The Leon Levy Expedition to Ashkelon

We've moved!

2010-07-13T06:30:00.000-07:00

The blog is moving to our new website, digashkelon.com. The site is very much a work in progress -- we welcome feedback -- but we want to let everyone know it is live. We plan to add new content over the next few weeks and months so check back frequently to see what we are doing!

Welcome to digashkelon.com

See you there!

(I'll be making up for the lack of blog posts over the past few weeks in the coming days. Good things have been happening.)

A Race to Pottery Washing

2010-06-30T05:31:00.000-07:00

Quick, can I write an entry before pottery washing and still have time to get some Ice Coffee? Let's see.

Today, in our latest edition of "Getting to Know You" I'd like to introduce you to Dr. Daniel Master, Co-Director Ashkelon Excavations and Associate Professor of Achaeology at Wheaton College. Here goes.

Dr. Master doesn't remember what he wanted to be when he was little but he does remember that he was notorious for telling his cousins where to dig. Today, Dr. Master is still telling everyone where to dig. In fact, that is an important part of his job as co-director. Dr. Master's job is to plan the season's work, find people who want to do the same work and then make it happen and do whatever he can to make sure all the work gets done. His favorite part of the job is working with people he likes. And he has no least favorite part of the job because, he told me, if there was something he didn't like he would change it.

Favorite tool: Trowel
Most interesting find he has excavated: 604 BC destruction of Ascalon
Favorite treat while in Israel: Ben and Jerry's Cherry Garcia Ice Cream Bar covered in Dark Chocolate

BTW, the answer to the question is "no." I wasn't able to post this before pottery washing. At 8:19 it is now just 11 minutes until my bedtime. Until next time, the dirt is ready!

Getting to Know You

2010-06-26T02:29:00.000-07:00

Today's installment of "Getting to Know You" features Robyn, a Ph.D. student in the Classics Department at the University of North Carolina. When I asked Robyn what she wanted to be when she was little she looked a little sheepish and confessed that she always wanted to be an archaeologist. There were obvious signs she told me. First, she was always digging in her back yard when she was a child. And, whenever she played with Barbie dolls she dressed them up as characters in Greek mythology!

Here on the Leon Levy Expedition to Ashkelon Robyn is a Square Supervisor in Grid 47. That means she oversees the day to day excavation of a 10 x 10 meter area within the grid. Robyn's favorite part of the job is the people. She loves meeting new people and teaching them about archaeology. Her least favorite part of the job are the spiders and lack of coffee.

Favorite Tool: WHS trowel
Least Favorite Discovery: A never ending pottery pit she excavated last year
Favorite treat while in Israel: Ice Aroma (basically a mix between a coffee slushie and a coffee milkshake)

Tel Tour

2010-06-23T04:49:00.000-07:00

Today we had our first Tel Tour. It started in Grid 38 where Josh detailed the latest events. In Square 85 Johnathon and his volunteers have waded through Byzantine and Roman period drains on their way to the Persian period and, happily, what appears to be the first well preserved 8th century BCE floor ever found at Ashkelon. That is certainly a big discovery!

One of the goals of Square 85 is to keep moving towards the level of the gray sandbags you can see in this picture and the one below. Last year they uncovered a very important building dating to the Iron 1 period which extends into Square 85. Stay tuned for Johnathon's progress throughout the season as he gets closer and closer to uncovering the remainder of this important building.

Further down in the grid in Dana's square they are dealing with fill layers from the LB 1 period and a house with a courtyard from the LB 2. (LB = Late Bronze Age. The approximate dates for LB 1 are 1550 - 1400 roughly and for LB 2 1400 -1200.)

As mentioned previously, Grid 38 is the longest continually excavated grid on site but much of it is coming to the end of its long winding journey. Dana's may very well complete the excavation of his area this summer after which point Johnathon's square and the quest for the remainder of the Iron 1 building under the sandbags will be the focus of work.

From Grid 38 it was on to Grid 51 and happily I have pictures! Up first, Kate, who you met in our first "Getting to Know You" segment. Here she is explaining her very interesting grid which is newly expanded this season. With the new expansion Kate and her team of supervisors find themselves dealing with a wide range of time periods. They have everything from Islamic and Crusader through the Persian period. All in all some very interesting stratigraphy.

I have a few more details and, I hope, perhaps even a description of the grid from Kate herself who tells me she also has some great pictures to share.

They are very hard to see but if you look at the ground to the right of the volunteer with the red backpack can see some ceramic tiles which come from a Byzantine period villa.

In this picture Kathleen is standing inside a large drain which proved to be much bigger than expected. They also found some great things while excavating it which I hope to have more information on soon!

Under the shade cloth is where the earliest material in Grid 51 comes from. It is here that they hope to come down on the first occupation levels after the 604 BCE destruction of the city.

I realize this is a bit skimpy but pottery washing is fast approaching and I must head off. I promise to have more than just pictures of Grid 51 soon!

Enjoy the dirt!

Ashkelon Happenings

2010-06-20T07:22:00.000-07:00

I am most tardy with a blog entry so without further ado here is the answer to the most recent "What? Where? When?"

This is a dog burial that dates to the Persian period, approximately 538 - 322 BCE. Between 1985 and 1992 over 1200 dog finds were recorded during the excavation of Ashkelon. Typically single dogs were found in shallow, unlined pits dug into large fill layers. Sometimes they were found dug into narrow streets. The burials were at many different heights suggesting, perhaps, that the burial of the dogs happened sporadically. There is no evidence that the dogs were either killed or diseased. And there is no evidence, such as skewed limbs or other types of distortions, that the dogs were just thrown into the pits. Rather, the dogs were generally buried on their sides with their tails carefully arranged to curl toward their feet.

What can we say about the dogs? Both male and female dogs were buried. They ranged in age from just a few days to extreme old age. There never was any evidence that one type of dog was selected over others although puppies did make up the largest percentage of burials. What about the breed? One of no particular ancestry. Parallels for this outside of Ashkelon are few and far between. If you want to learn more you can read the work of Dr. Brian Hesse and Dr. Paula Wapnish who have studied and written about Ashkelon's dog burials.

We will have another "Getting to Know You" this week. Stay tuned. I also hope to have a guest write a paragraph or two about Grid 51. We will have photos too... Fingers crossed. I know they have been dealing with a big drain which means that things have undoubtedly been interesting of late.

On the recording front. Another way we record information is to take photos of objects, architecture and, of course, stratigraphic relationships amongst other things. So here, for instance Ryan is cleaning a large piece of stone so that we could photograph it before doing any further work.

And it is a good thing we decided to take the picture. Last Friday we decided to expand the area of Grid 47, where I work in the theatre, in order to better expose the entirety of the building. So today we had a little extra help and the results couldn't be more impressive -- or messy, truth be told. We'll be cleaning up for a while but that's okay. We'll also have a much better understanding of the building.

So what exactly did we do? Well, stay tuned for pictures from tomorrow's work.

Wednesday is our first tell tour so we should be able to get the scoop on the other grids.

And for today a return to "Who? What? When?"

Until next time, the dirt is ready. Get digging!

Finding Artifacts

2010-06-14T08:41:00.000-07:00

Work continues and everyone seems to be making progress. I went on a field trip to Grid 51 today and saw Dr. Kate's newly expanded empire which is quite impressive. One of the most interesting things I saw in her grid was a floor made of mudbrick tiles! There were a number of other interesting things to see in the grid and I hope to post pictures soon so that everyone back home can see all the exciting material.

We have found a number of interesting artifacts in Grid 47 this week from the very large to the very small. For instance, we found a large architectural fragment. We think it might have decorated the of the theatre we are excavating. Ryan is making sure that the marble fragment is labeled so that we know where it came from. Behind him, Mark is entering data into the computer so that everything is recorded properly. We have been finding many pieces of the building as we dig. We have found roof tiles, floor tiles. fresco fragments, mosaic floor fragments and much more. Today we also found a blade or knife made out of iron. The most exciting thing about it was that part of the wooden handle was still preserved which is rather unusual. The knife came from a pit where we found a lot of interesting things including lots of broken pots, a large number of iron nails and lots and lots of bones.

And finally, for the students at Hamilton Elementary. Perry was there when Emily, one of our volunteers, found her fourth oil lamp of the summer! Everyone agrees she is very lucky.

I want to send out a big thank you to the Hamilton students and families who have been following our work here on the Leon Levy Expedition to Ashkelon. I know that the school year is almost over but you can keep following our work until July 16th when the season ends.

Next entry the answer to our last "What? Where? When?" And hopefully, a new staff member for everyone to meet.

Until then, the dirt is plentiful.

Who Becomes an Archaeologist?

2010-06-10T05:33:00.000-07:00

Who becomes an archaeologist? Good question. There are as many different answers as there are people doing archaeology. Today in our first "Getting to Know You" segment I'm going to introduce one member of our team of archaeologists. I was hoping to have the video working but since that hasn't happened yet I'm just posting a brief paragraph about Dr. Kate.

Kate has a Ph.D. in archaeology from Harvard where she studied the pottery of the Sea Peoples on the coasts and inland in Anatolia & northern Syria (The Philistines are part of the larger phenomenon of the "Sea Peoples"). When in elementary school, she dreamed of becoming either a conductor or a donut maker. While she still daydreams of pastries, she is now the fearless leader of an entire area of excavation. In this area, she supervises the excavation of material from the Islamic through the Persian periods. During the excavation, Kate spends her mornings teaching the square supervisors how to be better excavators. In the afternoon, she "reads" pottery & teaches her supervisors & volunteers about the pottery that has been dug up during the morning.

Favorite Tool: Pick Axe

Least Favorite Excavated Item: Dog Burials

Favorite Gummy Snack: Gummy Eggs

Coming soon the answer to the most recent "What? Where? When?" and the next installment of "Getting to Know You."

The Professionals

2010-06-09T04:33:00.001-07:00

This week Grids 47 and Grids 38 benefited from the assistance of a team of professionals. First up, Jeffrey, Lucy and Noah. After helping with the cleanup in Grid 47 they went on to Grid 38 where they were able to help in the digging there. The trio did an excellent job shoveling dirt, collecting pottery and bringing smiles to the grid.

Jeffrey, Lucy and Noah weren't the only ones to help in Grid 47 this week. Today the head of the excavation Dr. Master took the opportunity to get his trowel dirty excavating monumental Roman architecture with us.

As director of the excavation Dr. Master is very busy and doesn't often have time to dig in the dirt so it was a thrill for us and exciting for him (I'm sure) to spend a few moments in the dirt. Stay tuned for an interview with Dr. Master as the season progresses. We'll soon have an opportunity to ask him about what is new at the ancient city of Ascalon.

As I've mentioned before Grid 47 isn't the only place that we are excavating. Today I wandered on over to Grid 38 to see what they are doing there. In Grid 38 they are excavating a Late Bronze Age house which dates to the 13th century BCE. The house has beaten earth floors and mudbrick walls. When the house went out of use, when the residents left, people used the area for large grain silos that cut through the earlier houses. In one picture you see the ladder that leads to John's square. This square has the latest (or more recent) material in Grid 38. John has Roman and Persian period material as well as material from the Iron Age. He has a long way to go until he catches up with everyone else in the Late Bronze Age. In the other picture you can see another one of Grid 38's Square Supervisors, Madeleine. She is hard at work at her computer. We use laptops in the field to record all of our work and discoveries. By putting everything on the computer it makes it easier for other scholars to see our research as they do their own work.

Progress

2010-06-07T09:58:00.000-07:00

Grid 38 is clean . Grid 51 is getting there and in Grid 47 we are definitely making progress. If you remember, in Grid 47 we are excavating what we believe to be a Roman period theatre. Partially exposed by the excavations of John Garstang in the 1920s we have expanded the excavation area and are hoping to expose the full extent of the theatre. We also need to confirm it is a theatre and not some other type of structure using apsidal or curved walls. To do that we are looking for the stage of the theatre. In a Roman theatre there is are very specific words for the various parts of the stage. First, the front wall of the stage is called the proscaenium. The stage itself is called the pulpitum. And the back wall of the stage, through which there would be three entrances leading onto the stage, is called the scaenae frons. These then are the architectural features we are looking for that would help us to identify the structure as a theatre. Happily, today we found a wall, at least two meters wide, that may be either the proscaenium or the scaenae frons. We'll keep you posted our progress. In the meantime, here are some pictures after our first two days of cleaning in Grid 47. We'll take a look at some of the other grids too and let you know what is going on there.

The Night Before Digging

2010-06-05T02:22:00.000-07:00

What's up Hamilton Elementary School and the Wider World? Shhhh, Perry (Hamilton's world traveling bear) is in bed. He has to get up very early in the morning to go to work. Tomorrow is the first day of digging. Here are some "before" pictures of Grid 47 where we are uncovering a Roman period theatre. We'll keep posting our progress so make sure you check back!

More about what we are doing in Grid 47 will be forthcoming this week. In addition, we'll be adding a new feature to the blog. It's called "Getting to Know You" and every few days we will introduce and interview a member of the staff. (And if we are really on the ball this new feature will include video footage!)

Until next time, get to bed! The dig day starts early.

Just a quick hello

2010-06-02T08:02:00.000-07:00

So, "What? Where? When?" or as I suggested last time, "Who? What? Where."

The answer is that the image (which I can't post right now since my computer is being a little complicated) is a fresco uncovered in what Professor Stager, co-director of the excavation, identifies as the Church of St. Mary of the Green which is located near Ascalon's Jerusalem Gate. The church, built in the 5th century, was originally laid out as a basilica divided into three aisles by two rows of columns which supported a gallery and a pitched roof. Tradition holds that the church continued to function as such throughout much of the Islamic period before being converted into a mosque by the Fatimids (late 9th - mid 12th century). When the Crusaders conquered Ascalon in 1153 CE the building was restored to a church with some changes in its plan. It was also during the Crusader period that frescoes, part of which you see here, were added to the central apse and two side niches of the church. In the central apse the frescoes are of four saints/bishops reading Greek scrolls, each scroll containing excerpts from the homilies of St. John Chrysostom, who was bishop of Constantinople from 398-407 CE.

