Another interesting day, though in many ways totally opposite to yesterday, when most of what we were looking for / expecting / anticipating pretty much fell into place. Today, little did. Let me explain.
The first thing we noticed, while riding the bus up the hill at 4:45 am, was that there were NO clouds this morning. Every workday so far, we've been blessed with a rim of cloud over the eastern horizon that has not only hung around, most days, until about 8:00 am, but on some days has even intensified to shelter us until 9:00 or 10:00. By 5:30, the sky was bright all across the width of the Golan Heights, and by 6:01 it was cheerily peeking over. Beautiful, yes. But also bad news for diggers.
Then, at breakfast, we had NO cucumbers and tomatoes. This was truly inexplicable, since every meal at the kibbutz and up on the hill always features cukes and tomatoes in some form. They're usually available whole, but the form I usually enjoy the most is when they're all chopped-up into tiny pieces, mixed together. Anyway, this truly was traumatic, missing our cukes and tomatoes at breakfast. I wanted to take a picture of my breakfast, to share with people back home and in presentations later ("This is the kind of thing we ate every day up on the hill"), but the absence of these two staples completely ruined the first picture. But eventually, and thankfully, one of the other teams, which eats breakfast in a different old barracks building, eventually sent over one of their tubs of these two chopped-up staples, creating a mini-stampede. OK, it was just me and two other people... but you get the point. And below, I'm pleased to share with you two picture of breakfast on the hill: with, as well as without, cucumbers and tomatoes.
Sad breakfast--NO cukes & tomatoes... Hey, that's better!
Coming down from the hill, the next trauma was that we had NO bus waiting to take us back to the kibbutz. This was not good. Normally we start to walk down about 11:45 in order not to miss the bus's departure at 12:00 sharp. Noon came and went, and no bus. Ten minutes, twenty minutes, and no bus. Twenty-five minutes, and I noticed that Arthur Segal (the dig director) was sitting far away from the group on a big rock watching the road for the first sign of the bus. Doc Schuler said he (Arthur) was steaming mad. The rest of us were just steaming, for the absence of cloud had turned the day into an absolute scorcher-- the hottest dig day so far. Before coming down to the bus, the drill is that people get take their last water-break and then pour out the rest of the water in their jugs, to avoid carrying it back down the hill again-- well, here we were about 3/4 of an hour later without water. (Normally, we take a water break every 1/2 hour, religiously-- or on hot days like today, every 25 minutes.) Finally, just after 12:30, the bus showed up. I don't know what happened, whether it was the driver's fault, the dispatcher's, the boss's, or something else, but there are about 40-some people hoping like mad we never have to deal with that problem again.
At last-- the wheels are here!
So we were a half-hour later than usual eating lunch, which was no big deal except that part-way through the meal we suddenly had NO electricity throughout the whole kibbutz. As far as our lunch itself was concerned, this didn't really matter since it was bright enough in the dining-hall that we didn't need the lights, but obviously the outage of power meant that all the air conditioners were off, not only there but also in our rooms. Within a short while, we started to feel the difference. Again, it didn't amount to much of a problem overall since the normal drill for most of us is to go swimming right after lunch anyway-- and by the time we were heading down to the lake the power came back on. But again, it was another unexpected absence, in a day that was full of them.
You notice I haven't talked about the dig yet. Well, it too was a day of absences. My first job, beginning before the sun arose and then continuing until maybe about 9:00, was to dig down in the bottom of a "hole" that had been excavated two years ago, searching for the matching corner to the one I discovered yesterday. Well, all I found were pottery shards. There were lots of them, and some of them were actually very nice, but that wasn't what I was looking for! NO corner. The closest I came was finding one stone that was cut similarly to the ones in the wall and corner opposite, but none of the adjacent stones were "right" either in their finish or in their orientation. In fact, a crude wall did seem to appear exactly where I wasn't expecting one--parallel to what I was looking for, but right beside where it should have been. So much for that part of our theory.
