicist at the University of Haifa who works with the Concordia team.  

There were lots of plaster bits, and because we didn't finish collecting them yesterday, I returned to that task first thing this morning for another hour. The problem is, these bits are tiny, and not side by side or connected to each other, but strewn through the dirt, facing at all different angles. They must have broken off the stones they were attached to, as those stones fell in the earthquake, landing all over the place in this part of the square. You can imagine what a job it was to collect them!

Two of these plaster bits have paint on them, one with red and one with yellow. Can you spot them? (There's nothing to give you a sense of scale in the picture, but each plaster fragment is about the size of my smallest fingernail.)

It was a little disappointing to hear, yesterday afternoon, that few if any of these fragments seem to be from the portrait itself. They may, however, have come from other parts of the same scene, which was obviously painted upon many plastered stones, not just this one. It just so happened that this was the only stone to retain its fresco intact, by landing in exactly the right position-- flat to the floor, a couple of cm above it, and upside-down-- for its plaster and paint to survive. All the other stones that carried other parts of the scene probably just deteriorated over time. In fact, we pulled out plenty of deteriorated limestone blocks that bore no traces of anything significant, not even paint of any kind, throughout this whole area. Talk about the "accidents of history"!

Once I finished searching for these last bits of the fresco, the rest of our team moved into this part of our square and got to work. The first task was to remove all of the dirt that had earlier been piled on top of the opus sectile marble floor (a black-and-white diamond pattern) to protect it, so photos could now be taken. This was a lot harder to do than I expected, because the floor isn't even close to flat, making it tough to know where the "fill" ended and the floor itself began. I don't think we damaged it significantly by uncovering it, but it certainly was challenging work.

If it was wet, you could see the black-and-white pattern in these diamond-shaped floor tiles very well.

That done, the next and more interesting task was uncovering the mosaic floor that surrounds the fountain-fed pool. We were dying to know so many things about this floor, which had never before been exposed. What shape it was in? Were any sections damaged, and if so how badly? Was it just plain white squares, or patterned? If patterned, what was the design? Did it contain any images, or was it only geometric designs? Most of all, would it have an inscription?

Thankfully the job went quite quickly, both because the floor was in good shape and because the only part we have access to right now is fairly small. More of the floor is hidden beyond the edge of our square, buried under 2 metres of rubble. But what we can see is gorgeous, including many different colours of tessarae (the little cubes of stone) that make up a fairly complex geometric pattern. No images of animals, plants, or people. No inscription. But wow!--what a stunning floor, all the same.

Detail of one end of the mosaic.

Overview of the mosaic. I wonder what the design is like as it continues beneath the baulk?

And that was about it for the day. Doc Schuler took "official" photos of every nook and cranny of the site while the rest of us went on an hour-long walking tour of Hippos. The highlights were of course seeing what the University of Haifa people had been working on all season. Some of them uncovered more of the city's enormous and very well-made basilica. Its excavation began a couple of years ago and isn't finished yet. Other Haifa people excavated a steeply sloping area next to the city's north wall. Another group did the same next to the south wall; I think the structure they were working on was a military bathhouse. A fourth group worked on the odeon, the small but jewel-like theatre that our Canadian group had been shown by Arthur Segal on their last day on-site. After welcoming these colleagues to our site many times during the last couple of weeks, and enjoying their appreciative "oohs" and "ahhs" over the columned hall and pool-and-fountain, it was great to see what they'd been working on too.

Tour and photos done, we set up our bucket-line in reverse. Some days ago we used this system to haul most of the rubble and dirt out of ZZ-99, the area with the marble black-and-white floor. Now we filled up our buckets from the soft dust of the road up top, and passed them down into the hole, one by one, to carefully cover up both this marble floor and the new mosaic floor we'd just spent so much effort digging down to, and exposing. We then also covered up the pool as well as we could, given the limited materials and short time available.

The covered-up floors and pool. We'll see how well the pool covering lasts--the goal is to keep it protected until next summer's dig.

If this seems crazy to you, there's a double purpose behind this madness. First: to protect the floors from accidental cave-ins, as well as the winter rains that can apparently do significant damage to delicate surfaces. Second: to keep tourists from damaging the floors (and pool) until they can be properly conserved. When they're properly treated, ancient mosaics can withstand normal tourist traffic with no problem. But without stabilization, proper coatings, and so forth, they can also disintegrate very quickly from careless use.

And that's it, I guess. The 2010 dig season is finished. We gathered up all our gear and equipment, storing the "permanent" items in the old barracks and carrying the rest down to the kibbutz with us on the bus. We lunched, showered, claimed our clothes in the season's last laundry free-for-all, napped, and started packing for tomorrow's flights home. The last item on our collective agenda before we leave at various times tomorrow is dinner tonight at the kibbutz' "fish restaurant."

The columned hall, viewed from the south. Almost everything you see in this hall (which is on the right-hand 2/3 of the photo) was excavated in the last four weeks.

"The chamber of the pool" (its probable official name) from the north. Pretty much everything in this picture too, beside and beyond Doc Schuler is standing, came to light since 1 July.

After all the intensity of the past four weeks, it's hard to believe the dig is done. Our bodies are thankful, since many of us have started to pay the price of all of this heavy exertion in the last few days. Our emotions are thankful in many ways too, for the prospect of getting back home. But as you might expect, there's a kind of deflating feeling that goes along with this ending too. No more small finds--not to mention big ones! No more practical jokes, kibitzing, clowning around, story-telling. And most of all, perhaps, no more reflecting on Jesus' ministry in the region where it took place, and on the life of the earliest churches in the place where one of them formed and sustained its collective life for at least four centuries.

We'll take home with us, though, memories of all of this--and a changed perspective. And when all is said and done, that's enough, and even more important than all the spectacular copper decanters, glass jars, reconstructed pots, mosaic floors, and portraits of Roman goddesses that have ever come out of the ground.

Big day today, in fact one of the biggest ever on the North-East Church project. Not only because it was the last normal dig-day of the season, though that was definitely part of its specialness to us who have been toiling here for four weeks now. The fact that the end is near, and we'll be able to fly home in two days to our families, home cooking, and our own beds, was a very special cause for rejoicing today for sure! But even more than that, today was a big day because of what came to light today in our square, close to the floor in front of the plastered pool that's fed by the semi-circular fountain.

About that pool: You might have noticed that one or two of yesterday's photos were taken in full sun, not the shade that our tarps always create over our working area. That's because Arthur Segal, the director of the overall dig, was leading a big tour group through the site at 5:00 pm yesterday and asked us to take down of our screens so people could see our site without impediment. Logical, but a pain, not because they were so hard to take down (it was a 10-minute job) but because we'd have to turn right around and put them back up this morning, for the last two days of the season.

Anyway, Arthur came by this morning to tell us that the tour went very well and that the 140 people on it (!) were moved, as a group, by only one thing that they saw in the city: this large, impressive house that we are excavating. "We showed them the beautiful theatre, and impressive buildings all over," Arthur said, "and there was almost nothing for response. But here! They saw this pool, they saw this room, they saw these columns, and they could tell that people lived here. They could see, they could understand, the people who lived here."

One photo can't cover it all, but this is part of what our visitors saw: the fountain-room (left) and the colonnaded courtyard (right).

And that's what archaeology is all about I guess: helping folks in our day, so pre-occupied with our own ingenuity, understand that other people actually did live before us. And they too had "real lives," in many ways just as sophisticated and rich as ours. Seeing this room with its fountain and pool, just around the corner from the beautiful columned courtyard, brought that message home to Arthur's group yesterday. Awesome!