Here's the next one. Any ideas?

A Day in the Life of an Archaeologist

2010-05-30T08:16:00.000-07:00

Hi everyone. Today I thought I would talk a bit about our daily schedule. See what you think about this...

Wake up is at 4:30 AM unless like me you are crazy enough that you manage to wake up at 4:00 without the help of an alarm. (Like I said, crazy!). We wake up that early in order to finish a full eight hour work day before it gets too hot but you don't really think about that when you wake up and it is pitch black outside. You mostly think about how you must be crazy.

Once we manage to pull ourselves together we wander downstairs for First Breakfast (like Hobbits we have a few extra meals built into the day) which usually consists of tea or coffee, bread and jam and what we affectionately call "bug juice" which is sorta but not really like Tang. 5:00 sharp the bus pulls up to take us to the dig site. It is still dark and the ride never takes as long as we would like it to.

By 5:10 we are at the Pottery Compound where we one and all race to grab our tools. We do this by the light of the florescent moon which pierces the still dark morning. Honestly, it is still dark! Then, tools in hand we strike off in the direction we believe will lead us to our designated excavation areas. (We haven't lost anyone yet and, fingers crossed, we won't this year.)

By 5:30 we are usually hard at work even though we can't really see anything. We work using a range of tools from dental picks and tiny paint brushes on up to full size pick axes and shovels (although they have a more fancy name). We dump all the dirt we dig up into buckets called gufas and then haul it away.

We break for Second Breakfast at 9:00 which is both a good thing and a bad thing. It is good because we get a break after a morning of
manual labor and because the meal is pretty good even though we sit in the dirt to eat it (unless you are lucky enough to track down a nice patch of grass). And breakfast is pretty good; all you can eat (at least until it runs out) eggs, bread, olives, cheese, tomatoes, cucumbers, yogurt and more. The only real problem is that you have to go back to work and it always seems much, much hotter after the break.

And then we go back to work until our next opportunity for food or sleep, whichever you need more. Fruit Break happens at 11:15 or so and it only manages to be a Fruit Break if you saved some fruit from breakfast. From that point, however, the morning is almost over and even
though it is so hot your eyeballs are sweating the last bit of the day doesn't seem too bad. 12:50 we pack up our tools. 1:00 we board the buses and go back to the hotel. Once there we get cleaned up and go down to lunch.

After lunch we have free time until 4:00 when we get back on the bus to go back to the Pottery Compound (basically our office at the site) where we work on processing and analyzing the objects we found earlier in the day. We do that for a couple of hours before getting back on the bus to return to the hotel where we then attend evening lectures on any number of subjects from numismatics (the study of coins) to my favorite, Ashkelon in the Islamic period. And then, only then do we go to dinner (usually around 7:15) after which it is again free time. Which in my case lasts until about 8:30 when I go to bed.

So what makes us do it? Well, next time I'll write a bit about what we do when we are working.

Also, the answer to the latest "Who? What? When?"

Hey staff and volunteers! We are inching our way ever closer to the start of the season. Room and grid assignments are done, the hotel is
full (at least on the weekends) and the grids are dirty! See everyone on Saturday.

The Basilica

2010-05-26T08:07:00.000-07:00

It was a busy day of work today as we started preparing two areas for excavation. Perry, Hamilton Elementary School's traveling bear, visited one of those areas. This is an area in the central part of the site where many of the city's important public buildings were located. It is here that a man named John Garstang first identified one of ancient Ashkelon's basilicas. Today the Leon Levy Expedition to Ashkelon continues to work in the same area so that we can better understand it. We are currently in the process of expanding the area in which we want to work and getting it prepared which means we have to clean the dirt. That's right, clean the dirt. What that means is that we sweep it so that we can see everything in it and believe me there is a lot. When we can see different colors in the dirt we can see things such as pits, floors and sometimes even walls.

This was Grid 47 before work commenced today. Wait until you see it after!

Today work also began in Grid 51 which is being expanded and prepared for excavation. After a week of cleaning both it and Grid 47 should be ready to go.

In Ashkelon

2010-05-24T09:37:00.000-07:00

We are here! And I'd like to send a big shout out to the students of Hamilton Elementary School in Chicago, Illinois who will be following this blog for the last few weeks of school. Welcome to the Leon Levy Expedition to Ashkelon.

Accompanying my son and I to Ashkelon this summer is Perry, Hamilton's traveling bear. He will be making appearances throughout the summer so keep an eye out for him.

In the meantime, while we begin to prepare for the summer season we are simultaneously working on a number of projects. Here you can see two of Ashkelon's staff members "reading" Iron I pottery. Iron I pottery dates to 1200 - 1000 BCE and the time of the Philistines. When we "read" pottery we look at the shape and decoration of pottery (bowls, pots, lamps, jars, jugs and so on) to determine when it was used. The Iron Age
pottery in Ashkelon comes from many different places including Cyprus and the
Greek Islands. There are even imports from Syria. The vast majority of the pottery, however, was locally made.

We "read" ceramics from all different periods. While Josh and Laura are working on the Iron Age I am working on Islamic period pottery. At the site of Ascalon, our Islamic period pottery dates from 640 - 1270 CE. During this period we have imports from many different places including North Africa, Egypt, Syria, Iraq, Iran and as far away as China.

The sun is hot, the breeze is mild and it's time to start digging. Stay tuned for more from Perry and for regular updates on our progress this season.

Let the Fun Begin -- Soon

2010-05-12T20:10:00.000-07:00

The answer to the last "What, Where, When?" is that the picture was taken standing on top of the remains of an unexcavated church located on the South Tel. The view is looking to the southeast towards what may very well have been the intersection of the city's main north-south road with its southernmost east-west road. The stones at the very bottom of the picture are from one of the church's apses.

This summer we return to Ascalon's city center and a building first discovered by John Garstang in the early 20th century. The building he found was a long rectangle roughly oriented north-south with an apse on its southern end. Garstang believed he had uncovered the city's main basilica with, perhaps, a senate hall or some other type of attached structure. In 2008 we decided to return to the basilica to test the accuracy of Garstang's work and to further expose and examine the monumental structure he unearthed.

Over the course of two seasons of excavation we found that Garstang's work was generally very accurate. What we also found forced a major reinterpretation of the building. It now seems clear that the apse at the southern end of the building is in fact an odeon, a small Roman theatre. What does that mean for the remainder of the building? Is it a basilica? Are we actually looking at one single structure or are we in fact looking at several? How does the odeon fit into the urban plan of Ascalon?

We hope to answer these questions and more as we expand Grid 47 to the east and the south. Moving east is particularly important because we believe it will be an area undisturbed by Garstang's earlier work and, therefore, an opportunity to better understand the occupational sequence in the city center.

In addition to Grids 38 and Grid 47, which I will be supervising, there is one more area that will be excavated. Grid 51 is situated on top of the South Tel near the Mediterranean Sea and was originally opened as an excavation area in order to determine to full extent of the ancient city. In other words, we wanted to know whether or not the area of Grid 51 was inside or outside the city wall. This season work will continue and be expanded under the direction of Dr. Kate Birney with the goal of reaching the 604 BCE destruction of the city.

Three excavation areas, three different periods of the site's occupational sequence, three sets of questions and a world of archaeological exploration. This season promises to greatly expand our understanding of some key aspects of Ascalon's past. It will almost certainly be fun and tiring and fun and exhausting and fun. To those of you joining us, welcome. To those of you thinking about next year, keep an eye on the blog for regular updates. And for those of you just curious about an archaeological excavation and what we do, enjoy.

See you there! One week and counting.

Now, "What, Where, When?"

Summer Plans

2010-03-19T16:38:00.000-07:00

The object shown in the most recent "What, Where, When," is a Fatimid imperial inscription over which a Crusader knight carved his shields. The inscription was found, broken into many pieces, at the bottom of a section of stone talis located just to the west of the main park entrance. The inscription was carved into what excavators suspect was originally a marble tabletop, measuring approximately 1.49 x .63 x .10 m, from the Roman period. The 22 line inscription commemorates the construction of a fortification tower by the local Fatimid governor on the orders of the Grand Vizier in Cairo and even includes the date of the work, 1150 CE.

Just three years later Ascalon would fall to the Crusaders for the first of three times. What happened to the marble slab and the Fatimid inscription after that is unclear until it fell into the hands of a knight named Sir Hugh Wake who went on crusade with Richard earl Cornwall in the mid-13th century. Richard is believed to have built a fortress in Ascalon in the 1240s and it was at that time that Sir Hugh Wake carved his emblem over the earlier Fatimid inscription. The three large shields belong to Sir Hugh Wake, the smaller shields belong to a less important knight accompanying him.

The importance of Sir Hugh Wake's shields on this marble slab cannot be overestimated as to date they are the only direct proof for Crusader occupation in Ascalon in the 13th century. This in spite of the fact that sources record Ascalon was occupied until 1270 CE when it was finally destroyed once and for all by the Mamluks.

For some of us departure to Ascalon and the 2010 field season is only two months away. For the remainder, departure isn't too far behind that so it is a good time to start thinking about the season and our research goals. The longest continually excavated area (including a hiatus of a few years) is Grid 38 which is centrally located near the city center of ancient Ascalon. This summer Grid 38 will be supervised by Joshua Walton, a graduate student at Harvard University. I asked Josh what his goals were for this season and this is what he told me,

"This year in 38 we have three areas of focus. In [square] 74 we will be trying to further understand the LB levels, particularly the domestic structure that was partially uncovered in 2008, and trying to get a better idea of the LB sequence there. In [square] 84 we will be trying to find any evidence for the MB occupation of the site, which was hinted at by the ceramics in some of the deeper probes in 2008, hopefully we will be able to uncover some accompaying architecture. In [square] 85 we will be finishing the excavation of the Iron 2 fills, and hopefully reach the phase 17 and 18 philistine levels, which we will be attempting to connect to the last few years of excavation in [square] 75 to gain a better picture of the philistine domestic structure on the east side of the street. In this area we will also be working with the Weisman institute of archaeological science to try and employ some of their techniques for understanding the philsitine occupation."

In addition to working in Grid 38 Josh will continue to lead the Persian period pottery project. Work began on this project last summer when staff and volunteers processed several industrial sized containers worth of Persian pottery that had been in storage for, well, seemingly forever. More than one scholar has tried to tackle the Persian period pottery project and failed but this time it looks like things are well on their way. After last year's progress this summer Josh tells me the plan is to work on identifying phases, marking the pottery and, if all goes well, to start a general typology.

Josh will also be involved in a pre-season project which will refine pottery readings for some of the earliest Philistine floor assemblages.

That is just one of the excavation areas and some of the projects that we'll be working on this summer. Stay tuned to learn more about what we'll be working on this summer.

Now, "What, Where, When?" This time it's a little different. Where was this picture taken and what does it show? (The photo quality is terrible but you should be able to get the idea.)

Remember, there is still time to apply for our summer field season.

On the Road to Ashkelon

2010-02-15T13:38:00.000-08:00

"What? Where? When?" The short answer is that it is a Roman period bath (dated to the fourth century CE) discovered on the North Tel in the mid-1990s. Excavation of the bath uncovered the furnace, hypocaust tunnels which supported a partially preserved floor and two chambers. The scene depicted in the picture is a group of Romans hanging around in their togas as they relax at the bath. Ok, truth be told it is some volunteers engaged in a re-enactment for the benefit of other volunteers on a Tel tour, a once a week opportunity to visit other excavation areas and learn about what is being discovered. For bonus points, where exactly is the bath located on the North Tel? And can you name one of the two supervisors of this area?

On to other things...

I found this article while procrastinating on some work and include a link to it here as an introduction to Dr. Daniel Master, co-director of the Leon Levy Expedition to Ashkelon.

The story is a familiar one as my road to Ashkelon parallels that of Daniel’s to a great extent with some obvious differences (he is a co-director and I am not for example).

This is my story.

My freshman year of college my roommate was an anthropology major which I thought was cool though less practical then my history major. Sure Indiana Jones had lots of great adventures but really, who would pay you to do that sort of work? I wasn’t convinced there were too many people that would. I was, however, more easily convinced that it would be fun to try an archaeological excavation, that spending a summer digging in the dirt under a blazing hot sun would be a great experience.

So, like many students before me I perused the help-wanted ads in Archaeology Magazine and Biblical Archaeology Review. In other words, I combed through their annual listings of excavations that take student volunteers and chose one at random. Ashkelon was the winner. I suppose the Harvard University name attached to it may have had something to do with my choice but I really don’t remember. What I do remember is that once the idea hit me I didn’t let it go until I found myself in Ashkelon several months later.

I liked it enough that first season that I returned a second season as a volunteer happy to pay for the privilege of once again wallowing in the sewers of Ashkelon. My hard work, enthusiasm and willingness to dig just about anything paid off and I was invited back as an assistant square supervisor for the 1991 field season.

In those days Ashkelon was huge. On average 80 to 120 volunteers and a staff of 50 to 60 people. The excavation was large not just in terms of numbers but also in numbers of areas being worked. Each excavation had a Grid Supervisor, the person in charge of directing, collating, processing and interpreting the data collected from however many 10 x 10 meter squares were opened for excavation within that grid. Each square, of course, had a Square Supervisor who was responsible for the day to day decisions within that square. And it was not unheard of for each square to have an assistant supervisor who, obviously, assisted the Square Supervisor while receiving the training with which to overthrow their bosses.

