It was another fun day in the compound!
One of the practicalities the expedition faces is what to do with the material accumulated over 20+ seasons of excavation. The first task is always to process and properly store the various materials we excavate-- such as bone, glass, ceramics, metals and so on -- until someone is offered, and accepts, the opportunity to work on them. For the past three or four seasons, Fridays have been devoted to helping appointed specialists process their materials and this week was no exception.
The major project of late has been sorting Persian period pottery -- by far the single largest corpus of material on site -- and the crates stacked up in this picture contain Persian and Hellenistic pottery from Grid 50. Today volunteers worked on sorting the Grid 50 pottery into crates so that Kate and Josh can go through them and more easily find material that should be included in their projects. At long last, the Persian period pottery is almost entirely in Josh's hands.
At the same time crates were being sorted, other volunteers were sorting already identified and phased Persian period pottery for analysis. "Phased" means that the pottery has all been identified as coming from the same period of occupation in various areas of the site. Volunteers were sorting the pottery into categories such as Phoenician amphora, cooking pots, Attic vessels and more. It is the first step in building the typology.
A new project has gotten underway this season and here you can see volunteers sorting glass for a chapter on Islamic period glass to be included in the Islamic period volume. Volunteers worked on sorting diags and then entering information into a computer database.
And now the weekend is upon us! It'll be nice to relax for a day before getting back at it on Sunday.