So here we were this morning, working in that same room with the pool, trying to nibble our way down through the rubble toward the mosaic floor that we'd uncovered two corners of yesterday. In between was a huge monolithic column close to 3 metres long, far too big to be moved by hand. So while our tarps were down anyway, we got Talal to come by, first thing in the morning, to give that thing a tug with his tractor. He pulled and pulled, making the woven strap protest so loudly that we seriously thought it might break, but finally, ever so slowly, the column started to move. Within a couple of minutes, he had pulled it straight right out of the baulk that its upper end was embedded in, and lifted it free from the site.

The fun begins: A long steady pull on this 291-cm-long column, with a bit of a sideways wiggle, brought it out from its 8th-century entombment.

And that, see, freed us up to keep working down toward the floor. This was to be my main job today, with Christine and Meg helping me, so we articulated the big stones by clearing away all the loose dirt and small stones around them, scooping out the removable material bucket-load by bucket-load. I was working away in just this way, close to floor level in front of the pool, when all of a sudden I came across....

Well, I'm actually not allowed to tell you what it was, pending an official announcement that will likely be made next week by the University of Haifa. But it was very, very cool. It won't change the history of the world, and probably not even the history of Hippos, but it was another one of those "wow" moments in archaeology where our present generation could instantly connect across the centuries with people long gone. Sort of like this fountain / pool / courtyard complex did with Arthur's tour guests, only in a different way.

Mark Schuler (with hat), Arthur Segal (black shirt), Darryl (grey singlet) and others admire the special find.

In some ways, the big response that this find generated struck me as really quite curious. It's not like any of us made this artifact. All we did was stumble upon it while digging. And yet because of its ability to communicate cross-culturally, it touched us instantly and powerfully. "People lived here too!" We too could see, and understand, a tiny bit more about their lives than we had previously been able to do.

When permission is granted, I'll be glad to share with you photos and a description of what this item is. For now, I've told you all that I can. Sorry!

Not too long before this momentous event, though, and in the same general area, I had the great joy of making my first-ever "small find." Yep--I've been here for parts of 3 seasons now, and today was the first time I myself ever turned up anything significant from Hippos' past. The closest I cam until today was a nail a couple of years ago. Within a couple of hours of that find, though, Doc Schuler quietly told me that it was a modern nail that had somehow found its way down into our site. Dang!

So today's find was definitely exciting. It was probably just a spindle whorl--a black stone disk, flat on one side and convex on the other, with a small line curving around the perimeter on the rounded side and a hole bored through the centre. But I was quite elated. I told people, "This is my first-ever small find!" and made sure Ted took a picture of me holding it. 

And so, with small and large adventures juxtaposed, the season comes very, very near to its end. Because of the big news today, we didn't get the mosaic floor exposed.  But it's pretty close. We're hoping to expose it during the first couple of hours tomorrow, which finally is the very last day of the season! Then, we might also have time to expose another section of floor just above that one. There's a very nicely made step leading up to this slightly higher level of floor, which is adjacent to "the question-mark channel" and would allow us to understand a bit more about that feature too. So we'll see. On the very last day of the dig last year, the team stumbled onto the stunning black-and-white marble floor that directly prompted this year's focus on the areas just east and south of that floor. Now, this year, we seem to be having our most interesting find(s) right at the very end of the season too--today's newsworthy item plus, perhaps, tomorrow's mosaic floor. What an exciting day that will be!

In many ways though I think we'll all be glad to be through with it. We've had a tremendous amount of fun along the way. But we've also moved a ton of rock and dirt. No, make that many tons of rock and dirt. How many? I haven't the foggiest idea. But many. More dirt and rocks than most of us ever thought we'd move in our lives. Hey, more than we thought we'd ever see in our lives!

John & Darryl getting ready for the day's exertions. It's a long story...

But it isn't just about dirt and rock. It's about the people who lived here at Hippos from the 2nd century BC (or so) through the eighth century AD (or so). Many of them were our ancestors in the Christian faith, some of whom worshipped in this very church complex that we've spent so many hours labouring in. But all of them, Christian or not, were our ancestors in the broadest sense-- real live people who we can relate to, even across all the obvious (and not-so-obvious) differences of history and geography, language and culture.

That's why we do this, most of all: to be touched by these people of long ago.

My roommate Jim, from St. Louis, who I also got to know on the 2008 dig. It's been great to see him again and get better-acquainted this time. 

This isn't a metaphor that comes naturally to me, since I watch so little TV, but it strikes me that a season of archaeology is a little bit like an episode of some ongoing, long-running show--a soap opera, maybe, although I realize that may not be the most flattering analogy. It has a complicated plot that takes a while for new watchers to figure out, and for most of the episode, all of the little independent story-lines seem to be, well, small and independent. But in the last 5 minutes everything changes: you realize that sub-plot A is in fact related to sub-plot C, while B and D run off on a different tangent. And that guy who you thought looked suspiciously like the villain: well, that was pretty good intuition!

No, this episode of "The North-East Church Complex: The Never-Ending Story" isn't quite over yet. But we've taken the last commercial break and are fast approaching the finale. In fact, that will be tomorrow, Wednesday, which is of course like a Thursday in North America. The day after that is pretty much reserved for "rolling the credits"--cleaning up the site, stringing fence, packing away tools, etc.

Today was spectacular in our square. Almost nothing brand-new came to light, which fits with the TV analogy in that you seldom encounter a new character right at the end of the show. The one possible exception is that we found a mosaic floor just a few centimetres east of ZZ-99, the square with the black-and-white marble floor that was mostly excavated last season. All of us spent the early part of this morning cleaning out the side of that square, which was half a metre deep with tumbled rock and dirt after Talal the tractor-guy lowered the level of the road ten days ago. The 13 of us worked as one crew, with 4 people filling buckets with turreahs, 3 people relaying those buckets from that deepest level of the hole up to the level where they could be handed up to the top, 3 more people emptying buckets into wheelbarrows and carting them away, somebody else relaying empty buckets back down to the digging area, and the final person or two filling in here or there (translation: I counted wrong).

Setting up the bucket-chain to get rid of all the junk in the bottom of the hole (at top of the picture).

The only bucket-crew casualty: Max's old wheelbarrow finally lost its basket!

Anyway, with ZZ-99 cleared out, we were able to start nibbling east from its fine marble floor into our square. Within a short time, we found mosaic! The exclamation mark is both because this is what one would expect to find within an area as full of water installations as our square is, and because it raises the possibility that we might yet find an inscription. That's the one thing that has never yet come to light in all the seasons this church-complex has been undergoing excavation. No inscriptions! Without them, it's pretty tough to understand the history of the place, who built it, when it was dedicated, etc. So maybe, just maybe, this will be the place we find one. Or maybe not! So far only a tiny area has been uncovered: maybe 30cm square on one side of the room and 40cm x 20cm on the other side. In between lies the tumbled length of a massive column, at least 2.5 metres long. Its end is still buried in the baulk, by how much we don't know, but the first project tomorrow is to get Talal there with the tractor to lift it out so we can see what's underneath it. What will that mosaic show?

Brennan works on the small bit of mosaic that's just emerging at the south end of the square. 

Otherwise, more bits and pieces came together today. We had a distinguished visitor today, Tzvika Tzuk from the Antiquities Authority, who is an expert on water installations. He heard about this fountain in our square and wanted to come and have a look since such installations are very rare in Israel. He found it quite interesting, even though it's not yet fully exposed.

Tzvika Tzuk (L) and Mark Schuler (R) discuss the pool even while Rachel (front) keeps digging it out. 