Such was my position in 1991 when not even a week into the season I was promoted, without any overthrowing required, to a Square Supervisor in Grid 50 where I stayed for many years. I even made the cover of BAR one year -- of course, the scenic excavation area overlooking the Mediterranean Sea undoubtedly had more to do with that than I did.

And maybe along the way the power went to my head because I decided archaeology really was cool and that it didn’t matter it was less practical than history (remember, I was young then and I liked to study history). I decided graduate school was the way to go but I wouldn’t do what it seemed like everyone else at Ashkelon was doing. No Bronze or Iron Age archaeology for me. No, I decided that I wanted to study the late periods, specifically the Islamic period. This proved to be a very fortuitous decision as I was able to write about Ashkelon for my dissertation. No one else wanted to do it and I had my choice of topics.

I continued digging at Ashkelon throughout graduate school and in 1997 I became a Grid Supervisor and had the privilege of opening a new area for excavation.

Next it was on to a stint as the Ashkelon Lab Director for which I am most well-known as the author of an unheralded but very amusing (I am told) Lab Director’s Manual. The Leon Levy Expedition to Ashkelon maintains a lab facility year round in the city of Ashkelon in order to facilitate research and other ongoing projects associated with the excavation. That can mean anything from moving pottery crates from one rat-infested warehouse to another, hosting visiting scholars or team members working on various research projects to supervising, shall we say, the delicate use of mechanized equipment to prepare for the upcoming season of excavation. A varied and demanding job it is nonetheless quite rewarding and puts you in near proximity to some amazing archaeological discoveries on a daily basis.

In 2008 I went back to serving as a Grid Supervisor and there I have stayed. Every year there are new problems, fresh faces and the opportunity not only to uncover the history of Ashkelon but also to teach the next generation of archaeologists who will pursue our dream of revealing and interpreting the material remains of this ancient city.

How will your Ashkelon story read?

And now for the next installment of “What, Where, When?” Thoughts?

Until next time.

Dr. Moshier Part 2

2010-02-05T06:50:00.000-08:00

Here is the second installment of Dr. Moshier's blog reprinted with permission. Enjoy!

Blog Entry: The big one that got away (posted July 6, 2009)

Ashkelon is a city on the coast. There is a casual “beach town” vibe here that is not much different from places in the USA like Corpus Christi or Ft. Lauderdale. During the weekends (Friday-Saturday) the population of Ashkelon must triple, at least the occupancy of our hotel does.

Of course, there are disadvantages to living along the coast. The beaches of Corpus Christi and Ft. Lauderdale are frequently traumatized by hurricanes. But, such violent storms are not spawned in the warm waters of the Mediterranean; it’s just not big enough and lies too far north of the equator for strong cyclonal patterns to develop. Other dangers lurk in this tectonically active region that can result in devastation to the Mediterranean and Aegean coasts. Something really catastrophic happened here about 3600 years ago.

In the Aegean Sea between southern Greece and western Turkey, and due north of the Island of Crete there is a crescent-shaped island (or rather strand of small islands) named Santorini, also known as Thera. The Minoan culture was thriving in this region during the Late Bronze Age. Minoan art and ceramics are colorful and sophisticated. There may be cultural and ethnic connections between the Minoans and other people groups scattered around the Western Mediterranean, such as the Philistines, Phoenicians, Hyksos, etc. But Minoan culture basically ended with a bang when Thera blew up. Thera is a giant volcano. Or was.

So much ash was pushed up into the atmosphere that it probably explains evidence of climate disturbances in China and frost damage to trees in California and Ireland (Science v. 312, p. 548). Ash from the eruption has been recovered in Greenland ice cores and sediment cores in the Nile Delta. A little global cooling was the least of worries for people living along the Mediterranean and Aegean coasts. The eruption resulted in the collapse of the center of the island creating a caldera and surges of pyroclastic material flowed in to the surrounding sea. The displacement of water produced the dreaded tsunami waves that propagated in every direction.

Even some 500 km away, the coast of Israel could not have been spared of this disaster. Computer models show the waves hitting our Late Bronze city of Ashkelon about 100 minutes after those pyroclastic surges hit the ocean floor. With wavelengths of over 100 km, tsunami waves build in height as they run up on coastlines. Waves hitting the Levant could have been up to 12 m above sea level. Surely Ashkelon was smacked, but what actually happened and can we find evidence of that fateful day of doom?

Finally, there is controversy over the date of the eruption. Geochronologists using carbon-14 date the eruption at about 1600-1620 BC. Archaeologists, particularly those working Bronze Age sites in the Nile Delta and Levant, believe the archaeological indicators and chronologies put the date at 1500 BC!

Henrik Bruins, a geochronologist at Ben Gurion University of the Negev, has been looking along the coast of Israel for deposits that might be linked to the Thera eruption. He has described in great detail Thera tsunami deposits on the Island of Crete. In the spring of 2009, Ashkelon Excavation Director Daniel Master and Dr. Bruin discussed the possibility of tsunami deposits at Ashkelon. Daniel recalled a particular massive sandy layer on top of the hard kurkar dune rock along the beach cliff. It is about 6 m above present sea level. Perhaps if this deposit had the characteristics of a tsunami deposit and contained datable material and diagnostic pottery, we could establish the presence of the tsumani at Ashkelon and contribute to the resolution of the debate over the timing of the eruption.

My very first morning here two weeks ago we looked at that bed (we could not reach it due to its position on the cliff) and made plans to clean it up for study. What that means is that daredevil archaeologist Josh Walton would scale a ladder and chisel out a smooth surface with a pick and trowel. That did not happen until this past Sunday after our drilling project was finished. It took two hours hard labor by Josh and my geoarchaeology student assistant Ben before I had my first look at the deposit. Josh had already determined that the pottery beneath and within the deposit was much later than Bronze Age. I could see no evidence that the bed was anything other than typical tell sediment (thebrownish yellow loam soiling all my T-shirts). Shoot.

We decided to comb the beach cliff for other candidate deposits, using information from a previous geoarchaeological survey. About 250 m north of the disappointing deposit we found an old covered trench that was documented to contain, “fluvial sand” with Chalcolithic and Early Bronze pottery. Fluvial infers water deposition. The geologist who had described the trench wondered if flooding on the tell had resulted in the deposition of sand in narrow channels running toward the sea. It is hard to imagine that enough rainwater could collect on the tell to create such a torrent. It made sense to us that “the flood” may have been from run up or back wash from the big one. So this morning, Josh and Ben were at it again with pick and trowel, only this time they did not need a ladder. They cleaned a 4 m section and dug a 2.5 m trench. We found nothing even remotely similar to the previous description of that level (in all fairness, we might not have been in exactly the same place described in the previous report). We see no other reasonable places to look for evidence of the elusive tsunami deposit. I joked with Josh and Ben, “there goes our article in Nature.” Josh was not sure if his hours of digging would even have been acknowledged, anyway. Because they worked so hard to create a nice clean trench, we dedicated the next hour to describing the 4 m of sediment in detail, just for the record.

Even though we don’t have geological evidence for the tsunami does not mean that ancient Ashkelon was spared. From now on, archaeologists digging levels of Bronze Age occupation will be mindful to look for evidence of natural destruction. Our work to create a “bedrock” map of the tell will be used to model the effects of a wave on reconstructed Early Bronze Age topography. If waves were even as much as 12 m high hitting the coast, either as a wall or rapidly rising water, we know that some Bronze Age levels are as high as 17 m above present sea level. Even better for them, sea level during the Bronze Age was about 2 m lower than present! The ancient citizens of Ashkelon would have certainly been terrified by the giant wave or waves soaking the coast, but many may have survived by virtue of the elevation provided by the old kurkar dune beneath their city. They probably had more to fear from the falling ash. Who knows what human or natural activity might have erased physical evidence of the event? Or, have we looked in all the right places?

Core Sampling Project

2010-01-24T18:27:00.000-08:00

As promised, here is the first two of Dr. Moshier's blogs reprinted with permission.

Blog Entry: A big pile of sand (posted July 1, 2009)

All of my T-shirts have brown stains on the part over my belly. The hotel laundry just can't wash out the silt and clay that we are drilling out of Tell Ashkelon. I think the size of the stain is proportional to the size of the belly, a theory confirmed by a quick look at individuals in the pottery compound. I think I’ll have salad tonight for dinner.

The dirt doesn't seem to show as much on my pants, as they are very pale brown to begin with, a shade close to 10YR7/4 on the Munsell scale of soil colors. My typically pale “white” skin color is changed, too, either due to the sun or the absorption of Holy Land clay into my pores. Sunscreen only serves to give the clay something to stick to. Even after rigorous scrubbing in the shower, mud still smears the towel.

On Monday we started a second round of drilling. Archaeology students Ben and David assisted me again. Our driller Efni showed up at the park with his rig at 7 AM. We had been there since 5 AM. Efni packs up and leaves at 3PM and there is no time for lunch before he leaves. Our strategy Monday morning was to push up close to some of the excavation sites. The archaeologists know that the Middle Bronze settlement is built on a cover of yellow sand that extends beyond the (safe) level of excavation. Is the sand part of a dune that covers older cultures? We really wanted to punch through that sand to find out.

The drill is called a bucket auger that looks like a medium-size garbage can with jaws. The rig is mounted on a large tractor that is part forklift and part bulldozer. The drill string rotates and lengthens like a radio antenna, as the bucket churns down through the sediment. It is strong enough to grind through soft rock like the local sandstone, but the scraping sounds like fingernails on a blackboard and louder than a dinosaur in Jurassic Park. When the bucket is full with about 30 to 40 cm of sediment, the drill string is retracted and the bucket returns to the surface. The driller mechanically shakes the sediment out of the bucket, which falls on the ground for examination and sampling.

If everything goes well we can reach a total depth of 11 meters below the surface. Things did not go well Monday morning. At about five meters depth we encountered the yellow sand, but the sand was dry and started caving into the hole. We typically have to pour one or two standard buckets of water down the hole every time the auger goes down in dry sand. The water gives the sand cohesion and conditions the side of the hole to prevent caving. The idea of pouring fresh water down a dry hole seems ironic and perverse. It just did not work and we never got deeper than six meters. We moved the rig about 4 m to the side and tried again with the same results. If there is if there is older archaeological material beneath the sand, we will have to find a better method of drilling to find it. Next, we moved to another location near an excavation site. Same thing. Dry caving sand. Excavation Director Daniel Master stopped by to hear my complaints and told me, “Tell Ashkelon does not easily give up its secrets.”

The last three probes on Monday were more successful. We drilled in the main parking lot located between the north and south tells. The lot was probed in the 1980s but the reports from that survey are difficult to interpret because the descriptions are ambiguous and the depths don’t seem correct. We have good data now and that is the important thing. Even if I offer a lousy interpretation, I want our descriptions of the material and stratigraphy to be useful to future scholars working here.

On Tuesday we started by drilling very close to the beach cliff next to the south rampart built by Crusaders. The goal is to trace deposits evident on the beach cliff landward. Drilling was painfully slow through the sand. David and Ben carried gallons and gallons of water (uphill) from a park faucet some 50 m away from the drill sites. At about 9 AM the cable on the drill rig snapped. Efni called someone to come with a new cable. We were down for about 30 minutes. I fell asleep in the shade sitting up with my legs crossed on the ground. It was hot, but we had a constant breeze from the sea.

The next probe turned out to be our last of the season. It took nearly four hours to drill 10.4 m. We needed lots of water to get through the sand. David and Ben got quite a workout carrying jerry cans of water from an irrigation tap David found about 75 m from the drill site. I wanted to find a place where we would drill to bedrock. We have all assumed that hard sandstone, called kurkar, underlies the tell because it is exposed to elevations of up to 18 m above sea level. But, we have never encountered hard sandstone in our course landward under the tell. We do encounter lots of sand (remember the dry yellow sand from Monday?). We should have reached hard rock in our first probe near the south rampart beach cliff, but we did not. So for this probe we moved the rig to the north tell and set up near the cliff face (about as close as we could safely put it). We should have reached hard rock there, but again we did not! So it appears that the hard rock only occurs along the beach cliff. Hypothetically, the ancient sand dunes that formed the original topography of the tell were only cemented in this narrow zone against the sea. Seawater contains the dissolved calcium and carbonate that probably cemented the rock. We find no other obvious source of rock for the crusader ramparts and structures than the area of the beach cliff and a small quarry close to the cliff on the north tell. It seems then, when we encounter yellow sand anywhere under the tell, we are at, or near, the level of the original topography of the tell. Ashkelon appears to be built on a pile of sand. Our drilling efforts have provided the data to reconstruct the original topography of the site before human habitation and modification of the land.

We did not always encounter what we expected (that would be too easy). But perhaps Tell Ashkelon is beginning to reveal some of its geological secrets after all.

Read more from Dr. Moshier and his team next time to learn more about how geology is contributing to the archaeological exploration of ancient Ashkelon.

Archaeology, It's Not Just For Archaeologists Anymore

2010-01-24T17:57:00.000-08:00

"What, where, when?"

First things first, the answer to last month's "What, where, when?" is that the photo shows a Roman period road discovered during the 1992 season. The road and its associated drains were excavated in Grid 2 on the North Tell just outside the ancient city walls. Though exposed the street was never fully excavated and today it is buried under the parking lot just outside the Canaanite Gate

Technology, or How We Get Things Done

The privilege of old age is that I can reminisce with little rhyme or reason about the things that manage to stick out in my memory. So, here are some random thoughts that have managed to linger in the deep recesses of my mind.

Unsurprisingly, over the 20 plus years since I first went to Ashkelon there has been a great deal of change particularly in how we do things. Maybe not going from a horse and carriage to a car level of change but certainly revolutions in both technology and methodology that have changed how we investigate the ancient city. Yep, how we investigate the site and how we stay connected with the wider world as we live in the whirlwind that is an excavation season.

