We have been very poor bloggers, of late, we know. After the excavations at Marj Rabba, Mo began her new position and has been busily preparing new classes, grading and generally going full tilt. Meanwhile, Yo recently finished accompanying an Oriental Institute tour to Israel, and now remains in Jerusalem.
But recently a program concerning the problems of looting was released on al-Jazeera (English) news. This included interviews of colleagues and locals, including Mo, who comes in at about 36:00 (not wearing a hat!).
Note the lovely backdrop of Marj Rabba and students, including some from Brown University, University of Connecticut and more!
You can find the program at: http://english.aljazeera.net/programmes/2010/10/201010591416403822.html
Some of our readers know very well what working on an excavation entails (indeed, some might be the very people who introduced us to the routine and different field methods!) But for those who have never worked on an excavation, we thought that we could run down the daily routine.
In order to avoid the hottest part of the day, we start very early; Mo and Yo get up at 4 am, so that we have our own gear together (hats, water, cameras, etc). This year we are staying at a college in Karmi'el called ORT Braude, a small engineering college.
ORT Braude campus
We walk over to where we park the vehicles, which is near the dormitory rooms. After collecting empty buckets, water jugs and gear for the field, we hope everyone arrives by our 5 am departure. A quick 10 minute drive through the winding roads leading to Yodefat takes us to Marj Rabba, where our rented container containing the tools is stationed. At this point the sun is just about to rise, but by the time we get the tools out and walk them up to the site, there is just enough light to begin working.
MP and Mo discussing bucket tags and the day's goals
Pre-dawn excavations.
Mo in the mist
We work until 8:30, when we stop for breakfast under the nearby olive trees, which includes a variety of sandwiches, veggies, cookies and beverages prepared at the ORT Braude cafe which we pick up on our way out. A little after 9 we go "back to the salt mines", until 11, when we have a short fruit break. By 12:30 we are wrapping things up - taking elevations, sweeping up the excavation areas, collecting the buckets and bone bags, and moving the equipment back to the container, so that we can finish by 1 pm. The day goes by very quickly, usually, but we are all tired.
Pottery washing time near the dormitories at ORT Braude.
Yesterday Prof P and Mo visited the Al-Jib Heritage Exhibition in the Al-Jib Womanly Centre. Al-Jib is a Palestinian village in the West Bank where the ancient biblical site of Gibeon is thought to be located. During the early Iron Age, a massive wall was constructed around the crown of the hill of Gibeon and a huge pool was cut in the rock just inside the wall. The pool is over 10m deep and has a spiral staircase of 79 steps cut into the walls of the pool, continuing downwards into a tunnel that provides access to a water chamber 24m below the level of the city.
It is thought that this structure is the "pool of Gibeon" mentioned in the Bible (2 Samuel 2:13). Recently the Palestinian Association for Cultural Exchange (PACE) was awarded an Ambassador's Fund for Cultural Preservation (from the US Department of State) grant to establish some small community museums in the Ramallah area. The Al-Jib Heritage Exhibition is one of these museums.
This is the director of PACE with Prof P - explaining some of the highlights of the museum. Last summer Prof P and Mo went to visit the potential museum sites with PACE and this year we did a follow-up.
The exhibit is made up of artifacts from the site, some ethnographic material and some local handicrafts made by the women from the Womanly Center. Some of the artifacts are donated by the local villagers.
Any good visit to the West Bank involves many cups of tea and coffee and usually some sweets.
On this visit we were treated to a strange jelly and chocolate pudding concoction and more coffee!
This image is for our pal JE who is doing a study on museums, groundstone and the work of women in the Middle East.
As many of your know traveling to the West Bank can be long and involved. We leave you with some of the graffiti on the wall near the Ramallah check point. Tomorrow we leave for Marj Rabba in the Karmi'el region - look for more posts on the dig in the coming days/weeks!
Wow - two blog posts in two days, what is the world coming to?? On July 1 Mo finished her postdoc at the Joukowsky Institute at Brown University (sad)
and started her new job as an assistant professor in the Department of Anthropology at DePaul University (happy). There is no small amount of irony in the fact that Mo is ending up in an anthropology department while Yo works at the Oriental Institute with its near eastern archaeological emphasis.
With over 25,000 students, DePaul is one of the largest private universities where the focus is on teaching.
They have a nationally ranked service-learning program, which integrates the service concept into the curriculum. This means lots of work with the Chicago community. This is similar to the program that Mo completed at UGeorgia where much of the time was spent out and about in the Georgia countryside in small towns and cities working with local communities.
See camels, who are just passing through the area on their way to who knows where??
Live in comfortable tents amid the ruins.
Cook out in the open using the back of a truck as a food prep area. Drink warm yucky beer. And give up showering for 20+ days!
Eat unidentifiable meat from cans.
Experience sandstorms, and flies (1000s of flies) - desert living is brutal.
Usually the sky is blue - not sand coloured.
50+ Cairns - the tail of a tower tomb 
Yo spent a lot of time as the stick monkey (the guy standing around deciding where to put the prism for the total station to read) and Mo spent a lot of time drawing rocks.
Looks kind of like a pile of rocks . . .
Student L spent most of her days pushing the button on the total station - we are pretty sure that she has decided that archaeology is not her calling. In the end we were defeated by two days of sandstorms, which collapsed our shade. We returned to ACOR in Amman - to showers, to cold beer, to fresh food and to a nice bed courtesy of our very good friend BAP.
We are off to Maitland's Mesa tomorrow. That means packing up a truck with all the provisions 4 people will need for 4 weeks. Here are two images of our intrepid crew - Prof. G, student L and Yo. In these pictures everyone looks pretty clean and happy, we'll see how they look a month from now. We will be eating all things from cans for the next month, not showering and swatting a lot of flies.
We will also be mapping a very interesting mortuary landscape out in the panhandle of Jordan (the eastern desert near the Iraq/Saudi border). This is the site - Maitland's Mesa, which is a basalt capped mesa in the middle of nowhere. But of course at some point in time people were living there.
You can see here the outlines of what we think are animal (think sheep/goat) pens that surround the base of the mesa; some are probably mortuary structures as well. Part of our job will be to record these features and draw them and look for artifacts, which will help date them.
This is what an enclosure (perhaps a burial chamber or some other structure) looks like up close. So we'll be off of the grid for the next month and then we'll update our adventures in the eastern desert! At the end of the month, and after a brief foray into the wonderful world of Petra, we are off to Israel for another season at Marj Rabba. Stay tuned for future updates.