The pool that the fountain itself emptied into is well over a metre deep at this point. Although the bottom hasn't yet been reached, Rachel found a step today that seems to curve around the inner perimeter of its arcing wall. Hopefully tomorrow we'll reach the bottom, and also figure out how water got out of the pool. It must have had an exit somewhere!

The fountain (in semi-circular niche, top left) and pool--so far. Note the plastered bench on the outside of the pool's curving wall at right.

A small part of the exterior face of the pool's wall has also been uncovered, both at the SW and at the NE corners of its arc. Again, that's what we're going to work on tomorrow. Below is a small section of the NE corner that I quickly exposed today, just to establish its contour and method of construction.

The NE corner of the pool's curving wall: plaster over stone pieces, apparently atop a "soft" core (small stones? rough plaster?). Note also the "question-mark channel" mentioned below, circling around the bucket. Its exit-hole into the pool is not quite visible from this angle.

Quick note about the water channel in the floor that we found a couple of days ago then exposed more of yesterday. Some of us have taken to calling it "the question-mark channel," primarily because of its shape when you look at it from above. It occured to me today while discussing it with Doc Schuler that maybe this feature was actually the origin of the question mark, as visitors puzzled over its strange shape and said, "What the heck?" (Hah, hah.)

Finally, the little "catch-basin" that we uncovered more than a week ago received more attention today too. It was one of those little sub-plots that didn't seem to lead anywhere: we introduced it then, and ignored it until today. Doc Schuler asked us to start excavating it to see how deep its interior was, since it stands almost a metre high, and within 5 minutes we had the answer: it's not very deep! Its plastered interior only extends about 10 cm down from the surface, where it empties into a pipe that, after running through the wall, empties into the fountain on the other side. We suspected that was the case, but now we have the proof. Another pair of "characters" in the story are now proven to be related after all.

Like many soap operas, this story maybe doesn't sound like much unless you're really into it. Writing it up, I'm struck by that potential contrast between the fascination I feel as someone who's involved in the "production crew" putting together the series, and the ho-hum attitude that I imagine some of you readers must have, as you follow along. "How come things don't move ahead faster?," you might be wondering. "Come on, let's get to the good part! Too much talk--too little action! How does it all work out in the end?"

But that's the thing with archaeology. You can't zip ahead on your PVR to catch just the last 5 minutes of the story. Which is maybe a good thing, because then you'd be really confused. "How does this fit together with that? How come everybody's so excited about this little detail? Aargghh--I don't get it!"

So if you've persisted this far, congratulations! And thank you. These "liner notes" are not only quickly written, but jotted down by someone who doesn't know a whole lot more than you do about how the story ends. I'm a play-by-play announcer, not a screenwriter.

Our square, from the west, at day's end. Can you find the "olive vat" (top centre)? Curving water channel on top of a wall? (top left) "Question-mark" water channel? (centre, middle) Fountain? (right, middle) Pool? (right, lower) Projecting column? (left, lower)

The production crew is working together pretty well, as the series starts to run to a close. Of course there have been little dramas along the way within the crew too, as we work on the larger drama of the series. But mostly people have proven themselves to have the grit and good humour necessary to make it through this long production season. Here the TV metaphor works pretty well too, I guess, because it takes what, a month or so to make a 30-minute segment? That's what it feels like, being here. We schlep bucket after bucket and carry rock after rock, hour after hour, day after day, week after week, for the archaeological equivalent of a 30-second scene. The process of doing this work together, though, certainly does draw us together.

I wrote some time ago about how delightful it was, during the first 2 weeks especially, to see barriers come down as people from different countries, genders, ages and interests got to know each other and worked well together. Now that our crew is half the size, the dynamics are a little different. I've enjoyed spending more time with Darryl, John, and Jim, since the four of us--along with Doc Schuler--are "the old guys" within the team. I've thought several times, in fact, that it's too bad we can't get a set of those "Old Guys Rule" T-shirts. Hah! Of course we're working among and with the college kids all day up on the hill too; it's not like we're segregated or prejudiced. But at meals, and sometimes for a pre-meal drink as well, it's been lots of fun for our "senior generation" to just hang out together.

And so these last few days of the season wind down--some very special "days of our lives,"  indeed!

Returning to a topic from a couple of days ago, this is how far down the lake-level is from its "usual" level, which is represented by the line of big stones in the foreground!

Also, here's the line of big trees--eucalyptus, I think--lining the little lane in front of our house. Lovely, eh?

Remember the four sources of "destruction fill" that I wrote about a few days ago? Stuff could have ended up in the areas we're excavating from the church itself and from neighbouring buildings at the time of the earthquake... from neighbouring buildings, as they (possibly) eroded into the church... from elsewhere in the city, as large-scale erosion took place over the centuries... and finally from the Israel Defence Forces' activities in the mid-20^th century when they fortified and churned up the top of the hill.

Well, guess what Darryl's team found this morning? A 1950s era jerry-can. Yep. Right in the bottom of their excavation area, which is maybe 2 metres below the surface of the site before we started work. Unmistakeable. It was heavily corroded and had in fact rusted into two distinct pieces, but there is no possible way that thing originated before the 20^th century. Incredible! They had noticed a change in soil-colour within that immediate area, before finding the can, which signalled a different stratum. But nobody expected a jerry-can! We've run across old military hardware here and there, from time to time--bits of barbed wire being the most common--but we were all both astonished and deflated by this find.

Why deflated? Mostly because it shows that "nothing" we've been digging is undisturbed. It's all been churned up. So trying to date things by the levels at which we find them is pretty much useless. Just because we find it down deep doesn't mean it's necessarily any older than something we've found up higher. Aarrggh! Normally that principle is one of the archaeologist's main techniques. Even though most of us already knew, at some level, that our site was likely to have been disturbed, finding hard evidence of such disturbance is a shock.

I missed my chance to get a photo of the jerry-can. But here's another "find" completely out of context: a Byzantine grinding-stone in somebody's garden at the kibbutz!

The only amusing part was a line at lunch-time today: "You'd think that the IDF would have just done us a favour, if they were down that low, and clean everything up. Just think of all the work they would have saved us!"

Anyway, features that definitely did not originate with the IDF in the 1950s were in abundance again today in our square. I did try to joke at lunch today that "Maybe this bath-house our team is working in was built by the IDF," but that's pretty much impossible. It's almost certainly a Byzantine structure, in both the strict and metaphorical senses. Strictly, I mean it was likely built between the 4^th and 8^th centuries AD. Metaphorically, I mean it's a baffling series of puzzles, one atop the next. How they all fit together is still anybody's guess.

A few things are clearer than they were yesterday. The plastered channel that was in the floor, yesterday, is now known to ride along the top of at least a ridge, if not a full-height wall. It also has a beginning and an end (!). It's fed from a crudely-built plaster channel that runs down the wall from the first water-channel that I found yesterday. And it terminates, after looping around in a shape that looks like a question-mark when you look at it from above, in a 3 cm hole that feeds the lower-level pool within our square.

The question-mark water channel. See the hole that feeds the pool at lower right?

That's another thing that's more clear today. The "fountain" that spurted water out of a pipe into nowhere is now known to have been a plastered pool. Not a huge one, maybe 2 metres on each side, but big enough, and fed by at least these two sources, namely the fountain in the beautiful semi-circular niche in the wall and the much cruder, question-mark-contour channel. Was one for hot water and one for cold? I floated that  idea to Doc Schuler and he didn't really say much either way, which in my mind means it could be. Or maybe the cruder lower channel was built when the fancier fountain-type feed no longer worked. Maybe we'll figure it out some day, maybe we won't!

