Day 7

We dealt with gnats and the hot sun today, along with some big stones and some hard packed earth.  It was tough work but we had a productive day—we closed out our first locus, and opened our second.  That means we’ve cleared out the first layer of dirt, which was probably heavily contaminated, and have moved onto the second stratigraphic layer.  We moved a lot of dirt all over the square and brought the whole thing down around 5 cm.  We also brought down the area between our old square and our new one, and hopefully by second breakfast tomorrow, we’ll have exposed all the pavers between the threshold block and the stairs we’re hoping to find.  Whether or not they’ll be there is another story.  But no matter, the view of the sun rising over the site and the Hula Valley is always worth waking up at 4:30am and digging in the hot sun all day!

After a long day in the field, we washed pottery, catalogued the day’s finds, and had some lunch.  Then I took a quick nap before afternoon work, which was really informative.  We did some reconstruction work with pottery and looked at some stucco from the early shrine.  A Mac grad from 2001, Ben Rubin, who is now a Classics professor at Williams College in MA came up today and he’ll be working with us for the rest of the season.  He worked at Omrit in its earliest years and discovered the Early Shrine!  He did his PhD work in Turkey, so I’m looking forward to chatting with him for the rest of the season.

This evening we had a lecture from site architect Michael Nelson on the architecture of the temple structures.  I don’t seem to have too much free time, but when I do, I’ll put up a post or two with some info about the temple structure itself.  It was a very interesting lecture and included all of the new finds from the past two seasons.  Now to bed before and early wakeup tomorrow!