Brennan Woell

On the final day of the 2009 Hippos Susita dig, there were a lot of small things that needed to be done to finish up the site for our two year hiatus. To start off the morning, I was on fence duty. We had to put up a fence around the entire site to ensure that visitors would not hurt themselves or the structure. To do this, we took big steel posts, and used a big post driver to manually slam the posts into the ground. One of the biggest problems, though, is rocks. If you slam that thing down onto a rock, it's not very fun. After that, we tied rope and/or wire to the posts to create the fencing itself. We couldn't finish all of it, as we still had one square, ZZ99, open to clean off their floor. After the fencing, I helped move some big rocks into position asa sort of curb to keep unwary tourists from walking into the deeper holes. A few weeks ago, we uncovered a beautiful marble corinthian capital in one of our squares. But to keep it safe for the next two years, we had to rebury it.  After breakfast, we had to cover the floor in ZZ99, which before covering, looked like this:

To start off my work on Wednesday, I worked with the Mrs. Dr. Schuler to help recover (as in cover again, not regain) the mosaic floors that were in the church. They had worked all last week to uncover them for the surveyors who did all their scanning stuff earlier this week. To properly protect the floor, we first dumped sand over the places with the actual mosaic, leveled off the rest of the floor with a dirt/sand mixture, and put a layer of dirt on that. We got one room done before it got too hot to work. After breakfast, I was able to go back down the cistern, with my camera this time!

Here's the rope ladder to get into the hole:

Cistern diving today! We got up the hill in the morning and started clearing off the floor. We cleared off most of the floor, some of it being paving stones, some plaster, and some just packed dirt. It's quite an interesting floor. But after breakfast, Dr. Schuler come over, and told us it was time to go down the cistern. So, we got the rope ladder out, which is, about 25 feet, not ten like I had previously heard, and put it down the hole. I was the third or fourth person who got to go down. Sadly, I forgot my camera in my room, so I didn't get any pictures down there, but there's talk of going down again tomorrow. But it's quite a large cistern. The plaster is gray-ish, which means that it's Roman (I don't know how they can tell that, but that's what they said.) It's oblong near the bottom, and is maybe 2 or 3 meters wide at the widest. But it was a lot of fun to go down. There's a lot of dirt piled up in the bottom, so we don't know if there's anything good down there. And there's no more time this season to excavate it, so we'll have to wait for the next season to clear it out. But other than that, we didn't do a whole lot else. We moved rocks and dirt, and found a bunch of pottery. Only two buckets today, though.

So the floor is an awesome thing to find. We're closing out our square, and tomorrow we should be able to finish it. The cistern was pretty cool. I wish could excavate whatever's down there, but I know we don't have the time this season. We seem to be finding a lot of sherds from storage jars, which would make sense next to a cistern.

It's strange to think of all we've done over the past three, almost four weeks. We've gotten a lot done, but found even more that we can do. There are several rooms behind the ones we've been clearing, as the walls have been showing. But those will all have to wait until 2011...

Quite a change of pace today. We started the morning in a typical manner, clearing lots of dirt and big stones from our square. It was not too long before that started to change. Glenn, who has been working in our square since last week sometime, hit a change in the soil. This normally isn't too uncommon, as we work through several layers as we dig down through the dirt. However, this layer was extremely moist and compact. So we dug a little more to find more of this stuff, and as it turns out, we had hit the floor. So we decided to go from there, and work towards the rest of the square. After about a meter of this floor, Glenn came upon some paving stones. This was a good sign, since we were hoping for that with the cistern there. However, clearing them off, we found that they were not just paving stones, but in fact, are a stylobate. This stylobate stretches between the pilaster we uncovered and a column that had been partially excavated in a previous season. This was a pretty awesome find. We kept moving, and on the other side of the stylobate, I found some more paving stones, for real this time. We don't have many of them cleared off right now, but there seems to be a decent number of them that possibly tapers off about halfway through our square. We'll have to clear more of it off to figure that all out, though. Meanwhile, Glenn, who had been toiling away in a little corner of the square made quite the amazing find: a broken piece of pottery with writing on it. This ostraca was the first found in the church complex, and as far as Dr. Schuler could remember, the entire site of Hippos. It was pretty awesome. And on top of all these finds, we found a LOT of pottery. Not just two or three buckets worth, which is pretty impressive, but we ended up with four full gallon buckets full of sherds. In the last half hour, we stopped collecting the body sherds to try to keep the flow of pottery from coming, but it didn't help much, as we found several handles, rims, and bases. It was quite the productive day.

