John Robinson

So yesterday we started at 0400 for final photos. Got back at about 0530 and I basically slept until 1300. Then at 1430 my group was one of the groups that had to go out to the site for more mandatory volunteering. Remember all those sandbags that we filled, moved, and stacked? Yeah, all those had to go back. They were stacked by the Missile Silo (what we call the place we keep the tools, about 30-40 feet north of the temple podium) and we had to move them to the south end of the Early Shrine. The south end of the shrine is about 30-40 feet from the north end of the temple podium. So about 70 feet these things had to be moved. Not too bad, right? Except that the shrine was built on bedrock, the temple was built over the shrine, and the ground is currently about level with the temple podium in that area. Remember the picture I posted that showed how far down we had dug? We had to move the sandbags from the top of the wall to where I was standing (or at least that’s the vertical distance). It’s enough of a drop that we need a ladder to get down there. Okay, now it’s seeming a bit worse. Only it gets worse. The bags are made of burlap. Sand and dirt is smaller than the holes in the burlap weaving. These things are very very dusty. And of course I ended up as the dirtiest out of everyone by the end of it.

Instead of having each person carry the bags all the way from the Silo to the shrine, we had a sort of “sandbag brigade” going on. Except we had three “sub-brigades” going in it. We had one group that got the bags from the Silo to the podium, a few people to get the bags from the podium to the shrine area, and another group passing the bags to the shrine itself where they were stacked. Dan arranged the line so that the strongest people were moving the bags from the podium to the shrine, because walking on bedrock isn’t the easiest thing. He put me as the first person in the shrine area. I was taking them from Paul, who was up on the podium, and passing them to the rest of the brigade down in the shrine area. Only the podium is about a meter above my head when I’m standing on the bedrock. Before it all started, Paul and I decided that the easiest way to get the bags from him to me would be for him to basically drop them into my arms and have me catch them. Not too bad, right? Just catching sandbags that have been dropped over a meter. Only these things are freaking heavy. The light ones probably weigh about 35 pounds. The heavy ones are about 55-60 pounds. See, people cheat when they fill them. In order to move less sand/dirt, they put some rocks in the bags as well. So I’m having to catch 50 pound sandbags that have been dropped from a meter above my head. And every bag is accompanied by a dust cloud when I catch it. There were at least 100 bags. By the first water break about 15 minutes in, I was covered in dirt. By the end of it, my glasses were so dirty I could barely see and I was chewing on dirt because my mouth was so dried out.

Then in the evening we went to a Druze village for dinner. They’re the people who made us the falafel every Friday, and we got more of the same yesterday. Awesomeness.

Then I woke up this morning at about 0900 (since we had final photos yesterday, we got to sleep in today). Apparently catching 500 pounds worth of sandbags that have been dropped from over your head makes your arms and shoulders really really really can I say REALLY sore the next day…. I don’t think it’s a good thing if you can feel your own knots without touching them….

Today the squares are divided up for some extra work around the Kib to clean everything up for next year. In about 15 minutes, my square is taking stuff from the Bomb Shelter to one of the storage places that we have. Other groups are taking things to other places at different times, and then the last (and possibly least lucky) group is actually cleaning the Bomb Shelter — sweeping/mopping the floors, etc.

Tomorrow morning we leave for Jerusalem. I’ll probably post something again before we leave.

“Mandatory Volunteering”, that’s the phrase that Dan is using to describe the afternoon.

In the morning we were cleaning our squares for pictures tomorrow. At the end everybody took their shade down (actually tore it all down and tied it all up) and piled up all the tools except for what we’ll need for pictures. In the afternoon half the groups will be “volunteering” our time to load it all up into a truck so that it can be taken back to the kibbutz for storage. Then the other half will be “volunteering” their time to sweep down the entire temple podium. Mike will be going up tomorrow in an ultralight (little flying things that have been described as “a go-kart attached to a kite with a ceiling fan at the back”) to take some aerial photos of the whole site (and some of the area around it). But the temple has to be clean for that, so that’s our job this afternoon.

It’s hard to believe that we’re already almost done.

