It was my birthday today-- and very nice to receive greetings by email from a number of family members and friends. Thanks, guys!
Lots of other things going on today too, of course. My birthday card from the group of diggers (all 30+ of them) arrived in a most unusual but appropriate way. I went back to our square after a water-break and picked up my turreah to do some more excavating in the corner of a hole I'd been working in before, and before too long suddenly came across something familiar-- the corner of a Ziploc bag. At first I thought, "Oh no, somebody did already dig up this area!"-- which isn't as odd a thought as it probably sounds, not only because the Israeli Defence Forces had cut at least one trench through this particular area during the 20 years they used the mountain as a forward base against the Syrians (1948-1967) but also because somebody had just suggested, earlier in the morning, that maybe the large trove of pottery-shards we were carefully extracting had been put there by earlier archaeologists! At the time that suggestion had been made, I thought "yeah, right," but as soon as I saw the corner of that Ziploc bag, I put two and two together and figured it contained somebody's old excavation notes.
It didn't, of course, but instead a rather touching card from the group, graced with a caricature of yours truly that I stoutly maintain is really very accurate but most other folks seem to think is quite exaggerated, especially around the shoulders. You who know me well can be your own judges.
One more birthday incident. As soon as we got up this morning, I was sorting my dig-clothes trying to decide what to wear today, and giving my roommate Darren Siegle the running commentary: "I think I'll leave for tomorrow the stuff I might end up leaving here and throwing away, and wearing my better stuff today so it can go into the laundry tomorrow." His lightning-quick reply: "Why don't you wear your birthday suit?" Then he said, "Happy birthday, Steve!" Funny.
We made great progress in our square today. I asked Doc Schuler for the day off, after he too greeted me while we were waiting for the bus first thing in the morning, but because he said no (evidently having no more sympathy for birthdays than he did for Canada Day), yes I spent my "natal day" (as he called it) doing the usual routine with picks, buckets, and turreahs. Our whole squad was working in the far north again, having wrapped up work in the trench late yesterday (see yesterday's post). Our goal was the same as what I had been working away at for a couple of days already, trying to identify where-- if anywhere-- the north-south wall turned and ran east-west. I thought I had spotted the corner the day before yesterday, but that was based on just one stone that seemed to be of the right quality and pointed the right way, and we needed far more evidence than that. So today we moved our "shade" over this area, extended it by another tarp-length so we could all work under it, and got to work. Bill and Ian worked in the eastern section, widening the square by about another half-metre to the north and then taking the area farther down. We cooperated on removing a whole bunch of humongous stones out of that area using "the Arny net"--an innovation that one of our veteran diggers, Dr. Major Arny Friend (ex-US Air Force meteorologist), came up with a couple of years ago. It's a big heavy-duty cargo net, nothing more, but employed in the right way it's both a labour-saver and an injury-preventer. You put this net underneath the big stone you want to move, gather whatever excess there might be on top of the stone, then get as many people as you need to loop their fingers through the holes in the net so everybody can lift at once. It solves the problem of having to get a grip on the stone itself, since they're often awkwardly shaped, and it also enables a squad of four or six people to lift a big stone from the bottom of a hole up to ground level, with half the crew standing down in the hole and the other half at the top-- the net is long enough to enable that. Very clever! And it's not just our Can-Am team that thinks so either; having seen how well it works, the whole Hippos team now uses the same technique.
So that was Bill's and Ian's job. Dan and Harry and I worked in the western hole, about 3m over from the other two, doing basically the same thing except that our square needed widening by a full metre. In the process of doing that widening, we encountered what I called "The Pottery Barn"-- the stash of broken pottery-pieces that I mentioned earlier. It seemed odd that they were all stacked up as they were, and fairly large pieces too, so we figured it would be smart to keep them all-- every last small piece-- so that was what we spent quite a bit of time on, carefully getting out all of these pieces, even though that wasn't really what we had been looking for. The goal, again, was to find an east-west wall, and though it took most of the morning, we finally did find it.
As is so often the case, this east-west wall wasn't what we expected. We'd been looking for a wall like the one that ran north-south, namely built of well-dressed stones carefully aligned. As I mentioned a couple of days ago, I had instead found what looked like it might have been a wall of rough stones, aligned in the right direction but about half a metre too far south. So here's the deal: the builders changed the style of wall when they turned the corner; the two walls were indeed connected. The reason they didn't seem to line up is because the eastern piece (where Ian and Bill were working) was still standing upright, while the western piece (mine, Dan's, and Harry's) had tumbled over to the north. The fact it had tumbled wasn't easy to see, though, because the stones were irregular to start with!
And how did we know this part of the wall had tumbled? Well, that was my own bit of detective-work, actually, and great fun to figure out. Basically I just did exactly what Doc Schuler taught me to do: to expose large stones rather than remove them, to look at them carefully, and to try to figure out how they might have fit together. Basically, a cluster of stones just above the place where the wall we were trying to trace "disappeared" seemed, as I looked at them closely, to be related. They were all well-cut, lying close together, and--I noticed--lying at progressively greater angles from each other. It's hard to explain, but basically it seemed to me that, working up from the bottom, the angle at which each stone had fallen was an expansion of the angle of the stone below it, which made sense because upper stones would have fallen farther than lower ones and thus had more time to tilt. Do you follow?
The confirmation of this theory came about in the last half-hour of the morning when I finally dug down far enough to reach the northern end of the northernmost of the foundation-stones we were trying to trace. I reached around its end and found... nothing! No adjacent stone. But right on top of it was this whole intriguing pile of tumbled stone that matched it in size and shape. So that had been the corner, clearly. Heading east from this corner were all these irregular-shaped stones I've already described, forming a poorer wall. Bingo!
See the tumble? The foundation-stone is the long narrow stone near the bottom. Five well-cut wall-stones are splayed above it, three having fallen to the right and then two to the left.
This is the same area, looking east instead of north. The fine-cut stones are in the foreground, tumbled to the left from the foundation-stone, which is still level. See the three rough-cut stones aligned "up-and-down," directly above the lowest of the tumbled fine-cut stones?
What we don't know, of course, is why builders would have done this. Doc's suggestion at this point is that this outer wall may have been built to shore up the older outer wall of the compound that is still standing just inside the newer wall. Ironically, what is now the inner wall (and older?) is still standing, while the outer (and newer?) wall, which looks much better, is tumbled-over. Curious.
So I'm not sure what we're going to be doing tomorrow, on our last dig-day before heading out early Friday morning on our three-day trip to Jordan. One more up the hill, one more down the hill, and that's it for our Canadian team for 2008. Hard to believe it's gone by so quickly.
How many more seasons will there be on this project in the future? Doc wasn't very optimistic for the longest time, since the present 10-year licence from the Israel Antiquities Authority expires after next year (2009) and it didn't sound like they were at all inclined to renew it. The fact that most of the major buildings that have been worked on so far have been churches, and the absence of any clear archaeological evidence of Jewish presence on the site, probably hasn't helped. But more recently it appears that the IAA might indeed renew the licence for another 10 years, provided that the University of Haifa (through the director of its Zinman Institute of Archaeology, Dr. Arthur Segal, who heads the whole Hippos project) finds two non-Israeli institutional partners. One could presumably continue to be Concordia University-St. Paul. The other??
At any rater, we'll have to see how things work out. As hard as the work is, the team this year too has had a tremendous time, forming close bonds with team members from all over North America, learning new skills, pushing one's physical limits, and basking in the total-immersion experience of living and working in the very land in which our Lord lived. I for one really, really hope there are more years ahead.
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