This beautifully rounded pool was fed both by the fountain at upper left and by the "question-mark channel" just barely visible at lower left.

Finally, we uncovered a very crummy plaster floor in the area that houses both a semi-circular "catch basin" and the head of the big, 4.5 metre deep cistern that I wrote about a couple of weeks ago. The quality is really bad, and it looks in a few places as if it might have even been laid down after better-quality plaster had fallen down beneath it. At any rate, the finding of this floor might mean we're done in that particular area. There's probably a better floor lower down, but we won't have time to reach it.

The rough-plastered floor. Doesn't look much different than dirt from this distance, eh?

For tomorrow we have to start cleaning out debris from the lowest level of the excavation, namely the square known as "ZZ 99," just west of us. That's the one with the beautiful black-and-white marble floor that came to light at the end of the 2009 season, and the strange plastered box that was found at the beginning of this season. These pools we're finding in our area seem to be "cascading," with 2 or maybe even 3 levels already known, the highest on the east and the lowest on the west. We haven't gone far enough west yet to link up with ZZ 99, but it sure looks like the plastered thingamabob in that area was the final one in the series. Once we get all the rubble out of that square that fell in when the tractor was lowering the road level, ten days or so ago, maybe we'll be in a better position to tell.

And so it goes. Each day we chew away at rocks and dirt, and puzzles too. For every one that we solve, another one--or more--pops up. Archaeology in that sense is like a conveyor belt, with items falling on at one end, getting processed along the way, then falling off the other end. Many people have jobs that follow processes like that, I guess; cases arrive, are dealt with, and then are closed. The added dimension here is that most of these cases are inter-related, as sub-sets of an overarching puzzle that was both created and destroyed 13 centuries ago.

Except for the jerry-can! That's a category-buster, for sure.

Diagraming the puzzle: each day's entry in my notebook ends with a sketch of the square at day's end.

What an intense day up on the hill. It was my first day without taking cold medication, so I was kind of worried about my stamina, and on top of that we had very high humidity all morning--we could hardly even see Tiberias, just across the lake. But the pace of work, and the weird things we kept discovering, kept the time moving and the energy level high all day. Here are the brief highlights.

For two weeks we've been thinking we have two vats in the NE part of our square. One was clearly established quite a while ago. The second one seemed secure too, after I dug down to expose the floor in one of its corners.

In the left-hand bottom corner of the two walls, there's a horizontal layer of plaster that was identified, some time ago, as the floor of this "vat."

A few days ago, though, we realized that this vat seemed to lack a wall on its north side. That was a serious problem: How can you have a vat without it being fully enclosed? Today, we realized it's not a vat at all. The floor that I had partly exposed isn't really a floor at all, but just a bench in a corner. If I had done my "probe" just a few inches over, we would have realized that right away.

As of today, it's clear this wasn't a vat at all, but rather a small bench! (The angle of the photo is different, sorry.)

The second weird thing in this same area is a water channel set in the top of the wall between these two "vats" (only one of which really is, of course, a vat). I was sitting down on a water-break looking at this wall, and it struck me that one section of the plaster seemed to be concave, not convex. "I wonder if that's a channel," I thought. Two minutes' work with a hand-pick and brush showed that yes, the plaster dips down about 10 cm in the middle of the wall's crown. And it turns out that the feed-pipe leading into this channel is buried in a wall we excavated a long time ago. Where this thing leads, though, is still a mystery. It runs to the end of this little wall and then just seems to spill over the edge. Because we haven't dug down far enough to see what it might empty into, it's still a question-mark.

Here's a new one: a water-channel in the top of a wall! It's fed from a pipe in the wall (just right of centre, near the top) and seems to end by spilling off the edge of the wall at bottom left.

Ten metres west, the fountain-thing Christine found on Thursday is also becoming a more complicated puzzle. There too a water-pipe comes out of a wall but seems to spill its cargo into... nothing. Well, in this case it feeds into a semi-circular niche with a stone floor, but again there's no front edge to contain or hold the water. Where did the water go? Onto the floor? Into a deeper level of a multi-layer fountain? Was the whole room a (small?) pool? We'll have to dig down more to see.

The water-feature found last week and better exposed today.Where does the water go once it comes out of the pipe and lands on the little semicircular floor?

In between these two features, Liz today found another plastered channel in what would probably have to be a floor (unless it too is in the top of a wall). This channel runs straight for a metre or two, then bends, but because neither end of it has been found, we're even more perplexed about it than about the others.

Water-channel in the floor, running across the photo from R to L then curving off to one side

Altogether then, this whole area of the dig is just getting curiouser and curiouser. Doc Schuler wonders if maybe we've stumbled onto a bath-house, which typically would have multiple pools, each with a different temperature of water. These could be fed by channels and pipes such as we've found. However, there would have to be a hypocaust--an underfloor heating system--or perhaps some other less-common means of heating the water, to support this conclusion. And since we haven't dug down far enough yet to know, we can't say.

Remember too that the one fixture that we have quite definitely identified as a vat contained a large number of ancient olive pits. It doesn't have any water-pipes or channels associated with it, either. Yet it's located in one corner of this set of fixtures that otherwise seem to have flowing water as their common link. In this respect too we have quite a puzzle on our hands!

In the other area that was being excavated today, nothing so peculiar was found. They folks working over there were mostly just chewing their way down through big rocks and lots of dirt, seeking a floor. No luck today though. Last week, that team had all the spectacular luck--small finds galore--while we hauled dirt and pried out rocks. This week, it seems, the tables are turned.

The big worry now is that we're simply going to run out of time. Our lab person who's in charge of all the pottery, Rachel, leaves on Wednesday evening. That leaves only two more dig-days, Mon-Tues, to figure out what we can, because any sherds we dig on Wednesday itself will come out of the ground too late for her to examine and process. So, starting on Weds and finishing on Thurs, we clean up the edges of all the squares, brush all surfaces for final photographs, put up fence around the site, and so forth. Two more days of actual digging is all we have!

In many ways I think that'll be enough. The whole team was particularly tired today, even though it was the first day of the work-week and there hadn't been any official tours this weekend. Nobody had kept long hours either--no late-night parties or anything like that. Still, by breakfast (8:00 am), the whole crew was whipped. By day's end (noon), it was all we could do to get the tarps packed up so they don't blow away in the wind, and drag ourselves down to the bus.

Tent city: When the sun is shining, you simply must work under a tarp!

Which is maybe partly why the dig-season, here and at many other sites in Israel too, only lasts for a month. The weather and the work combine to wear folks out. Several times we've heard Israelis ask why we're doing this work at this time of year. Why not come in March, or May, or September? Good question! Mostly I think because the academic year that most of us volunteers are tied in with, wouldn't allow it. The Concordia team especially has always been blessed with a large number of non-academic folk too--people from a wide range of vocations, as well as retirees--but the fact remains that the bread-and-butter of most archaeology programs consists of students and profs. So July it is... for better or for worse.

Note: the pictures are a bit sparse again today. I wasn't out exploring, but inside most of the day. I'll try to get some better ones tomorrow!

Well, the glass is done. I decided during the night that the only logical plan was to go back to my original plan of sorting through all of the glass fragments here and deciding which ones to ship home. So that's what I did today. It took more than 8 hours to go through all the bags--more than 300 of them--and pull out the relevant fragments, bagging and labelling those ones for shipment and returning the rest to the big storage box. But it's done. That's the biggest accomplishment right there.

