July 2009 Archives

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.

With this entry, I can catch up with all my blogging for the week. I would still like to put my ideas down about Jerusalem and Bethlehem, but I just haven't had the time. Last night, our group took a boat ride on the Sea of Galilee, thanks to a few churches that donated money for us to go. While we were out there, we heard an excellent devotion and got to watch the sunset (I've included a picture for you all.) But we didn't get back until after nine, and with at most 4 hours of sleep the night before, I could hardly keep my eyes open, let alone write a blog.

Now that today is Friday, I actually have some time to catch up on my blog. It all got slowed down on Wednesday with a trip to Beth She'an (1 Samuel 31) from 8pm until midnight. And seeing as I normally set aside time at around 8 to write my blog, I had no time. But now I do have some time to write about what's been going on.
Wednesday, our main goal was to clear out the room behind the apse of the church. At the beginning of the year, it was about half clear, but with our work behind it and on the back wall, there was a lot of rubble that needed to be cleared out. So that's what we did. We started by continuing to clear away the dirt from that back wall that had not been fully uncovered yet. So we worked all morning, digging, and clearing away more of the debris. It was about half an hour before breakfast when I was working closer to the wall, when I hit a bunch of rocks. At first, we thought it might be another bed because it was only slightly lower in elevation than the other bed. However, as we cleared more away, it seemed to be the floor. After breakfast, it became our goal to try to figure out what it was. So, I began to clear out one of the doorways to try to find the threshold. After finding a whole lot of pottery, I finally came upon the threshold, and we worked from there to figure out that we had, indeed, found the floor. So we spent the last couple hours or so clearing out the room, leveling the floor, and then helping the square next to us dig. There was a lot of work, so we kept ourselves busy.

It was a neat experience for me to clear out a room like that. To be able to sit, stand, and work in a room that someone lived in was a really fascinating experience. However, even after clearing out the room, we still have questions as to the layout of the room and the entire structure to the rear of the church. The first thing is that the floor in the room we uncovered seems to have either a step up, or is not level altogether. The other big question is about the doorways. They seem to point to the fact that there is another, seemingly large room to the southeast of our square. but until we uncover that, if we ever get the time, we won't know for sure.
On a side note, the day was abnormally clear, so here's a nice shot of the Sea of Galilee from Hippos:



Clearing out a room is a good feeling. Although it means we'll be starting another new square on Thursday, it is good to finish what we started. Once the team next to us finishes their square, we'll have a better picture of what the back of this church was used for. I really look forward to see what we continue to uncover.

Today, I returned to my square. It was a lot like coming home to me. It was a good feeling. Then I realized that I was a few thousand miles away from home, and where I was was no place like home. Anyway, we got a lot of work done in the square today. Apparently, since I was last there, they opened up more of the square(s) for us to dig. They uncovered the back wall of the room we wanted to find, and followed it to the opposite corner. And they followed that wall even past the corner, and it turns out, there's a doorway into another room just outside of our square. So today, we worked on uncovering more of the back wall as well as the corners. We removed several large rocks with the "Arny" Net, as well as several other ones without the net. We didn't have any small finds today, but it was still a rather productive day.

I was really glad to get back in the square today. I was able to get a lot more work done, and the regular water breaks are nice, too. Uncovering walls seems to be much more beneficial to what we're trying to accomplish within this church structure. And although keeping walls up is part of that, you can't repair a wall that hasn't been uncovered.

All in all, it was a good day. Tomorrow, we will be uncovering the rest of the room directly behind the apse to see what all it was used for. It sounds to me to be an interesting dig day. But only time will tell... or God... He could tell too...

Today, I was on conservation duty again. I did pretty much the same stuff I did yesterday. When we got there in the morning, we went to get some more material for making the mortar. But apparently, the bees had decided to make a nest in one of the barrels we needed material from. So I plugged up their entrances, and did my best to swat the others away. But when you're working next to a bees nest, it doesn't do a whole lot of good... However, I didn't get stung, so it's all good. After getting all the material, we mixed up a big batch of the mortar and started working on another wall. Once again, I went shopping for rocks, making sure to stay out of the way of the tractor that was working where I had to walk. So we worked pretty steadily up until breakfast, minus the time I took to rig up some shade for us. After breakfast, it was pretty much the same. Another trip across he hill to get supplies, more mortar, and re-building part of the wall. We had to hurry up and use all of our mortar near the end, since we were running out of time, and if the mortar were to sit overnight, it would dry. but we got it all used, and the wall is pretty well patched up.

