All Good Things Must Come to an End

The dig has finally reached it’s climactic ending. This morning we finished off this season’s work at area D, our area of the dig. It’s amazing how far we have come over the past 9 days of digging. In some areas we dug down as far as 6 feet, which is quite a lot if you consider how meticulously and slowly we dug each layer.

Before:

After:

We celebrated the dig with a surprise pizza party. Instead of eating the kibbutz food one more time we ate pizza near our cabins and took some time to say our goodbyes to our amazing staff; Ami Mazar, Dr. Mullins, Hai, Uri, Yael, Nava, and all the others. After the pizza party, John from our group tied a loaf of sliced bread to himself and went into the water near the kibbutz just to see how the fish would react. They reacted in a relatively predictable manner, swarming around John eating the bread and nibbling on his skin. It was one more story to add to the repertoire of stories we will tell from this trip.

We will surely miss Israel but we are excited to come home tomorrow. This whole trip has been amazing and will prove to be unforgettable. We all have great stories to tell and experiences that we can share with our friends and families. Great thanks to Dr. Duke, Dr. Mullins, Mandy Kelly, and APU for making this trip possible. I speak for the whole group when I say that this trip has been amazing and life changing. The experience we have shared here in Israel has been invaluable. Thank you so much and please offer this trip to students in the future!

To all who have been following us through this blog, thank you so much. This will be the last post for this trip. This blog will be available for viewing for as long as wordpress allows it. It will not be deleted by us so stop in any time in the future if you want to relive some of the experience or see the pictures again. More pictures will probably be added when we return home so check in for those too.

Thanks again to all! Shalom Out!

Backhoe Day

Today was an interesting day of digging. We had a backhoe come in and dig out a small portion of the tel right in our area. Though it may have seemed to most of us that its’ purpose was to create dust, the backhoe dug a narrow trench down about 10 or 15 feet in order to investigate the tufa layer that abuts a wall in our tel, to see if the layer is natural or manmade.  Though from what Chai and Uri (our archaeologist supervisors) saw today it seems that the tufa is indeed manmade, the answer is still unclear. Besides giving us a clearer view of just how far down our walls go, there was another advantage to digging with the backhoe. Among the vast amount of dirt that was cleared by the backhoe Ami Mazar, the boss of the dig, found an almost fully intact figurine which was missing only a head. It was the most important and interesting find that has been excavated from our area of the tel thus far. The figurine is a very important find for understanding more about what went on at rehov.

For all but those who worked on sorting through the dirt that was picked up by the backhoe, besides the distraction of the backhoe and the dust it hurled in the air, today was a normal day. We continued digging through more layers of our usual spots. We are all a bit tired from the hard work we have been doing every day but our spirits are still positive. Though we are enjoying the experience of excavating we are all very excited to return home to comfortable beds, clean cloths, the food we have been missing, and most importantly the people we have been missing.

The Figurine

Shabbat Shalom

It’s finally the weekend and we are all saying “shalom!” to the shabbat… it’s great to get a good rest. Although we are enjoying the dig, some more than others, we are counting down to the day we return home to the U.S. Today some of us forfeited sabbath rest for a trip to Petra in Jordan. Some of us pretty much spent the day sleeping and others swam at the pools. Since it is sabbath, the kibbutz isn’t serving dinner to us. Instead they gave us food and charcoal for a barbecue. So as I write this post I am sitting near the stream that flows near the kibbutz waiting for the coals to heat up enough to thoroughly cook our kabobs. It’s a beautiful evening and we are getting a rare breeze.

As an update on the dig, we have been unearthing lots of pottery, bones, and flint. After we wash and sort everything, it all goes to Hebrew University in Jerusalem to be examined more thoroughly and sometimes tested and carbon-dated. The big finds we have had in our area (area D) have included some pottery that originally came from Cypress, a lot of architecture that will help us understand what we are excavating, and a beautiful copper piece that Mandy and Justin found. The copper piece we found is an almost fully intact pin for a toga, about four inches long. The other group from Asbury Seminary which is digging in Area C have found a really cool mini-altar that was for small sacrifice or burning incense. Area C is also where the apiary, the man made bee-hives, was discovered last year–the only Iron age bee-hives ever excavated. Tel Rehov is a very unique tel, not just because of the bee-hives but also everything else. Though the pottery is normal, the architecture, the city lay-out, and the buildings are all unique among all the tels in Israel. We can’t tell what ethnicity these people were yet. Were they Canaanite or just unique Israelites or what? We don’t know yet but we will tell you if we find out.

Making Progress

We are three days into digging and progress is easy to see, not only in the fact that our excavation area looks different than it did when we showed up but we are also progressing in our efficiency. Our bucket brigade, the part where we all line up and pass buckets down the line to be emptied at the end, is getting faster and our ability to distinguish ancient brick from plain old dirt is improving. One correction I must make from the last post is that I forgot that, although most of us are digging in the Late-Bronze age, some of us are actually not digging in the Late-Bronze age but in the Iron age, in the days of King David. Yesterday was the first day we actually got to clean the pottery that we had excavated. Once soaked and scrubbed off, the pottery can be seen more clearly, sometimes revealing paint or, if we get lucky, some kind of inscription. As of yet there have been no inscriptions or really special pottery discovered by our group but we are learning more and more about what our particular area might have looked like or been used for. Between our whole group we have found everything from sickle blades, to grinding stones, to arrow-heads, to necklace beads. Today will be the first day that we actually get to sort and examine our clean pottery in order to see what we have excavated.  Weather or not we find a really special piece, it should be rewarding just to see and identify more of our findings.

The food here at the kibbutz has been better than it was at JUC, I must say, and it has been really nice to return from the dig for lunch each day. After lunch we get some free time until 4:30pm to swim in the river or the pools and rest. Then at 4:30pm we wash pottery and sort it until dinner. We’re all a bit tired after dinner so we generally go to bed pretty quickly after we eat because it’s time to leave again to the dig at 5:00am.