Starting Out With a Bang

June 20, 2013  Thursday

So I almost blew up the dig today ....
A few minutes after I lit the propane tank and got the teapot going, some people could smell gas.  (I never did smell it.)  Then suddenly the flames shot up around the poor teapot and we realized there was a gas leak.  Someone used a pole to remove the teapot from the burner.  The flames went higher and Shimon shouted for everyone to leave the dig!  Eventually someone was able to turn off the gas and the flames went out.  The tank was inspected, and it was determined that the burner was actually broken or defective, and that had caused the gas leak.  Nothing I did caused the problem, but I still feel like there's a little black cloud over my head.  And there was no tea today!

Well, Pete and I both continued work at the same stations as yesterday.  He and Olga sorted through 300 buckets of mud!  In typical Pete fashion, they limited themselves to what they could find in 60 seconds so that they could keep up the pace that was needed.  They continued to find assorted pieces of pottery and bones.  It's not essential to find every single fragment.  Larger pieces are enough to aid with dating the section.

Here's a good photo of the sifting line.  We're really filling up those white bags!  My group was sifting mostly dry dirt/fill.  That means we can shake almost all of the loose dirt out first, and then we sit down to look for fun stuff.  My sifting group found pottery, bones, glass, and several coins.  I found a very nice Roman coin, but alas, the picture we took didn't work.

Here's an example of where my group gets dirt/fill to sift.

We have a zip line!  There's a black bucket coming down from a higher elevation to be sifted by my group.

This movie shows how the mud is brought up out of the cistern.  It's cool in the cistern, but very humid.

Popsicle break!  The woman on the left is Quincy, who is in charge of our well-being.  She carries a magic first aid kit and roams the site like Florence Nightingale, looking for people who need attention and water.  Heidi is on the right.  She has almost recovered from her knee injury too.  In the background isn Karsten, a dig participant from Germany.

End of the week recap by Shimon.  We've accomplished a lot these past five days!

After cleaning up the site and storing all the tools and equipment for the weekend, we carried buckets of "finds" to the Armenian Museum just inside the Zion Gate.  I forgot to mention that we have two or three people washing pottery in the museum.  Pete and I walked through the Old City on our way back to the hotel.  We stopped to buy postcard stamps, and we went into the tourist-packed Church of the Holy Sepulcher.  But that's another post!  We used up almost all of our money on the stamps, so our planned grocery shopping ended up yielding only a half kilo of delicious green grapes.  I'll eventually do a post on the food we've been eating.

I'm still using my cane, but my walking pace and endurance are improving, the pain is markedly less, and I've quit taking ibuprofen!  Several other team members have taken full or partial days off.  I'm not the only one with joint problems!  Some have suffered from migraines, dust allergies, and dehydration.  Pete especially has to be careful about dehydration since he sweats so much.  But so far, so good.  We have bottled water on the site and we are carrying Emergen-C tablets to drop into our water once or twice a day.

Our evening lecture was presented by Dr. Shimon Gibson.  The topic was "Early Explorers and the Archaeology of Jerusalem."  He had some fascinating old photos of Jerusalem, including photos of the area under the Dome of the Rock.  (He's written a book on this subject.)  No westerner has been down there since the 1930s.

We have Friday and Saturday free.  We could have joined the student group on a tour of the Mount of Olives and City of David.  We were on the Mount of Olives last week and will be there several more times, and we have a City of David tour scheduled during our final week.