The day went by quickly today, which was pretty nice. Again, it was a lot of tedious work, but I survived once again. This preservation work is, from what I can tell, pretty essential to keeping the walls up. So it seems a little strange to me how informal it all is. But we make it work. The walls we've repaired aren't coming down anytime soon, and you couldn't say that with any confidence a week ago. So I guess that's good.

I normally don't reconstruct walls that were built before the 8th century, so I don't know if a wall a day is decent progress or not. but it seems like it's not too bad to me. And if it were exceptionally bad, I'm sure someone would say something about it. So I'm going to go with it, and say we're doing well with the work we've been doing. I still would like to return to my square, but I'll get there when I get there.

So today, I started work on our square, continuing to pick, remove stones, and scoop dirt away. However, by the first water break or so, I was called away to help with conservation. I worked with Eva (I believe that's her name. I heard I think three or four people call her different names, all close to that, so I'm going with that for now...) restoring a wall in part of the church. The first thing she had me do was to help her mix the mortar. In it, we had to mix crushed stone, dry lime, some red stuff that she didn't know what it was, some hydrolic lime, and water, of course. To do this, she had me put on rubber gloves that are the cheap kind that break easily. I got a hole in one of mine, and she made me change it right away because, "The lime will eat your fingerprint!" For whatever reason, that phrase stuck out to me. But after we mixed up the mortar, she had me go get some stones to fit in the wall. She was very particular about the size and shape of these stones, which I had to get out of the big rock piles around the dig site. I had a bucket with which to hold the rocks once I found them. And to me, it really felt a lot like grocery shopping. Picking something up, checking the price, seeing if the fruit is ripe, the right amout of food needed, ect. It was the same with the rocks. But she needed rocks, and fast. it took some fine tuning, but we eventually got a good system going. I did get a chance to work on the wall as well. We pretty much just picked out the right size and shapes of the rocks, threw mortar in, and stuffed the rock in, making sure it was all wet, otherwise, it wouldn't stick. After all that, she had me throw dirt up against the new mortar to make it look older. It was a lot of little stuff like that. I also had to make a few trips to the forum to get the ingredients to make more mortar. It was a lot of stuff to do without much shade and fewer water breaks. It was a lot of boring, tedious work, but i made it through.

So, today was a lot of work, but it was really interesting. I did learn a lot about conservation though. Although I didn't like it all that much, it was good to see how all that works. To know how to repair a wall and make it look "vintage." Conservation is a key aspect of archaeology that helps in preserving the site for years to come.

The day was long and hard, but it was a good experience for me. I hope to return to the square again tomorrow, as they found the walls they were looking for in ZZ3NW. It's a bit harder work, but it's more fun for me. But tomorrow is a new day...

I apologize for not getting this written and posted until today. After digging Thursday, we had about two hour or so to eat lunch, clean up, and get packed for going to Jerusalem and Bethlehem. Needless to say, I had no time to write a blog then or even in Jerusalem, as we were kept busy the entire time. I hope to get a blog of the trip written and posted soon once I catch up with the rest of the stuff I have to do.
Anyway, Thursday was a pretty uneventful day. We started digging in our square (ZZ2North- We originally started just as ZZ2, but cut it in half as mentioned in a previous post) and did so most of the morning. We pulled out several rocks, and got a it more of the dirt cleared. However, after lunch, Dr. Schuler came over and moved us again. He had us go to ZZ3Northwest. Now, with a full team in a full square, we had a good system going. When we had the same number of people in half the square, it was a little crowded, but doable. But when a full team got put in a quarter square, it was nearly impossible to keep everyone working and not killing each other when picking, or chopping someone's foot off while using the turreah. (For those of you who don't know what a turreah is, here's the definition from the virtual dig site. "We use a hoe called, in Arabic, a turreah. It's is a little like a garden hoe, except it's handle is shorter, about four feet long, and its blade is approximately square, not pointed. We use the hoe to scoop dirt into buckets that we empty nearby.") But I digress... We made do with the quarter square with a little more caution in our work. No small finds, no walls. However, we do know that there are at least two walls in that quarter square. On that leads from ZZ2N, and another that comes from behind the apse on the church. So we hope to hit them before too long.