Finding the floor was a very good sign. Last I heard, we could go down the cistern when we cleared the square out to floor level. So we're definitely making progress there. The stylobate is pretty awesome, too. It could be a secondary use of the column and pilaster as a door, but we have no evidence of that. The paving stones on the cistern side of the stylobate are a great find for us as well. It helps support the theory that this was once an outdoor plaza in which the cistern eventually became enclosed. And the ostraca is absolutely fantastic! It is a cursive form of greek that was written on the pottery. It is truely unique, even from the inscriptions we have, because someone actually wrote these words on this pot. We don't have a translation yet, but hopefully we will get one in the next few days.

Today was a huge day for our square. We have yet to clear the rest of the floor as well as take a trip down the cistern (the latest day for that is Wednesday.) But with only three dig days left, two of actually digging, we have to move quick to get it all done. But we will get it done somehow...

Today began the last week of the dig until 2011. And the day started as it has for the past week or so. We have been cleaning out the site for the surveying/scanning people who got to work this afternoon. And in case you're wondering, sweeping a dirt floor is not very effective...
Still no cistern diving. Today it was because Dr. Schuler went with the site scanning people to go pick up the equipment in Haifa at 6, so he was gone most of the day. So instead, we tried to get down to the floor level in the room. We moved more big rocks and a lot of dirt from our square. However, it doesn't look like we've done anything at all today. Towards the end of the day, we moved a large rock from our square. And underneath was a cache of large chunks of pottery. It was quite a surprise that slowed us down even more than the large roks had. So we didn't get down to the floor at all today. But we are making progress.

Another day of typical archaeological work. We cleared more of our square, without much visible progress. Hopefully soon, we'll be able to go down the cistern, and get to the floor of the square as well. Because of the cistern, there should be some good rock flooring somewhere under the dirt that is sitting in the square. But we'll have to get the dirt out of it first...

There is a group of people spending the night on the hill tonight working on scanning the site. Apparently, there are about four days of work, and we only have the equiptment for two. So they are trying to get in as much work as they can as quickly as they can. I imagine that they are going to try to spend tomorrow night up there as well, but I don't know. So it seems our working with cleaning off the dirt and dust has gone to some good use after all.

So I took the weekend off from writing blogs, and am now a day behind. On Thursday, we did not get a chance to go down the cistern. They keep pushing it back for various reasons. However, our goal was to lower the level of the square even more. And that's what we did. We cleared a lot of rocks and dirt. And that's about it. There were a lot of big rocks that we had to get help to have moved, but we got them out of the way. Not much else interesting was found in the square. It was a day that seemed to drag on for quite some time for me.

This is more what most of archaeology is like, from what I've heard. It's just a lot of grunt work broken up with an occasional piece of pottery and sometimes a small find. We have been extraordinarily fortunate this year with the number and quality of the small finds as well as the structures we've uncovered.

We'll have to wait for at least the weekend to go down the cistern. I am really excited to do that, and am content to wait to do that, as long as it's within the next week, ad doesn't have to wait until we come back in two years. But I can't imagine us waiting that long. And I have plenty of other things to keep myself busy with while I'm here, too.

Beyond a shadow of a doubt, we do have a cistern. We cleared rocks and dirt from around our whole square. And after breakfast, we were able to clear out the rocks and other debris that had piled up over the past several hundred years. After clearing it all out, we took some more measurements. Our initial one held up, with the pit being around 4.5 meters deep. It is a bell shape with the wider end on the bottom. We also found the remains of a drainage pipe running down into the cistern via an alternate hole. And while Kristina and John were clearing away the dirt from around the hole, we found what initially looked like a grinding bowl. But as the dirt was cleared away from the bottom, we found that it keeps going down, and seems to curve toward the cistern. So right now, it looks like a giant curved funnel. But tomorrow, we will be able to go down into the cistern to see what has collected down there over the years.

I'm really looking forward to going cistern diving tomorrow. It's going to be a lot of fun. It really is a huge cistern. Because of the size of it, it wold have been one of the main cisterns used at the site. So this is a big find. I'm hoping to find some good stuff down in it. But that'll come soon enough. And first, we have to figure out how to use a ten foot rope ladder to get in a 16 foot hole...