On Tuesday we went to Tel Hai for the meeting with the dialog group. Tel Hai is a local college (one of the few in Israel that has both Israeli and Arabic students) that has the only program of its kind in the country. It’s a center for peace and democracy through dialog. What happens it there’s a group of students who get together a few times a week and discuss either current events relating to Israel/Middle East or just ways in general that there could possibly be peace in the area someday. There was a campus-wide “emergency” meeting two weeks ago in response to the flotilla incident in Gaza that lasted for 10 hours. What we were doing at Tel Hai was listening to students talk about how the dialog group is so awesome, then splitting up into small groups and having our own discussion. To be entirely honest (as I am wont to do), it was pretty boring. I think it was better last year. We didn’t get back until late (meaning about 9pm), so we went straight to bed as soon as we got home.

Today, Wednesday, we spent most of the time in the square flattening out, digging down a little bit more, and starting to clean up a bit. Probably the funniest part of the entire dig happened while we were digging. Mike, the architect, came by as we were doing it all. I was standing on a block so that I could sweep some dirt up without getting in my own way. Mike looked at the block and said “What’s that block there…?”, stepped back, got this pondering expression on his face, then said “I just had a flashback to modern-day Sparta. A pizza joint there. I think your shoes reminded me”, then just walked away. It was great. And the best part is that he does this sort of thing on a daily basis, but normally not this funny.

Then in the evening Bill took our square out for shawarma. Once again, it was amazing. Tomorrow we focus solely on cleaning the square for the Final Photos, which isn’t too much fun, but we gotta do what we gotta do.

So yesterday I had mentioned that I was helping Greg do some surveying work around the site. Today I’m going to be actually explaining what all we’re doing.

Greg is a grad student at Maryland going for his Ph.D in Archaeology. For his dissertation he’s using Omrit (because what would be better than the site that he’s excavating himself?). What he’s trying to do is figure out how far away from the Temple the site actually extended. Sounds like a relatively simple task, but you have to remember that the last occupation was 800 years ago. Things have changed a bit since then.

What we’re doing is collecting pottery shards, just like in the normal squares. Greg has, with the help of a few other people, set up about 30 squares in a checkerboard pattern across the northeastern hill from the Temple (I’ll post a picture tomorrow so that you can have an idea of what I’m talking about). He’s figured out where the southwesternmost corner of the squares are. What the group of people who help him do in the afternoons is tromp around the hill/valley and try to find the marked corners (he has a stake with a ribbon tied to it at each corner he’s found to mark the spot), then figure out the rest of the points of the square along the grid so that each square is the same 5×5 meter size as the others we’re digging. On a good day (like yesterday) we can get six or seven of them set up in two to three hours. On a bad day we might only get two or three set up. It really depends on where the stakes are — are they in a big clump of weeds or are they in a clear area — and what the area around it is like — if it’s really weedy, it can take up to three or four times as long to set up as if it’s a really clear area. Once the squares are set up, we go through later (usually two or three days later) and collect all of the pottery from the surface. Normally it would be excluded as the contamination layer, but here a) we don’t have time to dig full squares and b) it’s far enough away from everything else that people probably haven’t moved anything around too much. We’ve found really weird numbers of pottery shards. One square that we collected from today had about 20-30 pieces. Another one that we did last week (the now famous Square 10) had a LOT. And when I say a LOT, I really mean a LOT. Yes, I know I capitalized “lot” all three times there. In Square 10, we found two buckets full of pottery shards, multiple groups of tesserae (the little blocks that make up mosaics) still stuck together, a 20x35x55 cm concrete block, a small marble block, a few water pipe fragments, and some other stuff that I can’t remember right now. The pottery shards in Square 10 are a pretty funny story actually. Greg was at the pottery reading for it on Saturday and had the indicative shards separated from the non-indicative shards. Then on Sunday Norman and I counted the non-indicative ones. The grand total: exactly 620 pieces. It gets even weirder though. The number from bucket 1 was 413. The number from bucket 2 was 207. That’s exactly 2/3 and 1/3 of the pottery shards (without taking decimal places into account). Weird stuff.

Then what Greg does once the pottery is read and counted is determines the relative concentration of the different kinds of pottery in the different squares. He then takes that data and plugs it into a GIS program on his computer and uses it to basically make a weather map of where different kinds of pottery are most common. Then they’ll use that to determine where (if anywhere) in that area they’re going to dig in the future. It’s really cool fun work, and it’s a lot better than sitting around bored at the kibbutz!