Lab companions for part of the day: Jim and Max, working on pottery.

It was also good, though, to do a "rapid reading" of thousands of glass fragments all in a day. At home, I spent several months puttering on a handful of pieces, studying each one minutely. There's value in that kind of learning, but a different kind of value in skimming quickly over a big swathe of material. I have a pretty good rough idea now of what the glass collection actually contains--the types of vessels that we've turned up fragments of, within the North-East Church complex.

The most common bits, I think, are fragments of jars and bottles, most of them quite small. It's usually the rims that survive, with bases being the next most common, probably because both parts of the container are reinforced with folds that enable them to survive while the body bits are both weaker and less recognizable. After jars and bottles, we have quite a few pieces of cups--usually the bases, which are a lot like those of modern stemmed wine-glasses, only smaller and thicker. There's lots of window-glass too, though interestingly you wouldn't suspect that that's what it was, if you didn't know. Window panes were round in shape, about 30cm in diameter, and manufactured by spinning a cup-shaped piece of molten glass until it suddenly "flashed" into a disk. Because we're not yet sure where the windows were within the North-East Church, it's fascinating to find all these fragments of window-panes and realize that they had to fit into this building somewhere--we just don't know quite where!

Jim's project: re-assembling this remarkably complete bowl he found a few days ago.

Presuming, that is, that all of this glass, and all the other small finds too, actually did originate within the North-East Church. As Doc Schuler is constantly pointing out, what we're dealing with in this project is almost entirely "destruction fill"--that is, junk that came onto the site and filled in the crevices between the buildings' fallen stones over the last 1300 years. As often as I've heard him say that, it wasn't until today that I asked him more about what he meant. Where would all of this destruction fill come from, I wondered. And how did it physically come to land within the church?

There are basically four places our destruction fill came from, he told me. The first was falling debris from neighbouring buildings that also fell in the same earthquake in 749 that tumbled our building. The violence was so great that objects could have landed many metres away from the building in which they originated, especially if they were on an upper storey.

Second, once everything stopped shaking, erosion began to do its work too, distributing material from higher rubble-heaps into lower ones. If the neighbouring buildings' rubble-heaps were taller than those of this church, which is possible given the amount of open space it contained (both in the worship area and in its atrium, or columned courtyard), a lot of stuff that belonged next door could have washed or been blown into the church.

Third, the same erosive process took place over the whole extent of the entire city, with higher areas slumping down into lower ones. Judging by the level of the paving-stones in the street-grids, it's likely that our church's neighbourhood was at a relatively high elevation, but this is only approximate. If there were three- or four-storey apartment buildings nearby, as was the case in many cities already in the Roman era, the rubble-heap could have easily been much higher to start with than the one in the church-complex as a whole.

And finally, the Israeli army churned things up like crazy when they occupied the site from 1948 to 1967 as a forward outpost against the Syrians. Apparently they used bulldozers to heap up rubble into two giant berms, one on each side of the main street, to provide soldiers with cover against snipers and mortar attacks while they were moving from the rear areas at the western edge of the city up to the front lines on its eastern edge. They also cut trenches, dug tunnels, and built bunkers and pillboxes all over the place, all of which obviously caused massive dislocations of soil and material from their original levels.

So given all of that, archaeology in this place especially really is a blend of art and science. What have we found? That's the science end, cataloguing and describing. What does it mean? That's the art: it could mean nothing, in a given instance, or it could mean a great deal, depending how one imagines the bigger picture into which this detail could fit. Except in those wonderful but rare areas where you know for sure you're working in a "sealed context"--that is, a place that hasn't been opened to outside contamination since the earthquake that collapsed the city--it's a good idea to build in a certain amount of caution when studying the small finds in this dig. Bigger architectural items are of course different: a big building stone is unlikely to have been eroded into the site from a different building or neighbourhood. But small finds could have come from almost anywhere, if they're found in "destruction fill."

Ted and Michelle also put in time today at the lab, sorting and counting pottery fragments.

Still, I noticed patterns today that I don't think are accidental. Some of the areas we've been working in this year have turned up a remarkable degree of consistency within their small finds. I noted this earlier, the numerous Roman-style artifacts within the rooms that are noticeably more Roman than most others in their architecture and decoration. And within the glass finds too, the same is true. I saw very few "fancy" glass fragments anywhere else in the church--pieces decorated with appliqué glass threads, for instance, or in colours other than pale aquamarine, or dishes or plates that would have been used for domestic purposes. But here in these couple of rooms, there are fragments of all of these types that I just haven't seen elsewhere. Destruction fill? Well, yes of course we have plenty of that in these rooms too. But these pieces at least were, I think, original to these contexts.

Another lab task is photographing special pieces for study and archival purposes.

OK, enough of an archaeology lesson for one day. As of tomorrow, I will have been at this kibbutz for four weeks now! I thought of that while taking a dip in the lake after all the lab-work was done. In many ways it doesn't feel that long at all. When I think of home, though, the feeling of time changes drastically: yes, it feels like forever since I was at home. I flew to Israel on 17 June, which is more than 5 weeks ago. Boy it will be good to be back in Edmonton again, seeing Brenda and the boys, sleeping in my own bed, and eating home-cooked meals. One week from today I'll be homeward-bound, with all of those blessings soon to be familiar once again.

In honour of four weeks at Ein Gev, here are two lists: My favourite and least favourite things about this kibbutz.

Four favourites: Swimming in the lake: I remember this fondly between trips to Israel. The water is so warm it's delightful, yet still cool enough in contrast to the heat of the day to be truly refreshing. Toss in some wind-generated waves, and it's even more fun.

Lunches in the dining hall: Lunch here is like supper at home, the big meal of the day, and the cooks really know how to put on a good spread. There are always two sets of buffet choices, one vegetarian and one not. Fish is offered quite frequently, which I love, and every day we can have rice and small roasted seasoned potatoes. Especially after 7 hours' hard labour, this meal is fabulous.

The scenery: Not just the lake, though that's a big part of it, but the kibbutz' other attractions too. I love the big trees--palms of various sorts, all over, and mighty eucalyptuses that soar over the road on which our house is located, providing shade for the buildings on both sides with their enormous branches. I've never seen such trees anywhere, but I just love them. Many kibbutzniks have eclectic little gardens outside their apartments too, with cacti and fruit-trees and flowers of many kinds. I feel like I discover new visual delights just about every time I go for a walk.

An overgrown bomb-shelter entrance on the kibbutz.

The laid-back atmosphere: Quite a few people move to Ein Gev to escape the rat-race, and it really is a perfect place to get away from the pressure that dominates western culture in so many ways. Our Canadian ladies were befriended by a South African lady who moved here last year with her family; she and her husband are both well-educated and had "good jobs" before moving here but are just thrilled now to be working in the cafeteria and cow-barn, respectively. Their lives are simple but all their needs are met. What more does anyone need? Even for us who stay here only for the short-term, this appreciation for the simpler side of life is a welcome change from the usual hustle and bustle.

The blue house in the background is where most of our dig-team is now staying.

Four not-favourites: The "beach": The lake is beautiful, yes, but its water level is the lowest ever, 213 metres below sea level. Its normal level is about 210, and that 3 metres of vertical height translate into maybe 100 metres of extra "beach" before you reach the water. If this was a sandy beach, that would be fine, but the sand only lasts for maybe 10 metres and the rest is large cobbles, which are both tough to walk on and cookin' hot in the sun. The lake bottom, too, is these same large cobbles, which necessitates the use of flip-flops or another sort of footwear when going swimming. If only less water were taken out of the lake for drinking and agricultural use, its level might have a chance of recovering, but until that happens, it looks like the long walk down to the water will continue for some time.