For instance, back in the day technology at Ashkelon meant those ultra thin, light weight air mail letters you could send home. You know the ones you fold and seal shut no envelope needed. That was pretty fancy stuff.

Archaeologically speaking pencil and paper were the recording tools of trade and the only computer on site was a cranky old thing in the dig office that all the supervisors shared along with the team of dig registrars. At the end of the season when square reports were due BEFORE the final dig party that machine saw a great deal of love and attention.

By the early 90s we advanced sufficiently to have access to e-mail. By “access” I mean that the e-mail was sent to the aforementioned cranky old beast in the dig office where it was then downloaded and printed (one screenshot at a time) before being distributed to the designated recipients. And by “we” I mean members of the professional staff. In other words, while a limited few of us had e-mail we had little privacy and certainly few secrets. Did I mention that e-mail came via a 300 baud modem? For those of you not old enough to know what that is, imagine a bunch of hungry alley-cats fighting over food and then toss in a chorus of crying babies. Finally, drop a spoon into the kitchen disposal, listen to all those glorious sounds together and you’re just about there.

Today things are quite a bit different. Pencils and paper are a thing of the past. We actually use laptops in the field to do all our data entry. Anyone with a laptop and I do mean anyone has access to e-mail and the joys of the internet. Need to check the score of the Cubs’s game? You can do that -- just about anywhere you want. Need to update your Facebook page? Doable.

The pervasiveness of computers, both in and out of the field, isn’t the only thing that is different about Ashkelon and the way we do things. In the past few seasons we have started some new projects, one doing ground penetrating radar and another doing core sampling, to help us investigate more areas of the site. These projects use methods that are less invasive than traditional excavation and not only do they help to further our research goals but also they help to shape those goals.

The core sampling project is headed by the team’s geologist Dr. Stephen Moshier who is an Associate Professor of Geology at Wheaton College, Illinois.

Born and raised in upstate New York Dr. Moshier studied geology at Virginia Tech (BS, 1977), SUNY Binghamton (MA, 1980) and Louisiana State University (PhD, 1987). His previous professional experience included working in the petroleum industry and a faculty position at the University of Kentucky. His teaching responsibilities cover areas of general geology, earth history, sedimentary petrology, and geoarchaeology. Prior to 2000, professional interests were focused on ancient limestones and petroleum geology. From 2000 to 2007, Moshier served as team geologist for the Tell el-Borg excavation in the NW Sinai, Egypt and in 2008 he joined the Harvard University-Leon Levy Expedition to Askhelon, Israel.

Dr. Moshier has generously allowed me to reprint some of his blog entries about his work during the 2009 season. The first of two entries will follow after this one.

Now, for the latest “What, where, when?” Any ideas?

One final note, we have a new website for you to check out. The address is digashkelon.com. Visit it to see our flyer about the upcoming season. The site is still under development but check back in the future to see more about Ashkelon and what we do. We also have a new e-mail address, info@digashkelon.com.

Thanks and see you next time!

Thoughts of Ashkelon

2009-12-17T19:24:00.000-08:00

My name is Tracy Hoffman and I’m a grid supervisor on the Leon Levy Expedition to Ashkelon. As one of the longest serving members of the expedition team it is with some trepidation and even more excitement I take on the task of sharing Ashkelon with the world.

I first volunteered in 1989. I had just finished my freshman year of college and was eager to embark on the discovery of the hidden glories of the ancient past. Glories that I quickly discovered were not always hidden nor particularly gorgeous or even that ancient if it comes down to it. It is unfortunate, albeit sometimes gratifying and satisfying, that we don’t get to choose what impresses us, to hand select the memories that leave an indelible imprint on our life’s journey. If it were possible I would undoubtedly consider exchanging some of my earliest memories of Ashkelon...

My first few summers at Ashkelon were an adventure as might be expected of any “once in a lifetime” experience. One of my roommates, and there were four of us in one room, was adverse to shaving and had a propensity for sleeping in the nude. One of my fellow volunteers managed to drawl his one syllable name into three, sometimes four syllables leaving most of us confused about what his name actually was until halfway through the season when we were able to determine the two key letters that made up his name. There were a pair of supervisors who were affectionately referred to as “the Greek god” and “the Norse god” for their imagined resemblance to the oh so handsome, deities of old.

There were our accommodations which featured roaches (larger than any I had ever seen before and they moved fast), late night pool parties with hotel guests staying up into the wee hours of the night listening to the Chicken Dance on a seemingly endless loop. And, of course, there was the food which was always filling if not wholly satisfying.

Through it all there was the archaeology, the exploration of the ancient city of Ashkelon and its hidden glories. Which for me, that year and the next, meant an inordinate amount of time in sewers. Large or small, little more than rivulets running down the center of a dirt street or purpose built stone drains I experienced it all. And by the end of my first two seasons of sewer excavation I was convinced (and still am truth be told) that a rehydrated sewer, one newly re-exposed to the humid Mediterranean air, retained discernible vestiges of its former odoriferous glory. In other words, they still stank when the wind was blowing the right way.

Over the years I have excavated a wealth of archaeological material from those sewers to houses, warehouses, streets, burials and so much more. Along the way I have encountered a bewildering array of interesting people from those who didn’t like the sun and those afraid of bugs to students of history, archaeology and religion not to mention those more mature adults embarking on the adventure of a lifetime to borrow and repeat an apt, oft spoken cliche.

Ashkelon is many things to many people and as my thoughts turn to the upcoming 2010 season I can’t wait the meet the next group of hardy souls willing to take the 5:00 AM ride from the Gani Dan to the ancient city. With staffing well under way and discussions about excavation strategy and planning heating up it is only a matter of time before the months become weeks, and the weeks become days and the days become the morning after a really long plane ride. If the spirit of adventure moves you, come join us.

If you’re new to our site take a look at the National Geographic January 2001 issue where ancient Ashkelon is a feature article. Head to the library and peruse Ashkelon I, a comprehensive overview of the first season of excavation in 1985, edited by Lawrence Stager, David Schloen and Daniel Master. Or stay tuned to this blog where I’ll pass along interesting tidbits on the daily life and times, not to mention the amazing archaeological research, of the Leon Levy Expedition to Ashkelon.

For those of you who aren’t new, something I’ll call “What, where, when?” Can you identify what’s in the picture to the right?

To learn more about the site, our research and volunteer opportunities please go to www.fas.harvard.edu/~semitic/ashkelon/. Send questions to leonlevyexpeditiontoashkelon@gmail.com.

Thanks and see you next time!

2009 Post season wrap-up, part 3

2009-07-23T10:17:00.000-07:00

Well, we've come a long way this season, but it's finally over. The staff have checked out, my excavation computer and tape measure have been returned, and the excavation areas are all closed up and sandbagged for winter.

But how, you might ask, did we get from what you see in that picture to the left, to the cleanly defined walls and surfaces that showed up in the last couple of entries?

Okay, I'll admit: We used a big mechanical excavator for some of it. But not all that much, really -- most of the dirt was shifted by hand, by one of the best groups of volunteers that it's been my privilege to have worked with.

Now, it's true that there were times that the supervisors did a bit of work themselves. Why, I've even got a bit of photographic evidence to support that assertion: Here's Philip Johnson, busy with brush and gufah. But honestly, we spent most of our time making sure everything was going the way it ought to be, and filling things out on our trusty computers.

Which weren't the only responsibilities the staff had. Every week, there'd be a tour of one of the areas of excavation, which meant that we had to have our squares clean enough that people could see what was going on, and we had to give a little discussion of what it was that we've been finding. This was difficult for me, as I was never sure about what I was finding, but other people did an excellent job of explaining exactly what it was they had turned up.
Here, for instance, you can see the estimable Kate Birney explaining what's going on in Grid 51. As Kate is a high level black belt, I fear admitting that I'm not sure what's going on in her grid, but I can't say that I remember much of what she had to say. Please don't kill me, Kate.

And then there were the side projects. I had this blog, which I'm almost entirely done with. Other people were working on things like ceramics typologies, geology, zooarchaeology, and so on. As far as side projects go, this was actually a pretty modest effort -- maybe an hour or so a day, more when I had time for it. Unlike trying to sort out the Persian period material from previous seasons of excavation, say, which is something that involves, y'know, real work.

Sean Burrus, for instance, was one of the excavation's photographers, in addition to being a square supervisor. Here, you can see him taking a picture of me taking a picture of him taking a picture of . . . aaah! That was on one of the days where everyone in Grid 47 worked their tails off in 47.44, cleaning up after the excavator; you can see the effects of that day's work in the less than pristine shirts displayed. And that was in something like hour two of ten.

Not all the work that the volunteers did involved heavy lifting, of course. Unfortunately, I didn't get any good pictures of pottery washing, or of people writing on their potsherds, both of which are jobs that are absolutely necessary for the excavation, and both of which require constant attention to detail.
However, I did get a shot of Heather Calhoon using a pair of tweezers to sort hundreds of tiny beads. Again, something necessary, and certainly something that requires constant and focused attention. Heather may have gotten roped into doing that particular job as a result of being the registrar's sister; there are consequences to things like that.

Which isn't to say that the dig was nothing but work; there were also field trips, and, as the season drew to a close, a couple of parties, as well. First off was the finds display and reception; here you can see the registrar, Jessica Calhoon-Long, and Sara Hoffman standing behind the table, while everyone involved in the dig stopped by to look at some of what had been found over the last two seasons.

And, all credit to Jessica, it was a heck of a display. Some of that had to do with the quality of the finds, but more had to do with the choice of which finds to display, the logic of their arrangement, and the descriptions of each piece that Jessica wrote up. I'd love to show some of that work in detail, but the finds are the sort of thing that are going to be finding their way into peer-reviewed publications before too long, and it's generally considered bad form to put that sort of thing in public view before it can be properly published. But trust me: it's great stuff.

And, in addition to looking at the finds that had been so expertly displayed, a pair of hand made and decorated plates were presented to the director emeritus of the excavation, Larry Stager, and the excavation's sponsor, Shelby White, in recognition of the fact that they'd been with the project for twenty years. Which is really a significant amount of time to spend on a project; unfortunately, there's kind of a reason why I wasn't one of the dig's photographers, which can be seen in my failing to get a picture showing the decorated side of the plates.

And, on a similar note, I didn't get any pictures of the final party, which took place last week. Which is unfortunate, as it was an excellent party. There were extremely silly presentations, and a pair of music videos, which . . . well, if you weren't on the dig, you'd probably find them puzzling. But they were hilarious, honestly.

And that's about it, really. I'm not sure how many people have been reading this, but I do get the sense that it's more than one or two; for all of you who have been reading, thanks for your time, and I hope you've found it some combination of enjoyable, informative, or entertaining.

See you all around!

2009 Post season wrap-up, part 2

2009-07-22T02:13:00.000-07:00

Now, while the stuff that I was talking about in the last entry might be interesting, it wasn't really what our excavation focused on this season; the two squares with the majority of the volunteers were on the east side of the area, and while my square was on the west, most of what we dug was huddled up against the eastern edge of the square.

No, while the stuff on the west looks a bit different than it did at the beginning of the season, the stuff in the east looks a lot different than it did at the beginning of the season. And we certainly learned a great deal of what had been going on there, at least during the Byzantine period.

As with the last entry, MS Paint has been used in an attempt to clarify.

This picture more or less picks up where the picture in the previous post leaves off; the wall that I've circled in red and labeled 2 matches the wall in the previous post that I had circled in red and labeled 1; the wall that I circled in black here and labeled 1 matches up with the one that I had circled in green and labeled 2.

Sometimes I make peculiar choices.

But anyway. The wall labeled 2 is earlier than any of the other features that can be seen in this picture, and was probably the wall of the apse of a Roman basilica. The wall labeled 1, on the other hand, was built later, and does not seem to have been part of a basilica at all.

One of the things that troubled us at the end of last season was the plaster structure which I've circled in green, and labeled 3; only a bit of it was visible at the time, so interpretation of it was postponed until this year.

And we do see rather a lot more of it this year, and we've got a theory about it, now: It's part of the seating of an Odeon, an indoor theater where musicians and poets would have performed (there are remains of a full scale theater in the Ashkelon National Park, perhaps a hundred meters to the south of where we excavated this season that hasn't been excavated. It wouldn't be unusual to have an odeon and a dramatic theater close to each other; if I'm not mistaken, most of the odeons that have been excavated are found close to theaters.)

Thus, the wall I labeled 1 would have been the rear wall of the odeon's seating, and the wall that I've circled in yellow, and labeled 4 would have been part of the banking of the odeon's seating -- the seats on our side would have been over the top of that wall, and the next block of seats would have continued from that level down. Or, depending on the size of the orchestra, that might have been where the performers would have stood; it's hard to tell without excavating more of the material to the north.

How the wall that I've circled in blue and labeled 5 fits in isn't entirely clear; it might have been a rebuild of the basilica that took place before the odeon was built. Whatever it was, it's covered over by the remains of the odeon, which means that it came before it.

And that is, more or less, what we've found in Grid 47 this year. But I've got at least one more post that I'd like to make; hopefully, we'll get to that tomorrow.

2009 Post season wrap-up, part 1

2009-07-20T10:06:00.001-07:00

Well, the digging is done, the volunteers are gone, and much of the work that we had left to do after the season ended has either been completed or is well on its way to completion.

Which isn't to say that I've got nothing left to do; I keep feeling as though I'm about done with my paperwork, but it's a goal that seems to persist in moving toward the horizon. It's possible that I'll get into exactly why it's taking so long, but before that, I'd like to go through a bit of what we've done this season.

The first picture shows the western half of our excavated area, looking northward. Much of this was excavated by Garstang in the 1920s, but there's certainly a lot here that we've done. And I think that what we've excavated this season is helping us understand what had been visible since the 20s.

