2009 season, day 3, part 2

As I had hoped, I was able to get in a few pictures this afternoon. But as it turned out, they're not very good pictures. Sorry about that.

Anyhow, this is, more or less, what the square we're digging looks like now. The problem is that in this light, it's not entirely clear that there's something near a two meter drop about three quarter of the way through the shot. When details like that aren't apparent, I wouldn't expect somewhat more fine details to come through.

The picture is taken looking north, and the bit close to the edge of the square on the south is missing. But that's more or less what we dug today, and what I'm basing my plans for tomorrow on.

The red line should mark the edge of my square. (Triangle would be a more technically accurate, but I'm calling it a square because that's what people excavate. Also, it is a square, but most of it is empty air, having been dug by Garstang and not filled in again.) The area with the red one in it marks the area that doesn't seem to have been disturbed, and which I expect to find good, stratified archaeology. The plan is to chase a Crusader pit there tomorrow, but if I can't get the edge between this area and the next, finding that pit isn't in the realm of possible.

The blue line shows the edge of an area of soft dirt, which I think is related to the wall put in by Garstang -- a sort of foundation trench. We'll take a bit of that out tomorrow, and we'll see if I can find something to show that I'm right.

The little sort of brown-taupe line is somewhere I'm not sure about -- 3 is either material similar to 1 or to 2. One of the things that might help tell us is the feature that the orange line encloses, and which is marked with a 5. That marks the edge of the area marked 1, and if we find it, we know that the line. If it peters out, the problem becomes more complicated.

The bit in green, marked 4, is what we've excavated today. It's got a mix of different types of fill, and I'm not quite ready to call it a 20th century layer. But I'm not certain what it is, if it isn't that. I assume that'll get refined, as we get further down.

To get back to the story of the sherd, from the previous post.

After the day's digging is done, the pottery buckets are taken back to the pottery compound -- the excavation's base camp, more or less, where the initial post-excavation processing of finds takes place. There, the buckets are filled with water, and the pottery is left to sit. It's early days, yet, so the sherds only get to sit in water from the end of the excavating day, 1:00, until pottery washing, which starts at 4:00.

I was a bit busy today, so I didn't start taking pictures until after the pottery washing was done. So the sherd I took a picture of earlier isn't actually in those buckets; it was in a bucket similar to those buckets.

After the sherds are washed, they're put into fruit crates, and left to dry in the sun. Wet pottery looks a bit different than dry pottery, and if you put pottery away wet, you get bags full of water. And while I didn't get a shot of the sherd in the bucket of water, it is in that fruit crate; it's the green one near the middle, with the incised decoration that makes it look a bit like a palm leaf.

In an ideal world, the pottery will be looked at the day after it's washed, but we've been known to get a few days behind, when the excavation season is in full swing.

So, the hope is that we'll see that sherd again tomorrow; if that doesn't happen, it'll be the day after.

And I think I'll leave it at that, for today.

Good night!

2009 season, day 3

It was another productive day, today, and the triangle I'm digging looks a good deal different than it did yesterday. Unfortunately, I forgot to take pictures -- hopefully, I'll get that done this afternoon. Instead, I've got a couple of pictures of a a green glazed potsherd, which I took out of a trench near the south side of the big Byzantine wall.

Assuming that all goes well, I'll follow this sherd as it makes its way through the system we have. Thus far, that story hasn't been terribly eventful.

The story so far goes as follows: I saw the sherd in the dirt, (it's more or less in the middle of the first picture) and put it into a pottery bucket (it's on the lower left of the bucket in the second picture). The bucket has a tag which will let us track it -- it's got the date it was dug, the supervisors, the general area and the specific square from which it was taken, and so on. It's also got a bar code, which means that even if I made errors in transcribing that information onto the tag, as I will do, from time to time, we can look in OCHRE, and get all of that out, and more, including any comments put in about that sherd. There's also a plastic bag in that bucket, which I believe was holding marble tesserae. Once I've gone through this with a piece of pottery, I'll show you how finds like that are processed.

Anyhow now I'm off to the pottery compound. If I've got the time, I'll show the next step that sherd takes after I come back from there, and have eaten dinner. Also, maybe there'll be more about the digging that we've done today.

2009 season, day 2

Today, the plan was to finish cleaning the surface early in the day, and start digging as soon as possible. That plan was somewhat disrupted by finding a nice, level surface. That surface had to be cleaned, which took much of the morning.

But that wasn't all we did. There's a bit of a trench to the side of Garstang's wall that we've been digging out, and there's the end of the big Byzantine wall that we've been looking for.

I'll attempt to explain this, though the medium of pictures. Unfortunately, most of the pictures that I took in the afternoon didn't come out quite right, so I'm going to start by scribbling all over the one you can see up on the left, there.

Okay, there are a lot of lines there, which I hope will be visible if you click through on that very similar looking picture, to the right of this paragraph.

The red line, more or less, marks the edges of the slice of territory that I'm excavating. It's trying to represent a three dimensional space in two dimensions, so there'll be problems with that throughout, but I'll do what I can.

The bit circled in black marks the edges of the smooth, regular surface. I'm very pleased with that surface, as it makes it easy to distinguish between topsoil and what we're digging, and I'm looking forward to going through it. The bit edged in green marks a row of stones from the big Byzantine wall in the square that we excavated last year. Next to that, there's a little trench, where we've started digging today, showing that face of the wall. And, on the far side of the area, there's the 192os wall that we're going to be taking down, course by course.