We've been making some pretty great finds this year on the site. Overall, this is pretty close to the top of the list, I'd have to say. There is a lot left to do with only a little over a week left, but we'll get it done. And hopefully, we'll be back again in a few years to uncover more of this structure.

First off, I can't claim credit for the blog's title today. I first heard the Mrs. Dr. Schuler say it after my find. So today, we were digging some more. we cleared out a lot of dirt and a few rocks. There weren't as many rocks as the past few days, so that was good. But I was working on the northwest corner of our square, and kept finding large sherds of pottery. And we just kept finding them all in the same spot. So about an hour or so before breakfast, I was clearing away some dirt, and as I cleared part of the ground away, I noticed some went down a hole in the ground. And it looked like a deep hole. So I stuck my turreah in it, and it went all the way down. The hole was only about as wide as my arm, but there was some good pottery in it, so I just started cleaning it out. As I was doing this, a small rock would occasionally fall down, and there was a decent amount of time before it hit bottom. So after breakfast, I called the Mr. Dr. Schuler over, and told him I thoght I had found a cistern, and he confirmed it. Apparently, this is the seventh cistern they have found so far in the church complex. This cistern is about 463 cm deep, and from what we can tell right now, is shaped liek a bell. Either tomorrow or the next day, we will be able to go down into it to see what's in it and get more info like that.
Aside from the cistern, Jim continued to uncover more of the wall that we thought died. So that is a little better, not trying to figure out where the wall wandered off to.

This cistern I found would have been vital to the survial of the people within this church complex. It is primarily for this that it is such an important find. There may also be some gold or bones at the bottom of it, from just random stuff that had fallen in. So, we'll really just have to wait until we clear enough of the rubble on top of it away to see what's in it. but I'm really excited to go into it, and see what's down there.

This cistern is just another bend in the road. We didn't, and still don't really, know what the room we're digging in was used for. It could be anything from a personal bedroom to an open-air plaza. So we really just have to see where the road leads, and where the evidence takes us. but it is a rather exciting time.

A couple of strange findings today, including two walls that seem to go nowhere. We dug out a lot more dirt and rocks, and we finally got down to the level of the wall (this is the wall that runs parallel to the back of the church.) We followed it south, towards the other wall it seems to run into. However, about midway through our square, it seems to die out. We have nice, strait, relatively flat walls the first half of the square, then they disappear. It looks as if we're uncovering one of the older walls that a later civilization may have cut into to make their own walls, but we won't know until we clear it out. On that same wall, we seem to have found a niche in the wall. Once again, we'll have to dig down to see what's under all the dirt still there, but that's the way things look right now. We also found another wall that juts out to the west from our north-south wall. it's extremely odd because the other half of the room is already cleared, and there's no wall in it. We seem to have found the end of that wall, but it's only about half a meter long. So for now, we think it may be a ballast to the wall to help support it, since it is a long wall... That's about all we did today.

We're hoping to get down to the level of the rest of the room tomorrow. But depending on how many more large rocks we run into, that may or may not happen. We are moving quite quickly, even with only three or four people in the square, instead of six, like we had the first two weeks. Even so, with the wall(s) we're exposing, we have a good chance of finding some good stuff, since for whatever reason, that sort of stuff tends to gather next to the wall.

Since we started ZZ4 this past Thursday, we've made a lot of progress. We got a lot of the big rocks out of the way, but sadly, it looks like there's more to come. Finishing a square in four days seems like good work to me. Even five days is pretty decent. Hopefully, we'll be able to get a lot of work done tomorrow, and clear that room out.

More digging today. And digging... and digging... And lots of rocks, too. Big rocks... lots of rocks... No finds. No new walls. Just digging. And that's about it, sadly. The group from Irvine is gone, so there's no more singing on the work site, there is more food for us at breakfast, and we can all get seats on the bus now. But we all miss them.

So, we got a lot of dirt moved today, but not much else. It was a rather uneventful day. So, I'm going to put up pictures of where I've been working so far. Because words can only do do much.
In the background of this picture, you can see where we first started to dig. That back wall was our first mission. in this picture, it looks like it stops, but in reality, it's a doorway.

This next picture is that of our second mission. It is the room behind the apse of the church with a bed against the wall.