And, for the sake of explanation, I'm going to recourse to MS paint.

The wall of which we've got the longest contiguous piece is outlined in red, and labeled "1". For the moment, we're interpreting that as the apse of a Roman period basilica. The scale is about right, and that rectilinear room to the west of it is the sort of thing that you expect to see in a Roman period basilica.

One of the important things about this is that the straight walls extending to the west are bonded to the big semi-circular wall; that is, they're firmly attached to the semi-circular wall, with stones sitting half in one wall and half in the other. That's going to be important to understanding the wall that I've outlined in blue, and labeled 4. But let's not talk about that yet.

The other big wall in this half of the area is circled in green, and outlined in green. There area a couple of interesting things about this wall. First off, it does seem to be later than the wall I've circled in red; there's more of it left, for one thing, and there's also a small area (unfortunately not visible in the picture) where the green outlined wall actually covers a bit of one of the straight red outlined walls.

Which means that we have at least two phases of construction here. And this is where things get complicated. That bit of wall outlined in blue and labeled 4 starts off adjacent to the one outlined in red. But it's not bonded to it, so the assumption is that it was built after the red wall, but possibly while it was still in use -- if it was built after the earlier wall had gone out of use, it wouldn't have been fitted so neatly next to it, and might well have covered it, or been cut into it. So, let's say that this isn't a different phase of construction, but, rather, a later part of the same phase.

Now, all of the walls that we have had some of their stones robbed, and used in some other construction; we don't know how high they were when the buildings they were part of were in use, but judging by what we've found, and the trenches we've dug, we're looking at the foundations of a lot of these walls, and the floor levels for some of the others. In the case of the blue outlined wall, it was robbed out below where the current ground level is. But the material that filled in the trench made in the process of getting those stones is sufficiently different than the material around it that you can see the line of where the wall was, when it's very well swept, and the lighting is right. That may not be entirely true of the picture that I've taken, but I think that you can make out a bit of it if you click through on the picture without the scribbled lines. I've drawn brown lines on the edges of where that robber trench can be seen, and labeled it five.

Then you've got the somwhat lumpier wall that I've circled in yellow, and labeled 6. That wall is also semi-circular, and it goes on top of the robber trench material. So, for the moment, we're thinking that it's part of the later phase of occupation, and would have been in use at the same time as the big wall that I outlined in green.

Complicating matters, you have the two walls that I've outlined in white, and labeled 3. We don't know much about them, but they seem to be part of whatever was here before the basilica was built -- they either go underneath, or have been cut through in the process of making all the other walls. And we have the walls that I circled in pink, and labeled 7. These are the walls that Garstang built to preserve his open air museum.

Much of what I've been doing for the last few days is going through my notes, and showing, as clearly as possible, what is on top of what. And, hopefully, as the above demonstrates, that's more complicated than you might think; in a very small area, we had a bit of 7 standing on top of 6, which is on top of 5, which is on top of 4, which is on top of 3.

I've got a bit more of that to do, so I'm going to head off and do it. Hopefully, there will be a couple of more wrap-up posts when I'm done with that, and I'll try and explain what we think that second set of semi-circular walls were part of.

2009 season, days 28 and 29

2009-07-14T09:51:00.000-07:00

I spent today in the pottery compound, catching up on reading, but there were certainly people out in the field today.

As can be seen by this pair of pictures. The first shows the square as we left it yesterday, and the next one as the people working there left it at the end of the day. And you can certainly see the difference -- for one thing, someone seems to have left a trowel there today.

Also, they left it clean, whereas under my direction, it was left a bit messy. Now, as there is a great deal of dirt still left in the picture I'm calling clean, you might not see what I'm talking about. But take a closer look, particularly at the area beyond the bottom step of that big byzantine wall.

You'll probably have to click through to see it, but just by sweeping away the loose dirt, they found another course of stones, almost connecting that wall to the section standing in what had been Garstang's open air museum. Which had been something that I wanted to look for, but which I hadn't had the time for on Monday -- I had to push pretty hard to get the last bits I wanted excavated finished by the end of the day, as it was our last day of excavation.

So, all in all, I'm pretty happy with what was done; there will probably have to be a final sweep before the pictures for the end of the season, but other than that, field work is more or less finished in 47.53. Which isn't to say that work is done -- we've got a few more crates of pottery to wash and read, and then there's all sorts of documentation that needs to be documented.

But not tonight!

2009 season, days 25 - 27.

2009-07-13T05:15:00.000-07:00

Unfortunately, I missed a few days worth of blogging; the fast day took me out of the field for two days -- one for the fast itself, and the other for recovery. And, while I did get some pictures yesterday, I didn't have any time to write anything up, as we went directly from pottery washing to an Israel Antiquities Authority reception for the staff of the excavations active this season.

In general, I think that not having enough time to write things up is going to be the theme for the next week or so -- there's a great deal that has to be wrapped up, and I'm a bit behind on a lot of it. So, there's a picture, but not much explanation. I will say that the stone feature was taken out during the time I wasn't around, as was much of the dirt under it, and a decent chunk of the material to the south of the large wall. Today was the last day of real excavation; hopefully, I'll be able to document what's been happening over the next few days, but I'm afraid that'll have to take a back seat to getting all my work done on time. Still, since the site shouldn't be changing much from now until the end of the season, things I don't talk about should be around until I have a bit more time to post here.

2009 season, day 24

2009-07-08T10:24:00.000-07:00

Today was a slightly shortened day, as everyone went off to see what was going on in another part of the tel, ending the day about an hour earlier than usual.

But, all the same, we got a lot done. The stone feature, for instance, is a lot smaller than it was before; the bits that remain do so because there's dirt behind them, and they are useful as a retaining wall, keeping that dirt in place until it can be excavated. Which should happen in the next few days.

In addition to finishing up our work on the stone feature, we also took out a chunk of dirt, leaving that curiously circular divot in the plaster that you can see in the middle of the picture, and we cleaned up the loosely plastered material that had been on the edge of the large plaster feature. What we didn't do was get everyone over to help with taking out the loose stones that seem to be related to Garstang's wall. That's now supposed to happen tomorrow; when that's done, we'll be more or less done excavating in the northern half of the square -- there's the dirt below the stone feature to dig, and the material left that relates to the large wall, and a bit of what lies to the south of it, but the northern half is more or less done.

Unfortunately, while there will be excavating done tomorrow, I'm not going to be supervising it -- tomorrow, by the Jewish calendar, is the seventeenth of Tammuz, which is a fast day that I'll be observing. And while work isn't prohibited, drinking water is, which makes excavating an extraordinarily bad idea. I do hope to be back on the site on Friday, when we're either going to be digging or working in the compound; hopefully, those rocks will be gone before I'm back in my square.

2009 season, day 23

2009-07-07T09:14:00.000-07:00

Excavation continued today around that stone feature; we've brought the level of the material around it to that of the bottom of the feature, and cleaned off the face of the plaster that had been the outer face of the big wall.

Hopefully, there'll be one more picture taken early tomorrow morning, and then we can start taking the stone feature down.

The possibility exists that tomorrow we're going to get the volunteers from the square to the east to come and go through the loose rocks that we have at the edge of where Garstang's wall was. If that happens, I'm going to have to run around like a lunatic keeping an eye on everything. Which should be fun.

2009 season, day 22

2009-07-06T09:30:00.001-07:00

Today was, I hope, the last day we spent most of our time on the stone feature. We've dropped a bit of the material to the side of it down, so as to show the section, as well as cleared most of the material to the left (west) of it.

I had been thinking of trying to get a picture in tomorrow morning, but it might be wise to hold off on that, and spend tomorrow bringing the rest of the area down, rather than going after the feature; it's the latest material we have, so it should come out first, but I'm starting to think that the most orderly thing to do would be to fully excavate the material around it, and then go after it.

Did I say that I was getting ready to take it out? If so, that is because I am. As you can see from the second picture, we seem to have gotten to the bottom of the feature. Or not; it's a little hard to see. But the ashy gray fill that we've been following throughout the excavation of the feature is gone, and we're coming down on the sort of pottery we're finding to the east of the thing, and there's a line where digging doesn't seem to find any stones, more or less where that fill ended.

Assuming that this is the bottom, and not a trick the feature is playing on me, it might be worth going into a bit more detail as to what it might be, and why we think that.

The first question that has to be answered is, when the thing was in use, was it above ground or below ground? And I think that there's evidence both ways. One thing that points to it being underground is that the outer surface is lumpy, with rocks sticking out every which way. If you were digging a pit, and lining it with rocks, that's the sort of thing that would happen -- you'd want the inner surface to be relatively smooth, whatever it is you were doing with it, but the outer surface wouldn't be visible at all. Another point in favor of the lined pit theory is that the material between the rocks seems very similar to that ashy gray material we were finding as we went down. Again, this makes sense if it was a lined pit; the rocks would have been stuck into the walls of the pit, and the material from the pit would have filled the spaces between them. Finally, it's a pretty thin walled structure for something as tall as it is; I'm not sure something like that would have survived as a surface installation.

All of which seems pretty convincing. But there are reasons to think that it wasn't a surface installation. For one thing, the feature is slightly bell shaped, in its upper layers. And that's not how you dig a pit; if you dig a bell-shaped pit, it falls in. If anything, you'd expect the opposite -- wider on top, narrowing as it goes down. And then there was the dirt that filled the feature. In the areas where we didn't get the ashy gray fill, we got material that was similar to the stuff from the outside of the feature. Which isn't what you'd expect in an abandoned pit -- if it was left partially empty, you'd expect things to fall from above. If they were falling from the side, you'd expect to see disruption relating to that spill. Which we were looking for, but didn't find. And then there's the question of where the missing rocks went. It's possible that they were robbed for later use, but that seems unlikely to me, given that the rocks are pretty small, and small rocks are something that Ashkelon has in abundance. If it were exposed, the rocks might have fallen and then rolled away, but that can't happen to a feature in the ground.

On the balance, I think that the evidence does seem to favor it having been a lined pit, but there are still problems with that theory. As far as function goes, honestly, I'm not sure we're going to know that; there are a few bags of that ashy gray fill that's going in for additional analysis, but if those don't give us something definitive, it's going to be a matter of guesswork, rather than hard data.

2009 season, day 21

2009-07-05T08:49:00.000-07:00

Last week, it was asserted with some confidence that Sunday would be a day for catching up with work in the pottery compound -- washing, sorting, and reading the material we've fallen a bit behind on.

And so it was, at least for the first four hours. But not for me! Instead, I supervised the hired workers in their demolition of much of what remained of Garstang's wall, and in cleaning up the mess that said demolition made.

Let the record show that I'm fine with changes of that sort.

As has been the case recently, the picture is one taken in the afternoon, late enough that shadows are actually reaching where we were digging, which doesn't happen during the time we're excavating. And it's an interesting picture, or at least, it shows some of the interesting things that have been coming up in the square recently. Behind where the wall was, we're getting a layer of rubble. That might be related to the construction of the wall, or it might be related to the plaster structure that we've got on the other side. This is something that can be determined by digging, and assuming all goes well, it will be.

The plan for tomorrow is to spend a little more time futzing around with the stone structure -- it's looking as though we're close to the bottom of the ashy fill, and I hope that means that we're at the bottom of the stones; hopefully, that'll be clarified early on in the day. Then, a bit of clearing of the sides of the structure, and getting ready for pictures tomorrow morning, and the rest of the time digging in what little we have left of the northern half of the square.

Unless circumstances intervene, like they seem to do every day.

2009 season, day 20

2009-07-02T06:10:00.000-07:00

Looking at the first picture, you might think that we didn't get that much done today. There are other things that you might think as well -- "I thought he was going to take that stone structure out today," or "why can I see more of what's left of the open air museum in this shot than usual?" or "where did I put my car keys?"

Fortunately, I have answers for some of those questions.

The initial plan was to take out the feature, assuming that cleaning the inner surface undermined it sufficiently for it to be unsafe to keep up. But that didn't happen. We did spend the first hour cleaning it up for a photograph, which may eventually find its way here, and then scraping away at its inner surface. But instead of something that looked as unstable as the outer surface, we found an inner surface that looks quite solid and convincing.

Unlike the outside, where stones protrude at varying angles and distances, the inner surface is relatively smooth and regular. And there isn't a foundation where I expected to see a foundation. This is making me doubt my belief that it was built as a freestanding structure -- it's getting pretty tall and narrow for something not supported by the dirt around it. The aesthetics of having a rubbly looking outer surface strike me as being somewhat less significant.

So, what we're going to do with this is to continue to dig through the ashy material that's along that inside wall, and see what turns up as we go down. My suspicion is that there are two phases -- an aboverground phase and a pit, but I'll wait and see what the feature has to say before making a final interpretation.

The stone feature wasn't the only thing that we excavated today; we actually went down a fair amount in the northern corner of the square. And then, the plan was to take down a couple of courses of stone from Garstang's wall.

That's not exactly what happened.

Honestly, that collapse isn't bad news; we were planning on taking it down eventually, and once we get this cleaned up, we'll be able to get a good look at what's coming, once we clear away the debris, and I'm much happier about a wall falling apart when we were trying to take it apart than I would be if it fell apart underneath someone who wasn't expecting it.

All the same, we're going to have some cleaning up to do; I didn't get pictures of what we excavated in that northern part of the square because it's currently covered in dirt and rocks from the wall.

So, in addition to my complaints about Garstang's archaeological technique, I'm no longer very pleased about the masonry work that he supervised.

As the camera I've been borrowing doesn't have a video mode, this is probably going to be the week in review as well, so here's a look at what's been going on in the neighboring squares. To the north, they've dug a narrow trench across the length of their area of excavation. As I understand it, they've found the bottom of the cut that Garstang made in the 1920s, as well as what looks to be a part of a marble pedestal. I'm not certain if they're planning on going deeper, or widening their trench, or something else entirely. I do know that if they decide to remove that pedestal, it's going to be a bit tricky.