"Supper" in the dining hall: If lunch is supper, supper is breakfast. And not a great breakfast either. Sometimes there's little more than bread, hard-boiled eggs, salads, and cold cereal. Sometimes these staples are supplemented with pasta, or lasagne with eggs instead of meat, or something like that, but I don't think any of us really cares much for the evening meal here. The best part for me is always the halva­--a treat made from ground-up sesame and honey, blended together. I haven't found too many other North Americans who like it, but for me it's just super.

Laundry: The practice here is for everybody on the various dig-teams to put out their laundry in green garbage bags early on Thursday morning. It all gets dumped into big commercial washing-machines without being sorted, and is then "returned" in big heaps shortly after lunch-time. Each person needs to hunt through these heaps looking for the articles he's put in. Using laundry bags helps reduce the chaos somewhat, for small items like underwear and socks, unless of course the laundry-bag opens or rips, as ours did a couple of weeks ago. Then it's a matter of hunting for individual socks, etc., amid the mass confusion!

The kibbutz' general decrepitude: I still don't quite understand how a place that was an absolute gem in the 1950s, so famous as a resort and tourist spot that Frank Sinatra and other top names from all over the world played here, could decline to this point. The concert hall has been shuttered for years, home now only to pigeons and stray cats. The dining-hall's air conditioning was broken for a couple of days this week, requiring the use of an enormous box fan that could pretty much have powered an airplane. The buildings we archaeological volunteers stay in haven't had a thorough cleaning, as I understand it anyway, for many years, and all of the furniture is at least 30 years old. Thankfully, all of the air-conditioning units have been replaced in the last couple of years--I remember being here in 2006 when we put up with an ancient window-mounted unit that was at least as inefficient as it was noisy. Anyway, if you want luxury, you stay next door at the kibbutz-owned "holiday village"--and pay several times the price, per night. So for what we pay, I suppose this is fair.

The common area in the house I'm staying in.

My fears of it feeling like a  L O N G   weekend are coming true. Not so much because of my cold, which is actually quite a lot better, but rather because of what I've been doing, namely working on glass in the lab.

The problem is simply that there's four years worth of it to process. That's a lot of glass. Figure about 80 paper lunch bags' worth each year, based on 4 bags per day times 20 digging days per year. These bags aren't full, of course. Some only have one piece in them, if that's all that was found in a given square that day. But some will have 20 or 30 pieces in them. Thankfully, not all of these require study, for many are relatively anonymous shards from the middle of a bottle or cup. But a significant number are "diagnostic pieces," meaning that they can help identify the type of vessel from which they came. Plate? Window-pane? Jar? Cup? Jug? Oil lamp? There are lots of possibilities.

A handful of diagnostic pieces from one of the bags.

The process of, well, processing these pieces is pretty time-consuming in and of itself, too. Each bag has to be opened, after being sealed with masking-tape for quite a long time. Its contents need to be sorted, pulling out the diagnostic pieces and leaving the rest. The diagnostics have to be washed, then measured and described, with all data entered into a database on my computer. Finally, each diagnostic piece needs to be photographed. If that sounds time-consuming, it is! After about 5 hours' work, I'd gone through about 30 bags. At that rate it would take around 50 hours to process all of this stuff. That's full-time work for a week!

Scrubbing station in the lab.

Technically, I do have a week left, and I could spend it doing this. Doc Schuler is prepared for this eventuality, since work on the hill is going well... he's got other supervisors he can call on to run my square... and in the big picture, this glass-work is more important than hauling out more buckets and big rocks.

However, I haven't quite wrapped my mind around this task, yet. It's tedious work--which, to me, is the kind of task I prefer to divide up into smaller chunks and distribute over a larger number of days. An hour or two a day over a three-month span could actually be fun! Cramming the whole project into a week? Not so much. 

The product of a full day's work: 30 bags processed. 

So maybe I won't do it. Maybe I'll just do what I can, today and tomorrow, and go back to the dig on Sunday. Whatever glass isn't done by that point--most of it, for sure--will just have to be shipped to me by mail. And hey, that was the original plan, after all, until we discovered that the Antiquities Authority might not be willing to grant a permit for its export. That was the game-changer right there. Because if the IAA won't send it, I'm hooped. That's why there's a big push to sort / document / photograph all of the relevant bits now. We know there's no problem with exporting my database files and photographs. The glass itself: who knows?

Still to go: this whole box-full of bags!

As Doc Schuler keeps telling me, lots of things go sideways like this on a dig. You plan to do things one way, but it doesn't work out, so you have to improvise. Try this. Doesn't work? Try that instead. Still no go? Get creative! Whenever you operate amid so many unknowns, where certainties are rare and pretty much everything is based on guesswork, you simply have to be flexible. That's the inflexible rule of archaeology: Be flexible!

Obviously, that's a good rule for all of life, too. Be flexible! Who can ever count on anything? As James reminds us, we need to remember that all of our plans are tentative: "You ought to say, 'If the Lord wills, we shall live and we shall do this or that'." (James 4:15).

Good advice, eh? Just hard to implement. Especially for those of us who like to plan things out in advance and take care of details right away. Having the whole game-plan change, part-way along, is kind of tough.

Anyway, I'll get this sorted out by tomorrow. That's the deadline Doc gave me: "By tomorrow night," he told me again before dinner, "You will have a decision." Study it all here? Fine. Try to ship some of it home? Fine too. I just need to decide, then work accordingly.

Computer station in the lab.

In other news, the biggest event today was the apparent "suicide" of Mr. Peanut. One of the college students brought along this large, blow-up mascot that his dorm-mates adorned to look like the Planters Peanuts character, and so Mr. Peanut has been lugged around to various scenic points in Israel in order to get his photo taken. Lately, though, he's been languishing on the kibbutz almost all of the time. So today, when some of the students went on a field-trip to Nazareth and once again left him behind, he apparently decided enough was enough, tied himself up in a noose made from extra clothesline, penned a note, and did himself in! So naturally there was plenty of conversation later today about who was responsible for putting him up to it. Poor Mr. Peanut!

Tune in again tomorrow for more of the melodrama. What will I decide to do about the glass? Will I muster the guts to tackle it all this week, or stick with the original plan of shipping at least some of it home? And who was involved in Mr. Peanut's sad demise? Are anti-peanut activists loose on the kibbutz? More on these and other stories... tomorrow!

So I guess not even I can keep up the pace forever. If that sounds like a concession, it is--I'd like to think I can just push on through anything, but every once in a while something happens to show me otherwise. Nothing dramatic this time, just a bad cold, but enough to keep me home from the dig today. Normally of course a long weekend would be great, but that's not really what I'm here for. In fact I think it really is going to seem like a    L  O  N  G   weekend!

It's a tiny thing, but I get a kick out of the different feel of the weeks here, where Sundays are like Mondays and so on. Thursdays, like today, are really like Fridays back home, which takes a little getting used to. So many times I've said something like, "When we get back to work on Monday..." only to stop short and correct myself, "Nope--when we get back to work on Sunday...." It's like crossing the street in a country where they drive on the "wrong" side of the road: you don't realize how your brain is hard-wired with certain assumptions until all of sudden they're different. In archaeological metaphor, it's like the whole structure of one's approach to the world tumbles down, another one getting built in its place!