So without any good small finds today, and not being allowed to collect pottery in the new square, we got a lot of digging done. It was really hard work at times, clearing away rocks and dirt, but it was sort of interesting starting a new square. For some reason, it reminds me of Lamentations 3:21-23;

Yet this I call to mind
       and therefore I have hope:

Because of YHWH's great love we are not consumed,
       for his compassions never fail.

They are new every morning;
       great is your faithfulness.

Now, I don't know how many of you have actually sat down and read the book of Lamentations, but if you haven't, I'll give you a brief overview, as it is one of my favorite books. Israel is lamenting to God (hence the title) about His justice. Israel had, onec again, turned their back on God, and He et them go. As a result, the poeple and the land are ravaged. It is in the middle of this big long complaint that these verses pop up. And given that context, these verses stand out even more. Even in the midst of the destruction, the people still have hope. Because God is God. And God is Love. This sort of reminds me of digging, in a strange, roundabout way. (For those of you wo don't really know me, my mind does this sometimes... It's more fun that way...) In the midst of our own backbreaking labor, we can still praise YHWH for His love and compassion and faithfulness. As we get new squares every morning, we get more opportunities to make finds, to uncover unknown structures, and to grow closer to the God who gave us this opportunity.

There is much work yet to be done. But with the team we have, we will continue to move rapidly. We still have a couple walls to find, and hopefully more small (or large, for that matter) finds. We're working well as a team, which is a great thing. All this hard work has really drawn our square closer (in more than one sense of the word.) Since I'm writing this after the next blog's events have happened, I can say that there are new compassions in the blogs ahead. You'll see when I get there...

Today was another quite interesting day. We moved a lot of dirt today, clearing away the wall we found yesterday. After a few minutes, we hit the back wall to one of the rooms our square is adjacent to. There is a small corner that these two walls make, and it is this area that I focused my efforts today. And those efforts paid off. After we found the second wall, I was clearing out the corner of the two walls when I came upon this...


We're not entirely sure what this is. However, we do know that it has some iron in it from the rust that we can see. It's a long metal spike of some sort. It's not a nail- the head's too small, and it's too thin. It may be some sort of a tool, or possibly a door hinge. But we'll have to clean it up to see what it turns out to be.
We did a lot of more digging, and got down to the better stones along the main wall we were working on. We dug along the wall to see how long it is, and how far it goes. However, we didn't get very far before we found the end of it. This was quite unexpected as we were expecting it to go well past our square. But we kept digging, trying to keep the square at least somewhat level. It was then that we found that the wall keeps going! It turns out that what we thought was the end of the wall is actually the side of a doorway (or at least that's what it appears to be right now.) We don't have much of the wall cleared at that level, so we'll see what tomorrow brings.

So, over the past couple of days, I've been making some pretty cool finds. With the pendant yesterday (which I'll update you later on, but is really exciting!) and the metal spike today, it leads me to wonder how I can find these things. It is actually a familiar problem for me. Those of you who know of my petosky hunting skills are quite aware of the situation. For those of you who don't know, the petosky stone is the state stone of Michigan, and is, because of it's limited geographical location, more rare than diamonds. Anyway, I find these almost every time I go out in Lake Michigan (or even just the beach for that matter.) And people always ask me how I find them. And in both cases, here's the answer... I don't know. But it is clear that they are the same set of skills that help me in both cases. And I thank God that He has given me these talents to serve Him through this dig.

Once again, we made a lot of progress today. We found some walls and a dorway along with a couple of really fascinating metal pieces. Hopefully within the next week or so we'll find the floor and be able to expand even more. The quality of pottery we've been finding is pretty fantastic. We really haev agreat square to work with, and I'm excited to see what we can do with it in the weeks ahead.

