It was another day of pottery in the compound. This time, we were working through crates of Grid 50 pottery. Grid 50 is most well known as the location of the market destroyed by Nebuchadnezzar, the majority of Ashkelon's Persian period dog burials, and deep Islamic period robber trenches that dismantled the area's warehouses.
The first hour of work
The task was the same today as it was last week; to sort "unclaimed pottery" by period so that ceramicists working on specific periods (i.e. Roman or Hellenistic or Islamic) see and have access to all the pottery from their period of interest.
A volunteer consults with Becky about Greek pottery
Unsurprisingly, the majority of the pottery proved to belong to the Persian period. There was also a large amount of Islamic, from secondary contexts, Roman/Byzantine, and even some Hellenistic.
Volunteers sort bags of pottery