Because I wasn't at the dig site today, all I can do on that front is relate that Christine found a most intriguing feature in our square. I might have mentioned that we found a semi-circular "catch-basin" a couple of days ago, filling the quarter-circle at the junction of two walls, a long "normal" wall and what I thought was a very short wall called a "pilaster," which is actually more like a little buttress than a wall in its own right. Yesterday we were trying to trace the contour of that pilaster, and when she worked her way around it today there, on the other side from this basin, was another semi-circular structure. This one though was facing "the wrong way"--not forming a 90 degree arc to fill the corner, but rather facing out from the corner toward the room. It also features a water-pipe leading into it, coming out of the pilaster/wall. Nobody on the site had a clue what this thing is, other than a guess that it might be some sort of fountain. It's going to be an interesting feature to explore some more when we get back to work on Monday Sunday.

A group from the Israel Antiquities Authority visited our site one day last week to see what we've found; they seemed very interested in this peristyle courtyard that I wrote about the other day. Enroute to looking it over, they passed right by the place I was working and, I sensed, were watching me with interest. My hand-pick was laying on the ground while I was brushing dirt away from the top of a wall, and one of the IAA guys picked it up and examined it closely. He said something to a colleague, who also came over and had a look. Then a third guy came over and asked, "What is the material?" "Stainless steel," I said, and they nodded knowingly. "I like it because it's strong and not heavy," I said, and again they nodded. Doc Schuler commented on this incident later, asking me what they were asking about, and when I told him he wanted to know where I got it. So I guess Lee Valley Tools owes me for some free advertising!

I didn't mention this yesterday because it unfolded late in the day, but we had a fascinating discovery yesterday at pottery-washing time. Normally this is pure drudgery: sitting on uncomfortable plastic armchairs arranged in a circle with a bucket full of pot-sherds that have been soaking in water for 24 hours to loosen 1300 years' worth of crud, scrubbing each piece with a little plastic brush until it's more or less clean. Repeat for anywhere between 20 minutes and an hour, depending on how much pottery was found the day before. I don't think I've ever met anybody who likes pottery washing!

Heidi at pottery-washing. A circle of one is about as small as you can get! Normally we work in groups, both to make it go faster and for the sake of good conversation.

Yesterday, though, came close, not because of the task itself but because of what emerged as we were doing it. Doc Schuler was working away on the handle of a big amphora (storage-jar) and suddenly said, "Look at this!" As the mud and crud was disappearing, some lines and letters in red ink were appearing. It was faint but clear. The next piece that I grabbed from the bucket had more. Then another one. Altogether I think we found 4 or 5 similarly marked pieces, none with more than a letter or so, and one with what seemed to be more of a little diagram than lettering. A couple of the pieces fitted together, but not all of them. If only we had enough of these to tell the whole story!

Amphora pieces with red lettering. See the very small "m" at the top right of the piece at top left, and the Delta and "A" on the piece just to the right of the lens cover?

Even if we had more pieces, though, chances are it would still be a real challenge to figure out what the lettering means. A similar large amphora with lettering was found last year in this same church-complex, with lettering around the base of each of the four handles. It turned out that this type of writing is sort of like what we find today on shipping labels: it employs a type of specialized short-hand that's designed to tell people in the transportation and warehousing business what's inside, where it came from, and perhaps when it was packed. Besides the abbreviations and short-hand that's involved, the writing is often pretty sloppy too, which adds another set of difficulties. The jar last year, for instance, was thought by one scholar to mention a church, which would have been spectacular, while another expert said no, it's actually an abbreviation for fish sauce!

So what we have here is at this point completely unknown, but intriguing. A good example, I guess, of what keeps many of us interested in archaeology, year after year, bucket after bucket, rock after rock. It's as much brain-work as brawn-work.

On a somewhat related note, I bought a couple more ice-cream bars today. When Brenda and the Canadian ladies were here, they often met for ice-cream around 3 pm and invited me to join them, which gave me a taste for a local treat called "Magnum Gold?!" The words are clear enough: it's a big bar with sort of a butterscotch coating. The punctuation, though, is a total mystery. What the...?! (!!)

I doubt that ice-cream is a recognized treatment for a heavy cold, but they certainly are a nice diversion in mid-afternoon. Because today was our 21^st wedding anniversary, I made sure I did this again today, eating the last bar that Brenda bought when she was still here (not a Magnum Gold?!, but still pretty good). How the years fly by!

The day got off to a roaring start in the first two minutes. Doc Schuler was tracing his finger through the dirt in Darryl's square, saying "The line of the wall is right about here," when some sand crumbled aside and John said, "Is that another lamp?" Sure enough! And within about a half-hour, another was found a foot or so away.

The lamps.

The most interesting thing about these lamps is that they were both sitting on sort of a shelf within a niche adjoining the fancy columned courtyard I wrote about yesterday. The shelf is crude, yes, and only 10 or 20 cm above the floor. As basic as this is, though, it could still represent a lararium--that is, a shrine to the lares or "household gods" common in Roman times. These were common features in many houses, sometimes housing statues of these protective domestic spirit-beings. The setup here, with lamps on a shelf in a niche, suggests this sort of fixture, anyway.

See the shelf within this niche? The original shelf might of course have been wood, atop this stone (and plaster?) base. Several small nails found in the vicinity support this possibility, at least.

Again, then, we would seem to have evidence of a Roman-style dwelling here. The architecture certainly points in that direction, as noted earlier: peristyle (columned) courtyard, opus sectile floor (patterned, polished stone), relatively good-quality construction. And now we have been amassing a bit of a pattern of comparably Roman-style small finds. A Janus or two-faced image on the base of a glass. A carved bone Maenad. Oh, and the lamp that was found yesterday by Ted was also "read" by the University of Haifa ceramicist as late Roman--which surprised me greatly, after I told somebody who asked me earlier that I was pretty sure it was Byzantine or maybe Umayyad, not Roman, based on others I remembered seeing! I defer to the ceramicist, though, without question: it's his field, not mine. I wonder to what period he'll date these two lamps from today?

No other major small finds came to light today that I know of. In Darryl's square, where the lamps were found, things are in clean-up mode now. The digging is almost done, so it's time to make things look pretty by removing the last stray rocks, cleaning out the corners, sweeping off the stones, and taking copious notes and photos.

Darryl, happy with the progress in his square. (Then again, Darryl pretty much always has a grin on his face--he's just a whole lot of fun to be with.)

The sad part is that as soon as all the cleaning is done, the process of decay will start once again. The wind blows dirt back in, erosion chews away straight walls, tourist feet tumble stones, and weed-seeds sprout and shoot out roots. By next spring, even the tidiest of this summer's squares will look pretty shaggy and unkempt.

In our square, we're a long way from tidy. In fact I spent a good part of the morning pecking away in the corner of "Vat 2," trying to make sense of the mess. At first I thought we might have had a pilaster there--a rectangular buttress sticking out of a wall both for ornamental and for structural reasons. Then I thought there might have been another wall running perpendicular to the north-south wall in that section. By day's end I realized we had neither of these, although there was indeed a short section (two stones in length) of very late wall, built atop the tumble of the earlier structure in that area. Otherwise, nothing but junk that had to be picked through, stone by stone, cleaning out the crevices between them so the relationships between all of these stones could be ascertained. That task now done, first thing tomorrow we'll hoist out all of these random stones--and see if there's anything "real" underneath. Maybe, maybe not!