We went on several trips over the weekend, that’s why I wasn’t able to post anything yesterday.

On Saturday we went to Zippori (Sepphoras [I think I spelled that right....]) and Nazareth. One of the leaders, Andy, excavated at Zippori in the 90′s, so he was able to tell us a lot about the site. One of the interesting things about the site is that it’s one of the few sites in the country that still has the balks that show the layers that they excavated through. A bunch of us went around looking for “bad balks” (balks that aren’t flat or have holes in them) and asking him why he didn’t fix them while he was working there. It was a lot more fun than it seems right there. Then in Nazareth we went to the Church of the Annunciation. Amazing, just like last time.

Then today there were a couple of different options. A group of people got together and got a bus to take them to Akko, because that isn’t on the itinerary for the group this year. Apparently they had a good time. Another group decided to walk to Banias, another site about five kilometers away. They ended up getting lost and having to come back. I stayed back at the Kib for the morning and counted pottery pieces for Greg, who’s doing some extra surveying around the area. More on that later. Then for lunch, since most people were in Akko, Greg took a group of us out to lunch in Qiryat Shemona. We stopped at a little hole-in-the-wall Shawarma vendor. I have come to the consensus that Israeli/Middle Eastern food is amazing. As Greg put it, “Any food that requires power tools to make just HAS to be amazing.” Shawarma is basically shaved meat, hummus, vegetables, and sauces all put in either a pita or a baguette. So basically the Israeli version of a Subway sandwich. What they do with the meat is have a giant slab of it roasting in what’s basically a rotisserie, then whenever someone ordered something they would take what looked like a hand-held circular saw or a sander and shave some meat off into a dustpan-like thing, then put it into the sandwich. Then there were all sorts of different vegetables and sauces to add. It was pretty awesome. Much better than the food in the factory cafeteria. Then in the afternoon I went out to the site with Greg to help with the surveying for a few hours.

In the evening we had a guest lecturer. Ami Ayalon is the former head of the Israeli Secret Service, former commander-in-chief of the Israeli Navy, and helped draft a peace proposal in the early 2000′s. He came to talk about the current situation with the flotillas and possible future peace in the Middle East. It was amazing. He was able to give us literally the inside scoop on the decision-making process that went on while trying to figure out what to do about the whole situation. I’d love to keep talking about it, but my computer battery is dying and I should probably get to bed anyway.

For some reason I was really tired when I woke up this morning. Yeah, we’re getting up at 4:30am, but for some reason today was really bad. Then we got out to the site and it felt like time was going twice as slowly as it really does — I thought it had been like three hours when it had really only been one and a half.

I was starting to get a little bit nervous. It’s been a long time and we haven’t found anything TOO interesting all across the site. I mean yeah, we’ve found a lot, but nothing that really makes everyone drop everything and run to see it. Well, we found that today. And when I say “we”, I mean my square. But nobody is allowed to talk about it except in person (because anything can be intercepted and that probably wouldn’t end well — in Dan’s words “it could be a problem for the whole excavation”). So I’ll tell people about it when I get back.

Then when we got back we got falafel again. And once again, I had three wraps. That’s 12 of the little falafel balls for those keeping score at home. I’m just glad that we get it more than once, because the stuff is amazing.

Pottery reading will be happening again this weekend. The second group is going right now and we’re group six. In a perfect world we’d be first in the morning tomorrow (since we don’t have a chance of getting in today), but we’ll probably be second or third tomorrow. More info on that as I find it out.

We’re still digging down. At the beginning of the day we still had a bunch of rocks making a little tumble wall in the middle, so we were scraping and brushing and troweling around the rocks so that we can lift them up without knocking any dirt down. By breakfast we had most of the rocks down, but we had a lot of trouble figuring out what to do about the loci. Should we just incorporate locus 5 (the tumble) into locus 4 (the area under the tumble), locus 6 (the area above the tumble), or locus 3 (the area to the immediate south of the tumble)? Or should it be a combination of those? Or should we just leave it the way it is? That took a while to figure out. And then we just kept digging down.