There's all sorts of interesting stuff going on in the square to the east of mine; for one thing, they've been coming up with a lot of ostraka, all of which seem to be written in greek, on a very similar sort of potsherd -- it's possible that there's something that'll be found when they put that puzzle together. And they've mostly cleared the dirt off some of the larger features, which was one of the major goals for the season.

But, what I chose to take a picture of is a little lump of stone in the corner of their square. It's a bit difficult to make out, but it seems that they've just barely clipped the edge of the outer wall of the basilica. Which, to be honest, isn't a wall that I've ever mentioned before, and probably not something of surpassing interest to most of the people who might be reading this.

Sometimes I make poor photographic decisions.

Oh, and as far as the car keys go, I'm really not sure. Maybe check the pockets of your raincoat?

2009 season, day 19

2009-07-01T09:22:00.001-07:00

Looking at this picture, you might think that there wasn't as much done today as there had been on previous days; comparing this picture to that of the previous day, it would seem that we haven't excavated very much.

But you'd be wrong! We did a great deal, just not in terms of pounds of dirt moved. The times is coming to fully excavate and remove the stone feature, and I'd like to get a picture of it before we do that.

"Hold on a second," you might say. "You have pictures of that stone feature. I am looking at a picture of that stone feature this very second. What do you mean that you want to get a picture of the feature? Is this blog some sort of record of your descent into madness?"

Okay, I suppose it's possible that you wouldn't say that. But if you did, I'd explain thusly: When I'm taking pictures for my own record keeping, or for the amusement of others, there's not that much pressure to get everything right. The lighting can be off, there can be random detritus of the excavation around, you can see my shadow looming over whatever I'm trying to take a picture of, and so on.

But when you're taking an official picture, it's going to be something that goes into the records of the excavation, and which might wind up published. Certainly, if someone comes across a similar installation somewhere else in Ashkelon, they're going to want to look at the one I excavated. So the goal is to get a picture that shows the feature as clearly as possible, and with as few extraneous factors as possible.

So, basically, we spent the day trying to clean the feature up for the shot.

As you might be able to see, that meant cutting the edges of the dirt near the feature as sharply as we could manage, and clearing as much dirt from the stones as we could manage. There's going to be another pass with trowel and brush on the dirt on the inside of the feature, to bring out distinctions in the soil as best as possible, and I'll take some more dirt off some of those stones.

And then the stones are going to come out. I'm still not sure what this thing is -- it's got a very thin wall, with large gaps between the stones, but it very clearly does have at least one wall, and it's got a layer of fill inside it that follows that line of stones from the top to the bottom. But I've excavated it . . . well, I've told other people to excavate it as well as I could manage, I've documented what I've found as well as I could manage, and now it's got to go, so we can see what's going on underneath.

But, once it's out, I anticipate a rapid descent. The layer of fill that we've come across is a genuine pleasure to go through; it's soft enough that we can move through rapidly, it's got a decent amount of pottery in it, so it should be easy to find a date for it, and it seems to be deep and undifferentiated, which means that we can move.

Obviously, going in with that attitude means that we'll come up on some horribly complicated bit of archaeology inches below our current surface. Which would be fine too, really.

2009 season, day 18.

2009-06-30T09:31:00.000-07:00

Well, via the expedient of borrowing a camera, I now, once again, am capable of taking pictures. Unfortunately, despite it being a very good camera, I still don't seem to be capable of taking very good pictures. But this one, I hope, is at least illustrative.

As you might be able to see, we've taken down much of the northern half of the area in which I've been digging. Most of what you can see is a pile of plaster and rubble. It looks a bit like it might be a collapsed wall, or even fall from a ceiling, but it's hard to tell. Beyond that, there's a layer of reddish brown material, which seems to continue to go down. If all goes well tomorrow, we'll push into the stone feature, and get a good sense of what its foundation looks like. Then, we might take some pictures, and take the whole thing out. There also might be a pit that goes deeper than the feature that we have; that'll be a lot easier to see once we go further down as well.

And, perhaps sometime in the next few days, I'm thinking of taking the northern half of Garstang's wall down as far as it goes. That'll give us a cross section of what's coming, which is a useful thing to have. I would like to drop the area another foot or so before doing that, so we'll see what happens, and when it's likely to happen.

2009 season, days 16 and 17

2009-06-29T05:08:00.000-07:00

Despite a couple of attempts to find a work around, I don't have a camera for the moment, so I can't actually show you what's been happening.

That's somewhat less problematic for day 16 than you might think; I unfortunately managed to get backed up on putting the notes I had into the system, so I had to take a day off digging to do that. You can imagine how hard it was to sit in an air conditioned room typing, rather than carry buckets of dirt around in the heat.

(Actually, I really would rather have been on the site. But notes need to be organized in a format that other people can understand, so needs must.)

Today also didn't go as well as might have been hoped. One of the new volunteers slipped on entering the square this morning, and seems to have done some damage to her ankle. I feel terrible about this; it's one of those things that you wish you could undo as soon as you see it happen.

There was a fair amount of dirt moved, after that -- there's a layer of orange-brown material that stretches over most of the area north of the stone feature, and we took out a lot of that, and we took out the last of the stones that seem to have fallen from that feature. That was one of the two major goals I had for the day, so that, at least, was accomplished, but the other goal was to clarify the relationship between the orange-brown fill and a layer of pottery rich fill, and that proved bafflingly hard to do; we'll probably take another stab at it tomorrow, assuming that all goes well.

2009 season, day 15

2009-06-25T07:55:00.001-07:00

There was less digging done today than usual, as one of the volunteers I have working in my square was feeling a bit under the weather, and wasn't able to make it out to the site.

But we did get stuff done; those four stones from yesterday don't look like they're part of a larger structure, anymore, and we're pretty sure that we've found the bottom of that stone structure we've been digging the last few days, though that will have to be confirmed.

Unfortunately, I'm probably not going to have pictures of that tomorrow, as my camera seems to have given up the ghost. I'll probably come up with some sort of work around for next week, but for now, I can't take pictures.

I did manage one last snapshot today, of the guy who was able to make it out to the tel today -- T.J. Thames. To continue my litany of woe, T.J. is one of those people who were here for the first half of the season, so he'll be heading back to America on Saturday. Best of luck, T.J., and we'll miss you.

2009 season, day 14

2009-06-24T05:19:00.000-07:00

We were back in our square today, and we made more progress on defining that stone feature. The trailing line of stones that you'd expect to see on the left of my square has been taken out; it does seem to me that it was some of the missing stones from what we're excavating, but it'll take more digging to know if that's true -- if the feature itself is a lot deeper, I may have to come up with a different theory.

However, while those stones are gone, more are cropping up. There's a group of four stones to the right of the feature that are particularly interesting. It's possible that they're just later fill, or rocks which have happened to fall when there was a surface somewhere around there. But there are four of them, and they look sort of like their in a square. That's a lot of rocks, and a shape that can mean all sorts of thing.

My suspicion is that we'll learn more about them tomorrow.

2009 season, day 13

2009-06-23T03:48:00.000-07:00

No picture today, as I wasn't out in the field. Everyone in our unit was still working on getting through the material disrupted by the JCB, and today was my day in the pottery compound. And we've caught up on pottery, which comes as a surprise -- there are four crates left to wash, but there's nothing that's been washed and which is sitting and waiting for reading.

I did head out briefly, to see what had been done, and to have a brief staff meeting about what's been done thus far, and what we want to do over the next week or so. And, in my case, that changed my approach a bit. Rather than going deeper in the robber trench, we're going to be heading out to the north of the square, and hopefully bring it down to the same level as the square which was opened last year. If I was digging my square in perfect isolation, starting with the robber trench would make more sense. But there are some features which extend in from the square to the east that are going to be investigated over the next week or two, so it would be nice for them to know what their edges look like.

How fast that happens will depend on what we find. But, as always, I'm hoping it's going to go down rapidly.

2009 season, day 12

2009-06-22T05:16:00.000-07:00

Well, as expected, we did a great deal of work cleaning up after the JCB today. As a result, I'm feeling a bit queasy, but I assume that'll pass.

And, though I tried a couple of times, I really didn't get any pictures of the work that was being done. Which was a genuine achievement -- there was an awful lot of material dislodged by the excavator, and most of it is gone, up what is now a very steep slope.

But I did manage to get a shot that conveys an impression of what we did yesterday, if not the whole of it.

In the picture to the left, we're looking mostly eastward, towards the large apsidal wall; you can sort of see another stone coming through -- we exposed perhaps an inch or so of it. And, interestingly, now that we're going down, it seems that the rubbly fill is now limited to the robber trench of the wall; the material to the south is much more ashy and clayey, though I have not been able to find anything as regular as a pit there.

Tomorrow, I hope to dig more in that trench; it does seem to be later material than anything else we have in the square, so logic dictates that we dig it first, and that'll give us a cross-section of the material to the south, which should inform how we excavated that, as well.

2009 season, day 11.

2009-06-21T08:22:00.000-07:00

The JCB came back today, and as it was working near where our sunshades are normally tethered, we didn't have any shade today.

Nonetheless, we got a lot done -- we took a bit more out near that stone installation, and I think it's become clear that it more or less follows the line I expected it to follow, and we went further down in the robber trench of the big wall.

However, I'll admit that not much of that is visible in this picture; unfortunately, it's the best of a bad lot. But I should be able to get more tomorrow, as we're not planning on doing any additional digging in our square tomorrow. Instead, everyone is going to be in the northern part of the area, cleaning up the rubble that the JCB has knocked loose. So, in addition to reporting on that, I might get somewhat more intelligible views of what we did today.

2009 season, week 2 in review.

2009-06-19T05:36:00.000-07:00

This morning was a working day, but not one spent in the field -- instead, we spent the day in the pottery compound, organizing some of the material gathered in earlier season, for a new study project. So not too much to report on that front.

But another week is gone, so here's another wobbly bit of video for you. This is actually my third attempt at shooting this; I'll leave the quality of the previous tries to your imagination.

So, as far as a review goes, we basically finished everything that I had set out to finish this week. If we hadn't found that stone feature, we would have gone deeper, but it would be foolish to be upset at archaeology interfering with my ability to move dirt -- if that was the priority, we could have used a bulldozer.

Next week, hopefully, we'll dig a bit more in that robber trench, starting with the ash pit, knock a few more courses off of Garstang's wall, and head on down into a pottery rich fill that we've seen all across the site.

As with last week, I've got a few pictures from the other squares open in our area:
We'll start with the square next to mine. I don't seem to have a good picture of it, but they seem to be coming down on that same big wall that I'm coming down on. I think that over the next two weeks, the relationship between that wall and the other features we see in the square is going to become clearer -- there's certainly a lot going on, in different periods, and it does seem like exposing the architecture in that area is going to help clarify when different features were built, and what their relationship to each other is.

in the northern square, the big plaster lined pit from last week has been taken out, through the vigorous application of pickaxes. It seems to go a bit deeper than we had expected, so we're left with a little rectangle of plaster where it stood.

In addition to going down in the open areas of the square, they also dug a remarkably deep probe, to see if they could find a floor related to the basilica, or possibly one of the walls. They didn't find either of those, but a close look at the sides of the probe should give useful information about the levels that they'll be going through, as they dig down.

And that's all for week 2. Or at least, that's all I can think of for now.

2009 season, day 10

2009-06-18T09:52:00.000-07:00

A bit of a slow day today, as we had to spend a bit longer cleaning than we usually do -- it's best practice to leave a square looking tidy before the weekend, as that's usually when other archaeologists have a chance to stop by. Leaving things leveled flat and swept will make it easier for them to see what you've been digging, and will leave them with a positive impression of your field technique.

What this blog says about my personal field technique, I'll leave unexamined for the moment.

But, despite the slightly shortened day, we more or less finished what I had hoped to finish for the week, getting the square more or less flat, with the exception of the plaster feature and that stone structure. I don't expect either of them to last more than a few more days, but for now, they're telling an interesting story.

What I expected to find was more stones, and something closer to a complete oval shape as we went further down. We seem to have gotten one, but not the other -- rather than closing in, we've got a line of stones trailing outward. For the moment, at least, I think those stones aren't part of the feature, where they are lying -- possibly they're debris that were knocked loose from the feature, or they might be an unrelated thing.

We'll know more when we dig, but for now, who are you going to trust -- me, or some stones? Bear in mind that I have a degree in archaeology, and I'm pretty sure those rocks don't.

2009 season, day 9

2009-06-17T04:09:00.001-07:00

An eventful day, today. We've moved a certain amount of dirt, and as is so often the case, doing that made what we were finding a lot clearer. For one thing, the semi-circular feature that I thought was come up did come up, but it's a lot smaller than I had thought it was yesterday.

And, more interestingly, it doesn't seem to be a pit. This is more evident in the second picture than in the first, and it would be even more visible if I took another video, but what seems to be happening is that the feature gets wider as it goes down.

While it might be possible to dig a pit like that -- something that gets wider as it goes further down, it would be very hard to do that, as dirt tends to fall down when there isn't anything under it. So, it seems more likely that this was a structure that was built in open air, more or less.

What exactly the structure is isn't clear. There's a bit of soil along the inside of that crescent of rocks that we have which looks ashy, and shot through with small bits of charcoal. Expert opinion is that if it was a kiln, there'd have been more evidence of burning, but it might have been an oven, or something along those lines.