Elsewhere in the square the work was equally tedious. Because our area is now several metres bigger than two days ago, there's a lot of new ground to work down. Doc Schuler gave us a big team today, six people, to expedite the task, and indeed we did move quickly. He was very pleased by morning's end at how much dirt we had moved. At one point I briefly found myself the only bucket-carrier while 5 people were busy filling them with turreahs. I moved as fast as I could. Pick up 2 buckets, pivot, walk 9 steps to the edge of the cliff, set 1 down, dump the other, set it down, dump the other, pick up both, pivot, walk 9 steps back, repeat. One repetition took only about 20 seconds, but there was absolutely no way I could keep up! So very quickly we adjusted things by having another person help with buckets, and someone else shift to a slower, more delicate task. Even so, yes we certainly did move a lot of dirt today.

Before hitting our stride with this dirt-clearing machine, though, we had to spend an hour or so removing a "floating wall." Maybe I wrote about these before: they're always near the surface, usually made of biggish stones, and rarely aligned with the strict east-west / north-south grid of the Roman and Byzantine periods. The "floating" designation is a Schulerism, describing the fact that they are never built on a firm, well-grounded foundation but simply glide along the surface or, at best, have one toe trailing in the depths.

The two darker-coloured stones near the top, well-fitted together, are the end of a "floating wall" built atop older tumble. See the small angular stone propping up the one on the left?

Invariably, floating walls are "in the way" of the older and better-built structures we're mostly interested in at lower depths, so after understanding them, drawing them, and taking pictures, we rip them out and bowl them over the side of the cliff.

Ted had the nicest find of the day, a small oil lamp that was almost completely intact. So at once the cry went up, "Ted buys the first round of beer tonight!"  That was a joke in itself, since the beer consumption has gone down markedly since the Canadian guys left a few days ago. But then I tweaked it a bit more, for good measure: "Never mind the beer--how about the first round of Advil!"

Ted, rightly proud of this beautiful lamp.

That was the kind of day it was. Again. Yesterday we thought we were working in a Byzantine rock-garden--you know, they put them there for pleasure, at least theirs, not ours. There weren't as many "new" monster-stones discovered today, but the problem was that we had a huge backlog from yesterday to take care of. So the first hour and a half were spent moving stones with the net. The temperature was relatively cool, the sun wasn't up or, when it was, it was hidden behind our friends the clouds, and there was a lovely breeze. All of those things helped a lot. But the lifting was still pretty taxing. Where, oh where, are the Canadians when you need them?

Finally though the stones were out of the excavation areas and neatly lining the new edge of the road that Talal carved yesterday with the backhoe. The aim was not aesthetic but practical, both to keep the slope from eroding into our hole and to keep tourists and ourselves from stumbling in. Thirteen big stones were put to good use in that way, and then the rest went over the side of the hill. No cows are known to have been injured, but some of the rocks had pretty satisfying "runs" all the same.

Darryl's square is getting close to being finished. It's an interesting place, now that the floor is almost clear all the way across. It's a peristyle courtyard--I don't have a good picture but the one below shows part of the area at least. Notice not just the columns but the line of heavy stones they're standing on.

 This particular courtyard has columns around 3 sides of the room, which would have supported a sloping roof that actually sloped inward rather than outward, for the purpose of rainwater collection. The inner and lower edge of the roof would have sat along the line of columns, and the outer and higher end would have sat on the solid walls surrounding the courtyard. You can see the remains of one of those walls in the photo above, running parallel to the columns about 2 or 3 metres away.

This courtyard doesn't seem terribly big, but that's because the ones we're used to seeing are those in big public buildings like churches and temples. In those sorts of structures, the columned atrium (courtyard) could easily be 20 or 30 metres on a side. This one, at maybe 8 or so metres a side, looks puny by comparison. But for a private house, the scale of assessment needs to change. Having a columned courtyard at all is a sign of extraordinary wealth--only the very rich could afford to build them. And interestingly, it's also a sign of relative antiquity. Doc Schuler did some research and from what he can tell so far, the latest columned courtyards known in private residences across the Roman world date from around 500 AD. If that's also true here, this house that we are excavating is considerably older than all of the other parts of this church complex. I should stress that this is not a firm conclusion at this point, just an intriguing hypothesis. We'll have to see where the archaeology leads in the next 7 days of digging before the season ends.

Our square is expanding once again. We added a metre to the north and more than that to the west a week or so ago, and now today we added another metre north and a good 2 or 2 ½ metres west. The goal now is to link up our square, which is the extreme easternmost point of the whole excavation, with the 3 ½ metre deep square that Darryl worked in last year and earlier this year. That's the one that has the gorgeous opus sectile floor--black-and-white squares of polished marble, sort of like a 1950s diner. That type of floor hasn't been found anywhere else in the North-East Church complex, nor (to my knowledge) elsewhere in Hippos thus far. Its fine quality suggests that it, too, could be significantly older than the rest of the church complex.

Anyway, we want to see how that area links up with ours. One part of the puzzle was solved today when we exposed a constant "line" of wall between our square in the east and the other square in the west. The area in between had been sort of a no-man's land until today--nobody knew what was there. Establishing this wall wasn't a surprise, but tangible confirmation that the two sections are indeed connected. Now we'll have to see how else they're connected, as we go deeper.

Aha, there it is! Bottom left corner: the wall found last year, at the edge of the square that has been excavated to 3.5 metres. Top left: one of the vats we've excavated this year, to a depth of ca. 2.5 metres. Middle of the picture, near the broom-head we use to brush away dirt: the line of the wall that links these two areas. Bingo!

The mystery in that respect is mostly about floor level. In the western square, we've got this beautiful cut-stone floor at a depth of 3 ½ meters. In the eastern part of the eastern square, we've got 2 agricultural/ industrial vats that have floors about a metre or so higher. What's in between? Are our vats close to the "real" floor level, which we might soon find when we start excavating outside them in the next day or two? If so, there must be steps of some kind in between. Or are they a secondary level of construction that was plunked down at a later point on top of the ruins of the older, lower level, with a significant gap in height between them? Only the digging will tell... in days to come.

Morale was pretty good today, despite the sore muscles, tiredness, and lingering illness. Two people stayed down the hill today suffering from sickness of one kind or another, plus another one became too light-headed to carry on past about 10 am. With another person staying at the kibbutz practically every day to work in the lab, that leaves us with only about 9 or so able-bodied workers out of the current team of 14. But the new phase of work was encouraging, I think: less grunt-work than yesterday, and more "real" archaeology going on in terms of finding walls, discovering a few small items, etc. We also got a better breakfast today--with no complaining or arguing at all. Imagine that! Yesterday's "conversation" with the excavation manager seems to have done the trick. Hooray! Like the army that marches on its stomach, we too dig with our guts. The only way to keep working is to keep well fed and well hydrated, all day every day.

Ted's lamp, again. Everyone's morale shoots up when something this nice pops to the surface.

Oh yeah, one more thing. As I was walking up to the dining hall for supper last night, I saw a huge column of smoke to the NE of the kibbutz and then, at the base of the smoke, great flames shooting over the top of a ridge to the north of the mountain we're digging on. I mentioned in earlier posts that wildfires have swept through parts of the Golan several times since last year, and this one was pretty close ! A kibbutznik riding by on her bike stopped to watch too and said, "Big fire!" It dawned on me then that I should take a picture, so I ran back to my room to get the camera--one of the few times I've actually run in this heat--but by the time I returned to my vantage-point, a small plane was dousing the fire with red fire-suppressant ind and the flames were no longer visible. The plane made 4 or 5 passes and that was pretty much it--less smoke after each pass, and finally none at all. The best picture I got was below, where if you look very closely you'll see the tiny speck of the plane to the left of the photo (near the edge of the smoke) and, on the right, the streak of red fire-suppressant it has just dumped. How amazing that a fire in such wild, hilly country can be put out so quickly!