Number 3

Hey all,

Sorry my updates have been pretty much nonexistant. I have little free time these days as digging is starting to get down to crunch time and sleep is getting less and less. We dig every day from 5 30 till 1 (or 12 30 on a short day), go home and shower and clean up. At 2 is lunch, then free time during which I usually nap. Then back to lab from 4 till 6. Today I actually got the energy to walk the 5 minutes here though.

Things have been getting really interesting in my square. We are deep into the Iron Age. We have found some really big pot sherds of storage jars and cooking pots. At one point we thought we had found a tibun, essentially an oven, and we got really excited. Unfortunately, we never found enough evidence to support that, just lots of broken mud brick pieces. We think that they were used to support the storage jars which have really small bases.

Today we dug down to bedrock in part of our square. On top of the bedrock was a whole mess of pottery, which was exciting. We probably have 1 or 2 more days to reach bedrock in the rest of our square and finish cleaning it out and then we move on to another part of the square. If we move quickly evnough we might close out our square forever and get to move on to helping excavate a Byzantine mosaic which would be pretty neat.

Other than that all is going well. My stomach has adapted to Jordanian food, I'm getting to know all the people on my trip, and our weekends have led us to some really interesting sites around Jordan. I'm not looking forward to lab time where I get to wash all the pottery and bone we found today, but this weekend is our 3 day mid field school break, and we head off to Petra and other sites in that area.

I'll try and give an update on that one soon!