Huh.

A pretty extraordinary thing happened today. 

Today was the day on which the team had dug down deep enough to start finding meaningful pottery pieces.  So I gave my pottery lecture at the beginning of the day to help explain WHY it is important to collect pottery and for WHAT they should be looking.  I first relayed that pottery is the most intimate look we have into the ancient world.  Someone formed their hands around a bundle of shapeless clay and created the piece.  Another person considered it at the market or elsewhere and thought about its usage at home.  This pottery was held and handled by people living thousands of years ago.

On a technical level, pottery is very helpful to determining the usage of certain spaces.  As my visit to Tel Kedesh showed me yesterday, MUCH can be revealed by the simple presence of pot.  For example, our current working hypothesis is that not only is the NEC a Byzantine church run by a few monks/nuns/both, but part of a large urban monastery.  The square I'm digging is where Dr. Schuler belives may be a cafeteria.  I'm curious to see what sort of pottery we find in this room - will it reveal much or will it be scattered randomn pieces (which is what we unfortunately find)?  I'm hoping for the former.    

Anyway, it was a bit of a challenge to describe what I wanted when I had no examples of it in front of me.  Rather, I talked about body pieces (from the side of the piece of pottery - on these, all the edges have been broken) and also DIAGNOSTIC PIECES - such as rims, bases and handles.  The general rule of thumb has been literally thumb - if the piece is bigger than the tip of the thumb (nail to knuckle), keep it.  My theory was to lay down our practice and then adjust it based upon how people collected.

And collect they did.  This team was diligent in paying attention to pieces and turned up some glorious finds that I will be able to use.  Once I had the pieces in my possession, I was then able to show the team during pottery washing for what EXACTLY they should look.  Today they may have been over-zealous and too many too small body sherds were kept. But tomorrow they will have a better idea and I have great confidence in their ability.  

This in turn gives me a boost of confidence - they were able to take my instructions and make them work.  They were careful and they will thorough.  Tonight at pottery washing, they continued the hard work from on-site.  I'm am very impressed.

And though I haven't had nearly enough time to fully work on my languages, I did get Julius Caesar started, read through latin and greek flashcards and finally, ran through my French verb chart.  Not enough quite yet, but my goal is to keep all this information fresh in my mind.  

Yay.     

P.S. To the wife of Darryl - yes, he is making trouble, but has also made significant progress in his square.  I can't fault him too much.  As for Arnie's wife, he is as ingenious and thoughtful as ever.  He truly makes my life easier in many ways.