Today was quite a day. We started out with our big square, one person short because he was filling in for another guy who was sick today. First thing in the morning, Dr. Schuler came and expanded our square because of a measuring error. So we worked almost all morning leveling everything off and expanding as necessary, making sure it was nice and square and level. But after breakfast, our square was chopped in half in order to find the wall we were looking for faster. It took us only about half an hour to find it. From there, we worked on clearing off the wall and uncovering what we could of the sides. It was then that I found this:

It's a metal pendant of some sort. We're not entirely sure what kind of metal it is, since there's a lot of buildup and corrosion, but it's still pretty sweet. From then on out, it was a pretty normal dig day. we worked around the wall, continuing to gather pottery sherds, glass, and bone fragments.

So, yesterday, I talked about the connection to the people who used the pottery. Finding the pendant today took it one step further. This pendant was a piece of someone's jewelry. They wore this, and cherished it as a treasure. This is exactly the same thing we're doing with it today. No, we're not going to wear it, but we have the same attitude towards it. We and it's original owner share the bond of growing excited over seeing this small chunk of metal. It's pretty awesome to think about it.

Even one man down, we made quite a bit of progress today. 1. We squared up our site. 2. We cut our square in half to work more efficiently. 3. We found the wall we were looking for. and 4. We found this pendant. All in all, it was a really good day of work. We're settling into a groove, getting used to the hard work and therefore getting a lot of work done.

So, as much work as the first day was, it doesn't get a whole lot easier the second day. Starting a little tired and sore, we got to work. Today was just a lot more digging, mainly. However, today's digging was interspersed with several pauses to pick up pottery sherds (Yes, sherds, not shards. I don't know what the difference is, though.) Our square found the most pottery sherds with one full bucket and another one that had a few centimeters full of it. Most of the other teams just had a few centimeters of their own. We also picked up a lot of glass and a bit of bone as well as the tessera, which are pieces of mosaic flooring. We're in the middle of trying to level off our square. It's rough, though, because we're literally fighting an uphill battle. But we're making definite progress.

Today was another bit of an eye-opener for me. Although the pottery and glass and tessrea we've found is broken and smashed, it is a little strange to think that people living at Hippos, at one point in time, were there making, selling, decorating, and generally using this pottery. To hold in my hand the workmanship that has survived (more or less) though the centuries that have passed is a unique experience. I think that is partially compels people to do this sort of thing. It is truly amazing to think about it.

Today was another day filled with hard work. But being able to find these things is such a tremendous experience. I really look forward to the rest of my time here. With what I've been able to do these two days of the dig, I know there are good things in store for the next few weeks.

Ok, so today was the start of the dig. We got to the site about 5, and immediately got to work. We started with getting rid of the grass and weeds that had grown up in and on the site over the past year. It wasn't really pulling weeds, since that might damage the walls and the other stuff at the site, but that's pretty much what it was. From there, I moved on to picking up smaller rocks and such that had fallen from the walls and ground level into the church complex. So far, this had all been general "busy" work. it was the little stuff that had to be done before we got started.
Once that was done, we were able to move to our respective squares to start digging. My team had one of the largest squares back behind the apse. Right now, there's a part of it that was cleared in one of the previous years. They thought it would just be the back of the church. However, they found what a bed and another few walls. So what started as just the church now appears to be a monastary complex. However, it is our square that will or will not prove that this year. We just did the preliminary digging today, picking the soil that had been packed down as part of a road, and clearing it off. Along the way, we ran into several large stones, several of which we've removed. However, there are four or five that look like they might be part of the back wall of the room we're clearing. So we'll see what comes of it tomorrow.

Being able to take part in a dig like this is absolutely incredible for me. I've always wanted to be a part of something like this, so I was really excited to get a chance to do this. But it's not quite what I expected. It is really a lot harder work than one might think. Even after one day, my respect for archaeologists and those who do this work regularily has grown greatly. I have really began to learn quite a bit of all that's involved in a dig... And that is only going to grow over the next month of working.

So today, I've done a lot of work and learned quite a bit. It's already been an amazing experience, through which, I have grown mentally and spiritually. To be where Jesus was and to see where he was and to swim in the sea he walked on is something that cannot be easily described. Today was quite a day...