The wall I was looking for "should be" immediately to the left of my feet-- not directly under them!
The other thing we didn't find, partly because of the absence of this corner, was the temple we had been thinking we were piecing together. NO temple either! The nicely made new wall we traced over the last few days turned out to simply peter out, suddenly and most unexpectedly. As noted above, we haven't yet find the east-west wall linking this new wall we just found with its parallel wall on the other side of our square. So, partway through the morning, the word came down from Doc Schuler: "It's not a temple." Nuts! That really would have been sweet--giving us not only a major Roman structure but also a rather nice illustration of the succession of one religion by another.
Further, as work in the trench area wrapped up today, we also discovered that "bedrock," at least in this part of the North-East Church, isn't at all what we expected it to be. NO big, solid mass of immoveable rock on which long-lasting permanent structures could be built. Well, to be honest we did find a big chunk of stable stone at the western end of the trench, directly upon which the "new" wall I've been talking about, had been built. Right-o. But throughout the rest of the trench, what we found when we couldn't dig down anymore was a crumbly sort of limestone/gravel mix that I think goes by the name of "marl." At first when we reached it, we thought it was a layer of plaster floor--that's how crumbly it was--but then as we came upon more and more of it, extending farther and farther down, and very strangely configured into all sorts of lumps and bumps, Doc Schuler said he thought that this stuff actually was the bedrock that we'd been looking for. I wasn't convinced at first, but soon came to realize he was right. Careful work with a stiff brush (a broom-head) revealed that this marl was in fact a single contiguous mass extending practically the full length and width of the trench. At the eastern edge, opposite the wall that was set on solid stone, this crummy marly stuff had been cut by the builders into a trench, into which they had set a bunch of large solid stones to serve as a proper foundation for the wall they then erected on top. Very, very interesting! This was the first place in the whole church-complex that anybody had dug right down to bedrock, meaning it was the first opportunity I had had (or anybody else for that matter, except Doc Schuler) to see how the Byzantines "did" foundations. So, not at all what I expected-- but pretty cool all the same.
The ruler marks where the back-side of this wall stands upon solid bedrock, at one end of our trench.
As if that wasn't enough, I also heard today, first through the grapevine then officially as well, that the pair of nails I discovered yesterday turn out to be modern rather than ancient. NO ancient nails (found by me, anyway)! How they made their way down into the bottom of a metre-deep trench, I have no idea, but that's the official word anyway. I suppose their manufacture should have given them away, since ancient nails tend to look pretty big and clunky compared to the ones we're used to, even when both types are heavily corroded as these ones were. I guess I was just so glad to have found something significant (see the photo in yesterday's post) that I let myself conclude they "had to be" ancient.
Finally, here's one more absence too, but of a different and much more positive variety: Today was the first day since I left Edmonton that I didn't take any medication for my cold. NO decongestants! I still coughed a bit, sneezed pretty often, and sniffled constantly, but most of that I think was due to the constant and pervasive dust. Shortly after coming down the hill, I was fine-- like most days. But that dust: oh my, that's nasty stuff. It's as fine as talc, and gets into absolutely everything. The stains in my shirt are so deeply set that I really do think they're permanent-- not from chemicals, dyes, or anything like that, but just from plain old dust. But at any rate, I seem to be done with the medications for now. Hurray!
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A closing thought, tangentially related to all of this: Darryl Schmidt and I ate supper together, and he lamented the fact that his group hasn't yet found anything "major" in their square. NO walls, NO mosaic, NO stairs, NO street, NO paved floor, NO coins... nothing but dirt and very big and very numerous rocks. "In fact," Darryl said, "the kids in our square figure that we've got about three breeding pairs of them down there--that's the only possible way they could be proliferating so fast!"
One more pic, just for fun: Bill Hayes, Darren Siegle, and I welcome another guest while enjoying an afternoon beer at the kibbutz.
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