Give me Oil in my Lamp!

Well, today is the day when I can say that I have accomplished what I wanted to do while here on the dig: I found something besides pottery, and dirt! I found two things that I think are important. Well, maybe not so much important as exciting for me. First, I was using the pick axe in a corner of our square (and it wasn't going very well!) The axe had been bouncing off rocks and not breaking up much dirt. Very frustrating! I bent down to see what kind of dirt I had dislodged and what rocks I could put into a bucket. There I found a piece of marble which was cleanly shaped and bevelled on the edges! It was about 2cm thick or so and completed it would have been about 15-20cm long and about 10cm wide. The piece I found was a chunk about half as long as that. I thought I might have broken it with the pick, so I kept searching carefully in that spot to see if I could find the rest of it. I found another piece! I kept searching, but I was unable to find the last chunk of it. While I was carefully digging in this area I also found two peculiar pieces of pottery. They weren't very big and I almost left them in the bucket of dirt. (We don't keep anything that isn't at least as big as "a giant's thumb nail" unless it contains a rim, handle or base.) These pieces looked a little strange and so I kept them, even though they were a little on the small side. When we washed them this afternoon, we discovered that one of the "strange" pieces had a raised pattern in it. On closer inspection, we saw that one of the designs was a cross! We showed it to Dr. Schuler who was quite excited. I found the top piece of an oil lamp! When I told him there was a second similar piece, he asked me to bring it to him. It turned out to be the bottom of the same lamp. This piece will be able to be dated and we will be able to know when it would have been used. This was very exciting to me! I plan to go back to the lab tomorrow when I have a minute to get my picture taken with both my oil lamp and my marble "something."

Tomorrow is both an exciting and a sad day. Exciting because it is the last day that I'll have to get up at 3:45am for the foreseeable future. Sad because it is my last day on the dig site. How did it go by so fast? As I have mentioned before, the weekend here begins Thursday night. Tomorrow we do laundry, and dig then pack our bags and head to Jordan for a long weekend. We will return to Israel Sunday night and then it is time to come home. I hope to find the time to blog tomorrow, but I may not have a chance with all the packing I have to do. That means that you will not be able to read another post until Sunday night at the earliest or else Monday evening. I will not have computer access while we are in Jordan. Thinking of all I have to do in the next few days makes me dizzy and tired...I had better get to bed before too long so that I don't miss any second of the rest of my big adventure. Goodnight!