One point that's interesting to me is that there seems to be a notch cut into that large plaster feature, matching the angle of that stone structure. That helps establish a relative chronology for these things -- the stone structure had to have been built after the plaster feature. If it was there first, there would have been stones there, rather than a notch in the plaster, or the plaster would have cut through it. And, given that the walls of the stone structure slope outward, we can assume that the dirt around it had to have been deposited after the structure was built. Which means that if we were to find a coin in the plaster feature, say, that would give us a date earlier than the stone structure, or the dirt around it.

In either case, we're hoping to find more of the structure as we go lower down, and we'll take some soil samples for flotation analysis, which will use water to sift the sand, and hopefully find tiny artifacts and remains that simpler forms of sifting miss.

Speaking of things recovered by sifting, we've had some neat finds today as well.

You'll either have to take my word for it or click through, but that little stone cube is a six sided die.

I'm not a dice expert, so I can't tell you if it's Roman, or Byzantine, or Crusader, but I can tell you that the spots are arranged in the same way they are in modern dice, and that the 1 and 6 are opposite each other, as are the 2 and 5, and the 3 and 4, which is the way most modern dice are arranged.

Whenever that die dates from, judging from the finds around it, it can't be later than the Crusader period, so it's been hundreds of years since the last time that die was thrown. Then we dug it up, and it seems I rolled a four before taking that picture.

For those who are curious, the tag there is the sort of thing that we make whenever we find small finds of that sort. There's a bar code, which will let people find it with the stroke of a light pen in the upper left corner. Then there are the numbers 35/09, our Antiquities Authority license number, and the year.

Underneath that, you get 47 and 53, which is my area number and my square number, "unit 15", which is the area of my square in which we found it, 6/17 which is today's date, in the manner in which Americans write dates, ASR/RBN, which are my initials and the area supervisor's initials, 4054, which is the number of the pottery bucket which was open for unit 15 when that die was found, and MC59777, which is the number that'll identify that particular small find.

It's a moderately complicated system, but it lets us know where and when that die was found, with a certain measure of precision, and makes it easier to refer to that find, if we were to find another die, or a medieval Settlers of Catan boxed set, or suchlike, or if we wanted to compare it in size and weight to other medieval dice, and so on.

2009 season, day 8

2009-06-16T09:24:00.000-07:00

Today we moved less dirt than we have in previous days, but this is the difference between digging stratified archaeology, and digging homogeneous fills. Today we started on that triangle of dirt that isn't related to the Byzantine wall, and which isn't related to the 1920s wall, and as we had hoped, there seems to be stuff in it that's worth a closer look.

And, as on previous occasions, I'll recourse to drawing lines on a picture to show what we've been up to.

The area circled in red and labeled 1 is the line of plastered stones that we've been aware of since we got through the topsoil. It's looking slightly better defined now, because we've taken out some tree roots that were in the way, but it's basically the same as it's ever been.

The bit circled in green, and labeled 2 is a tiny fragment of a floor, that had been around in the previous seasons, and which might continue underneath the bits we haven't excavated. But we did get a bit more of it, after taking out a rather strange pair of well plastered, rectangular stones that seemed to just sort of be standing by themselves, with no relationship to any other floor or surface.

The bit labeled 3 is what's giving us the most cause for puzzled consideration. It seems to be bounded by a semi-circle of stones, which I've circled in yellow, but which remain hard to see in the picture, and judging by the bit of the crusader pit that we've dug, those stones do seem to go further down.

So, based on that, it looks like it should be a stone lined pit. The reason why I'm not jumping to that conclusion is that the material in the area marked 3 is not very different than the material to the north of it. And, generally speaking, when you get pits, you get something filling them.

So, we'll see what happens tomorrow -- My assumption is that this feature is going to be resolved, one way or another. Or at least we'll be able to make a guess, and work on that basis.

Also appearing in the picture, but not labeled, are supervisory staff, volunteers, hired workers, Garstang's wall, several other squares, a wheelbarrow, and a stick with a bucket on the end. See if you can identify which is which!

2009 season, day 7

2009-06-15T05:08:00.001-07:00

Week 2 is great, because the preliminary stuff is out of the way, and the shape of what's coming is not yet clear.

Today we followed a trench of loose material next to the 20th century wall. The working theory is that this was something that was dug and filled by Garstang's workers, but that's not necessarily the case. You might notice that the triangular area we haven't dug sort of slopes downward into the trench with that bucket and stick in it.

This isn't poor field technique on my part! It seems that the trench that we're digging slopes inward, and we've been following the difference in the materials. Which is, more or less, the way features like that are supposed to be excavated.

Tomorrow, the plan is to finish up that trench -- there's a bit more dirt to take out, and then I'd like to flatten that area out so that everything we've dug will be approximately the same level, and then we crack that wedge of material that we've been avoiding.

And so on, all the way down. More or less -- it seems likely that we'll eventually find floors and walls and so on, which will make digging less orderly, but until then, the lines we've been following seem likely to be the lines that we're going to continue following.

2009 season, day 6

2009-06-14T04:44:00.001-07:00

The first day of week 2, and it's off to a great start, at least in my square. There's not much point showing the square in more detail, as we've flattened the entire area that we've been digging.

I'm not yet entirely certain if I'm going to dig there tomorrow, or open up the narrower end of my triangle, but whenever we do open that side up again, we'll probably divide it up into at least two, maybe more chunks -- there's an ash pit, that we can now see clearly, and a fill with a good deal more rubble, which pottery seems to be indicating is from the Crusader period.

There was an unfortunate incident today -- one of the volunteers in a different area did himself a minor injury with a pick, and had to get a few stitches put in. My understanding is that it wasn't terribly serious, but it does make it clear that we have to watch out for mistakes of that sort, particularly over the next couple of weeks; it's when you start getting comfortable that these sort of things can happen. So, on the off chance that there are volunteers reading this, try to keep control of your tools, and drink water.

2009 season, week 1 in review.

2009-06-11T21:08:00.000-07:00

In general, the first week of an archaeological excavation is a slow one. It always takes a day or two to clean up the effects of the off-season, or to clear the surface that's going to be excavated, and it takes a while for people who've never been on a dig to get used to their tools, and waking up at four in the morning, and so on.

And yet, I think we did about as much work as could be expected in a week. I think that we know where the good archaeological contexts are, and where they aren't, and we'll be able to be digging good material starting Monday, if we aren't already in a Crusader period robber trench. So, as far as the digging goes, I'm going to call this week an unmitigated success.

On other fronts, things were a bit more . . . well, mitigated. I've got a somewhat better handle on the computer system than I did at the start, which is good, as I'm going to have to start collecting and sorting more data, as we work through the better archaeological contexts. And, hopefully, managing that stuff is going to take up less of my time. But, as far as the last week goes, I'm going to have to chalk a certain amount of it up to a "learning experience", and spend the next few hours fixing mistakes I made, and getting in information that I've left out.

As far as blogging goes, there are a few things that I wanted to try, the first of which you can see below. I apologize in advance for the sort of Blair Witch cinematography (do the kids remember the Blair Witch Project? Should I call it Cloverfield cinematography if I want to be understood by the youth of today? In either case, what I mean is that it's not very good.)

Whatever you want to call it, it's a brief tour of the square, narrated by yours truly:
Another thing that I wanted to do was to keep an eye on what was going on in the other squares; while I'm not planning on trekking out to the other areas, as they're scattered across the tel, I'm hoping to get a picture or two, and a general sense of what's going on in the squares nearby.

So, here's what I've got for the first week:

The square directly to the east of me was the only square open last season, and this week, they've been digging in the western half of their square. Thus far, they've come across a number of different layers of material, but they haven't found any structures or floors, so they're working on figuring out when various layers of material were deposited, and their relationships with each other; a complicated sort of job.

(The picture was taken on day 3; sadly, it seems that's the best picture that I've got of their square.)

There's one other square open in our area, directly to the north of this one, and to the northeast of mine.

For the moment, this square is defined by the trench that Garstang dug, and which the JCB redug. (It does seem that the JCB may have cut a bit more than Garstang, but such is the way of excavating equipment.) One of the structures they've turned up, on the southern side of that trench, is this large, plaster lined pit. It seems to have been poured, rather than free-standing, because the plaster walls are not strong enough to have stood on their own -- someone dug a pit, and then poured plaster in to line it. It may have been used as a lime kiln, which may have been where some of the statuary of the basilica were turned to lime, or it might have been something else.

On the other side of that trench, there had been a floor. That floor was taken out yesterday, and it's not yet clear when that floor is from; hopefully, they'll find good dating evidence in the fill directly below it.

This isn't all they've found -- there are other, subtler features that have turned up on the southern side of this square. But these are the large, dramatic features of which I have pictures.

And that more or less where we're up to, but there's one thing more that I wanted to talk about before closing up shop for the weekend.

You'll remember that sherd from earlier in the week. Yesterday, our pottery expert (who is also the area supervisor) looked at it, along with a great many other sherds, and gave her evaluation; it's a sherd from a glazed bowl, with incised decoration, and dating to the Mamluk period (1250-1517).

The next picture is a closeup; the bit of paper in the background is a top plan -- that's a sort of map, that shows where the dividing lines between the different units are, so we can know exactly where the pottery came from.

Once the pottery was read, that sherd was put aside, along with a lot of similar pieces, for further analysis -- there are some difficulties with the dating of Islamic period sherds, so the plan is to get several experts together, to look at what we come up with this season, and to try to pin down those dates.
And that's more or less it for week 1. I'm not entirely sure what next week is going to look like, but hopefully, I'll be able to do something like this the next time the volunteers are off on a trip somewhere.

2009 season, day 5

2009-06-11T10:49:00.000-07:00

As you might have expected, there was more digging today. There was also a bunch of other stuff, including a short staff meeting before pottery reading, and work I had to catch up with on the computer, so there isn't going to be as much blogging today as on other days. However, tomorrow I have a day off. Most of the volunteers will be taking a trip to Jerusalem, but as I live there, I figured I'd pass on the tour.

So, after waking at some luxuriantly decadent hour, maybe seven, I'll see how much I can do as far as wrapping up the first week of the dig; I've got ideas and pictures and so on, so we'll see what we can do. But, for now, what I dug today:

This is a slightly different angle than usual. The reason that I'm only showing the southern half of the square is because that's where the vast majority of today's digging happened. And, hopefully, it'll be a little simpler to see what we've done in this picture, than it would be in a somewhat wider angle shot.

As usual, if you want to see the lines I've drawn, clicking through the next image is probably the best way to go, though I suppose it's possible that it's all visible on monitors with better resolution than mine.

While there's still a certain amount of flattening as a result of the bright, direct sunlight, I think that the difference between where we're digging and the ground two meters lower is sufficiently clear that it doesn't need outlining. On the other hand, the Byzantine wall looks flatter than it is, so I've outlined that in red, and labeled it one. Hopefully, you can now see that we've come across another course of stones -- while some of that wall was robbed out, not all of it was.

The bit that I've labeled two, and circled in blue is a line of white plastered stones. There are two courses in some of that, though I don't think you can see it, and we haven't found the bottom of it yet. If there's more of it further down, it goes from a little strange to a lot strange, as the bit in the next square over doesn't go very deep at all.

The orange line shows approximately where the trench for Garstang's wall begins; it's harder to see in this bit than in the bit further north, but it's something that you can feel in the consistency of the soil. Along with the trench, there's also a bit of the wall visible in the bit I've labeled three. There was more before I hit it with a pickaxe for much of the day, and took the rocks away. Which demonstrated how aggressively out of shape I am. I imagine that five more weeks of digging will do something about that.

The bit circled in yellow and labeled four is a little row of little stones. I have no idea what its deal is. It's in the middle of a rough-edged bit of ashy fill, and doesn't seem to go much further down. Maybe more digging will show what that is, and maybe it won't; finding out what those are is going to be one of the goals for Sunday.

And then there's five, which is basically all the rest of what we've dug today. Pottery reading is showing a lot of Crusader period sherds, so it might be fill from the robber trench, and it might have been someone in the Crusader period who dug that trench, and took the Byzantine walls stones to build something. I'm hoping to find out exactly what's going on here, and maybe define different areas on Sunday, and then spend the rest of next week digging the more northerly half of the square.

2009 season, day 4

2009-06-10T05:21:00.000-07:00

I got to the excavation site a bit early today, which was nice; it was a terrifically misty morning, which is about as heavy as you can expect precipitation to be in the summer in Israel.

"How misty was it?" you might ask, assuming that you're old enough to remember Johnny Carson. And assuming that you thought I was looking for that particular response. Honestly, it's not a terribly likely chain of events.

However, if you did want to know just how misty it was, the next picture should give some information in that regard; that's what it looked like when I tried to take a picture with the flash on -- there was a lot of water in the air, indeed.

That was all gone within an hour of us starting to dig, but it wasn't entirely forgotten -- we set up our laptops underneath a tree, in order to have sufficient shade to see the screen. And because it's a bit more comfortable. It took longer than an hour for that tree to stop dripping on us.

Nobody was electrocuted, either, so it worked out well all around.

As far as the actual digging went, at least in my square, we mostly managed to finish what I had hoped we would finish; it was a bit of a short day, though, as we got a sun shade, which took a while to set up. So the changes to the square today weren't that dramatic.

Obviously, there were changes, as you might be able to see in the next picture. Or, perhaps you can't. For one thing, one of the major projects of the day was digging a pit from the crusader period, and I seem to have neglected to take a picture of that -- there's a little bit of it on the side, there, but it's hard to see, honestly.

I've been fooling around with the settings on blogger -- I'm not sure if you're going to see the following picture well enough to make out the details without clicking through. If not, I'd suggest clicking on the picture below, with the lines drawn by my trusty assistant, MS Paint.

So, as with last time, the red line marks the edges of those parts of my square that I can excavate, at the moment. The little bit circled in yellow, with the 1 in it is the crusader period pit I mentioned earlier, which is cutting into a surface that dates to before the Crusaders. It's going to take pottery to tell us when that surface is from, but whatever it is, it's going to have to be earlier than the Crusades.

The bit circled in green, and numbered 2 is a bit confusing. It's clearly a line of stones, and it's been plastered, but that line seems to meander a bit. At the moment, I'm not sure if it relates to the surface that the crusader pit cut, or if it's something earlier or later. It's possible we'll learn more about it when we take it out, but we might not. In either case, it gives us a good boundary between the areas to the north and south of it, which we'll talk about soon.

Before that, we've got the long area circled in blue, and labeled 3. At the moment, I think it's a late trench, probably the foundation trench dug in the 1920s for Garstang's wall, which is labeled 4. One of the reasons why I think that is that it's shot through with tree roots, while the areas to the east of it aren't; material deposited later isn't going to be packed as hard as dirt that's been sitting in the same place for a thousand or two thousand years, and it'll be easier for the trees to get their roots through it.

Which leaves us with five and six, which are distinguished by not having any particular distinguishing characteristics. Much of 5 lies over the big Byzantine wall, so it's going to be later than whoever it was that took the stones from that wall -- I'm guessing Crusader, but that's a guess that's going to have to wait for pottery analysis. It's got different sorts of fill; rubble, and ash, loose dirt and harder packed dirt, but it's all sufficiently jumbled that I'm not sure if it's possible to distinguish much about it. We'll see what happens as we go down.

6 is mostly hard packed fill, and much of it seems to be of that surface that the Crusader pit goes through. While there are some complications, 6 seems to be our best bet for good layers of undisturbed archaeology. So we're not going to start there until we get a bit deeper in the areas with later material; the general rule is that you want to try and dig the later material first.

2009 season, day 3, part 2

2009-06-09T08:29:00.000-07:00

As I had hoped, I was able to get in a few pictures this afternoon. But as it turned out, they're not very good pictures. Sorry about that.

Anyhow, this is, more or less, what the square we're digging looks like now. The problem is that in this light, it's not entirely clear that there's something near a two meter drop about three quarter of the way through the shot. When details like that aren't apparent, I wouldn't expect somewhat more fine details to come through.

The picture is taken looking north, and the bit close to the edge of the square on the south is missing. But that's more or less what we dug today, and what I'm basing my plans for tomorrow on.

The red line should mark the edge of my square. (Triangle would be a more technically accurate, but I'm calling it a square because that's what people excavate. Also, it is a square, but most of it is empty air, having been dug by Garstang and not filled in again.) The area with the red one in it marks the area that doesn't seem to have been disturbed, and which I expect to find good, stratified archaeology. The plan is to chase a Crusader pit there tomorrow, but if I can't get the edge between this area and the next, finding that pit isn't in the realm of possible.

The blue line shows the edge of an area of soft dirt, which I think is related to the wall put in by Garstang -- a sort of foundation trench. We'll take a bit of that out tomorrow, and we'll see if I can find something to show that I'm right.

The little sort of brown-taupe line is somewhere I'm not sure about -- 3 is either material similar to 1 or to 2. One of the things that might help tell us is the feature that the orange line encloses, and which is marked with a 5. That marks the edge of the area marked 1, and if we find it, we know that the line. If it peters out, the problem becomes more complicated.

The bit in green, marked 4, is what we've excavated today. It's got a mix of different types of fill, and I'm not quite ready to call it a 20th century layer. But I'm not certain what it is, if it isn't that. I assume that'll get refined, as we get further down.

To get back to the story of the sherd, from the previous post.

After the day's digging is done, the pottery buckets are taken back to the pottery compound -- the excavation's base camp, more or less, where the initial post-excavation processing of finds takes place. There, the buckets are filled with water, and the pottery is left to sit. It's early days, yet, so the sherds only get to sit in water from the end of the excavating day, 1:00, until pottery washing, which starts at 4:00.

I was a bit busy today, so I didn't start taking pictures until after the pottery washing was done. So the sherd I took a picture of earlier isn't actually in those buckets; it was in a bucket similar to those buckets.

After the sherds are washed, they're put into fruit crates, and left to dry in the sun. Wet pottery looks a bit different than dry pottery, and if you put pottery away wet, you get bags full of water. And while I didn't get a shot of the sherd in the bucket of water, it is in that fruit crate; it's the green one near the middle, with the incised decoration that makes it look a bit like a palm leaf.

In an ideal world, the pottery will be looked at the day after it's washed, but we've been known to get a few days behind, when the excavation season is in full swing.

So, the hope is that we'll see that sherd again tomorrow; if that doesn't happen, it'll be the day after.

And I think I'll leave it at that, for today.

Good night!

2009 season, day 3

2009-06-09T05:16:00.001-07:00

It was another productive day, today, and the triangle I'm digging looks a good deal different than it did yesterday. Unfortunately, I forgot to take pictures -- hopefully, I'll get that done this afternoon. Instead, I've got a couple of pictures of a a green glazed potsherd, which I took out of a trench near the south side of the big Byzantine wall.

Assuming that all goes well, I'll follow this sherd as it makes its way through the system we have. Thus far, that story hasn't been terribly eventful.

The story so far goes as follows: I saw the sherd in the dirt, (it's more or less in the middle of the first picture) and put it into a pottery bucket (it's on the lower left of the bucket in the second picture). The bucket has a tag which will let us track it -- it's got the date it was dug, the supervisors, the general area and the specific square from which it was taken, and so on. It's also got a bar code, which means that even if I made errors in transcribing that information onto the tag, as I will do, from time to time, we can look in OCHRE, and get all of that out, and more, including any comments put in about that sherd. There's also a plastic bag in that bucket, which I believe was holding marble tesserae. Once I've gone through this with a piece of pottery, I'll show you how finds like that are processed.

Anyhow now I'm off to the pottery compound. If I've got the time, I'll show the next step that sherd takes after I come back from there, and have eaten dinner. Also, maybe there'll be more about the digging that we've done today.

2009 season, day 2

2009-06-08T04:23:00.000-07:00

Today, the plan was to finish cleaning the surface early in the day, and start digging as soon as possible. That plan was somewhat disrupted by finding a nice, level surface. That surface had to be cleaned, which took much of the morning.

But that wasn't all we did. There's a bit of a trench to the side of Garstang's wall that we've been digging out, and there's the end of the big Byzantine wall that we've been looking for.

I'll attempt to explain this, though the medium of pictures. Unfortunately, most of the pictures that I took in the afternoon didn't come out quite right, so I'm going to start by scribbling all over the one you can see up on the left, there.

Okay, there are a lot of lines there, which I hope will be visible if you click through on that very similar looking picture, to the right of this paragraph.

The red line, more or less, marks the edges of the slice of territory that I'm excavating. It's trying to represent a three dimensional space in two dimensions, so there'll be problems with that throughout, but I'll do what I can.

The bit circled in black marks the edges of the smooth, regular surface. I'm very pleased with that surface, as it makes it easy to distinguish between topsoil and what we're digging, and I'm looking forward to going through it. The bit edged in green marks a row of stones from the big Byzantine wall in the square that we excavated last year. Next to that, there's a little trench, where we've started digging today, showing that face of the wall. And, on the far side of the area, there's the 192os wall that we're going to be taking down, course by course.

And that's all for now, I think.

2009 season, day 1

2009-06-07T09:09:00.001-07:00

Rather than heading in on Friday, I played hooky and slept until ten. But today was no day for hooky! This was the first day of the season proper, and as far as I could see, it went great.

The bit I'm excavating is the little slice of dirt between the area where we dug last season, and the area where Garstang left as an open air museum. Before we could start digging, we had to takeout the sandbags that had been left there the previous season, as well as get rid of the dirt that had escaped the control of wheelbarrows and people carrying buckets of dirt last season. And we had to clean the surface of various plants that had taken up residence over the winter. So we had work to do.

The same was true throughout the area. The JCB came in for the morning, and finished lifting the last of those rocks from Garstang's wall, and when he was gone, the people working at that end of the area turned the somewhat irregular furrow the JCB had left into a more clean-edged archaeological trench.

Basically, there looked to be about two days worth of work in the area before we could get started, and we seemed to have just about finished that.

And I was eventually able to connect to the network, and record the buckets of pottery we took out while cleaning the topsoil. Unfortunately, I kind of did that wrong, at the time. But one of the advantages of using a computer system for recording is that I can go back and fix things later. Which I'm pretty sure I did. Hopefully, tomorrow, I'll get some of the measurements that I hadn't gotten today. And, if hope may be piled onto hope, maybe next time I'll get it right the first time around.

Pre-season, Day 4

2009-06-04T03:23:00.000-07:00

Not much happening today, at least not in the area where I'm working. We did a bit of surveying, making sure that we know exactly where we're going to be digging. Other than that, there was the excitement and romance of infomation technology, attaching routers to wireless cards, and making sure that we can connect to the network.

This is stuff that needs to be done. We're going to be using OCHRE, the “Online Cultural Heritage Research Environment”, to manage what we find in the field, so we need to be able to connect to the servers in order to open a new pottery bucket, or record a find, or, basically, to dig at all. All the same, it doesn't make for terribly interesting reading, I'm afraid.

Tomorrow looks to be much the same -- I'll probably head in, and see where I can lend a hand, but I might just take the day off.

Pre-season, Day 3

2009-06-03T09:04:00.000-07:00

Today, there was more backhoeing. Specifically, we dug out a bit more of Garstang's trench, and took apart one of the walls of the open air museum. There weren't as many finds today, but there were a lot of heavy rocks, some of which I had to pick up. You see, while most of the wall was taken apart in such a way that the rocks could easily be scooped out, a fair amount of it spilled into what had been the open air museum. And, while the sculpture isn't there any more, the walls of the apse still are, so we did our best to get the fallen stones out without damaging the walls. Which meant hauling stones away from the walls, so the digger could get them without dinging the walls.

Assuming that I've figured blogger out, the picture above should be of the digger lifting stones from where they had fallen.

Unfortunately, we didn't finish up everything that we had set out to do with the digger, and it's not clear that it's going to be coming back; if it doesn't, there's a lot of dirt and rock that's going to have to be shifted by hand. My understanding is that someone else is going to be in charge of that bit of the excavation area, so I personally shouldn't have to move that stuff. But who knows what the future will bring?

After the backhoe went back to wherever it is that backhoes come from, I sat in on a bit of pottery reading; that is, an expert looked at various piles of pottery, and identified when and where they were made, based on the shape, material, and decoration of the pottery. In this case, a lot was from the fourth century BCE – the border between the Persian and Hellenistic periods, with material from before and after. It had nothing to do with the basilica, but it's an interesting period, and I learned a lot by watching the read.

Then I wrote this up, which brings us to now.

Pre-season, Days 1 and 2.

2009-06-03T08:09:00.000-07:00

The volunteers and most of the staff aren't going to be here until Saturday evening, but I've already been at work for a few days. But, before I start talking about that, I think it might be worth talking about what we're doing here.

In the early 1920s, John Garstang excavated the basilica in Ashkelon. He was in charge of the British Mandate's Antiquities Authority for a while, and the head of a pair of archaeological institutes at different times. And yet, at least in Ashkelon, his field technique left a bit to be desired. He excavated a significant percentage of the Roman-Byzantine basilica in Ashkelon, and left a section of the apse as an open air museum, displaying the statuary that he had found.

Last year, we started excavating a section of the basilica that Garstang hadn't opened. At the time, we had expected to find one of his trenches meandering across that section, but as it turned out, while he recorded a trench there, there wasn't a trench there. Standards were different, back in the 20s. In the upper left corner, there's an aerial photo taken at the end of last season, showing what we did; the bit to the left is what Garstang excavated, the bit to the right is what we did last year.

The apse doesn't really look like that picture anymore. The tree in the middle is gone, and a great deal of earth has been moved, as we're hoping to open up almost the entire apse for excavation. Here's how that went:

Day 1:

Since I wasn't here on Day 1, very little got done. Well, actually, I wasn't here for the first day, and very little got done, but that's a subtle distinction. What I gathered was that there was some difficulty with the equipment. There's a big trench that Garstang seems to have dug, rather than just put on his plan, and earth moving equipment was called in to get the stuff that he filled the trench in with. Unfortunately, the edges of his trench were a bit wavy, and the equipment brought in couldn't really deal with the fine details. So, it didn't do much digging. But there was a floor found that gave us the other edge of Garstang's trench, so a start was made, certainly.

Day 2:

This is when I showed up. Also, a loader/backhoe was brought in, and I have to admit, it probably did more digging than I did. Which isn't to say that I didn't do anything at all. Mostly, I traced the edges of Garstang's trench and looked through what the backhoe was digging up, and taking out the occasional find. There were bits and pieces of marble floor tile, as well as little bits of carved stone, mostly from column capitals. The big find of the day was a blue teapot from the 1920s, providing archaeological evidence for the long held belief that Garstang was British.

Perhaps an introduction is in order.

2009-06-03T07:06:00.000-07:00

Hi.

This is the official blog of the 2009 Leon Levy Expedition to Ashkelon. And I'm Alter Reiss, the official blogger of the 2009 Leon Levy Expedition to Ashkelon. I got this job by writing about last year's excavation on my livejournal (if you're curious, entries related to last year's dig start at http://dhole.livejournal.com/2008/06/02/.) Unlike last year, when I was a volunteer, I'm on staff this year, so the time I have to spend on this might be a bit reduced. On the other hand, my authority has increased tremendously. I used to be a guy who listened to a square supervisor who listened to an area supervisor who listened to the dig director; now I'm one of those people who'll listen to an area supervisor who listens to the dig director. You can see how I have to struggle to keep this power from going to my head.

What'll I'll be doing here should look pretty similar to what I did on livejournal last year, though this year it's going to be a group blog, so assuming all goes according to plan, there are going to be other people posting about what's going on in their sections of the dig.