And that's all for now, I think.

2009 season, day 1

Rather than heading in on Friday, I played hooky and slept until ten. But today was no day for hooky! This was the first day of the season proper, and as far as I could see, it went great.

The bit I'm excavating is the little slice of dirt between the area where we dug last season, and the area where Garstang left as an open air museum. Before we could start digging, we had to takeout the sandbags that had been left there the previous season, as well as get rid of the dirt that had escaped the control of wheelbarrows and people carrying buckets of dirt last season. And we had to clean the surface of various plants that had taken up residence over the winter. So we had work to do.

The same was true throughout the area. The JCB came in for the morning, and finished lifting the last of those rocks from Garstang's wall, and when he was gone, the people working at that end of the area turned the somewhat irregular furrow the JCB had left into a more clean-edged archaeological trench.

Basically, there looked to be about two days worth of work in the area before we could get started, and we seemed to have just about finished that.

And I was eventually able to connect to the network, and record the buckets of pottery we took out while cleaning the topsoil. Unfortunately, I kind of did that wrong, at the time. But one of the advantages of using a computer system for recording is that I can go back and fix things later. Which I'm pretty sure I did. Hopefully, tomorrow, I'll get some of the measurements that I hadn't gotten today. And, if hope may be piled onto hope, maybe next time I'll get it right the first time around.

Pre-season, Day 4

Not much happening today, at least not in the area where I'm working. We did a bit of surveying, making sure that we know exactly where we're going to be digging. Other than that, there was the excitement and romance of infomation technology, attaching routers to wireless cards, and making sure that we can connect to the network.

This is stuff that needs to be done. We're going to be using OCHRE, the “Online Cultural Heritage Research Environment”, to manage what we find in the field, so we need to be able to connect to the servers in order to open a new pottery bucket, or record a find, or, basically, to dig at all. All the same, it doesn't make for terribly interesting reading, I'm afraid.

Tomorrow looks to be much the same -- I'll probably head in, and see where I can lend a hand, but I might just take the day off.

Pre-season, Day 3

Today, there was more backhoeing. Specifically, we dug out a bit more of Garstang's trench, and took apart one of the walls of the open air museum. There weren't as many finds today, but there were a lot of heavy rocks, some of which I had to pick up. You see, while most of the wall was taken apart in such a way that the rocks could easily be scooped out, a fair amount of it spilled into what had been the open air museum. And, while the sculpture isn't there any more, the walls of the apse still are, so we did our best to get the fallen stones out without damaging the walls. Which meant hauling stones away from the walls, so the digger could get them without dinging the walls.

Assuming that I've figured blogger out, the picture above should be of the digger lifting stones from where they had fallen.

Unfortunately, we didn't finish up everything that we had set out to do with the digger, and it's not clear that it's going to be coming back; if it doesn't, there's a lot of dirt and rock that's going to have to be shifted by hand. My understanding is that someone else is going to be in charge of that bit of the excavation area, so I personally shouldn't have to move that stuff. But who knows what the future will bring?

After the backhoe went back to wherever it is that backhoes come from, I sat in on a bit of pottery reading; that is, an expert looked at various piles of pottery, and identified when and where they were made, based on the shape, material, and decoration of the pottery. In this case, a lot was from the fourth century BCE – the border between the Persian and Hellenistic periods, with material from before and after. It had nothing to do with the basilica, but it's an interesting period, and I learned a lot by watching the read.

Then I wrote this up, which brings us to now.

Pre-season, Days 1 and 2.

The volunteers and most of the staff aren't going to be here until Saturday evening, but I've already been at work for a few days. But, before I start talking about that, I think it might be worth talking about what we're doing here.

In the early 1920s, John Garstang excavated the basilica in Ashkelon. He was in charge of the British Mandate's Antiquities Authority for a while, and the head of a pair of archaeological institutes at different times. And yet, at least in Ashkelon, his field technique left a bit to be desired. He excavated a significant percentage of the Roman-Byzantine basilica in Ashkelon, and left a section of the apse as an open air museum, displaying the statuary that he had found.

Last year, we started excavating a section of the basilica that Garstang hadn't opened. At the time, we had expected to find one of his trenches meandering across that section, but as it turned out, while he recorded a trench there, there wasn't a trench there. Standards were different, back in the 20s. In the upper left corner, there's an aerial photo taken at the end of last season, showing what we did; the bit to the left is what Garstang excavated, the bit to the right is what we did last year.

The apse doesn't really look like that picture anymore. The tree in the middle is gone, and a great deal of earth has been moved, as we're hoping to open up almost the entire apse for excavation. Here's how that went:

Day 1:

Since I wasn't here on Day 1, very little got done. Well, actually, I wasn't here for the first day, and very little got done, but that's a subtle distinction. What I gathered was that there was some difficulty with the equipment. There's a big trench that Garstang seems to have dug, rather than just put on his plan, and earth moving equipment was called in to get the stuff that he filled the trench in with. Unfortunately, the edges of his trench were a bit wavy, and the equipment brought in couldn't really deal with the fine details. So, it didn't do much digging. But there was a floor found that gave us the other edge of Garstang's trench, so a start was made, certainly.

Day 2:

This is when I showed up. Also, a loader/backhoe was brought in, and I have to admit, it probably did more digging than I did. Which isn't to say that I didn't do anything at all. Mostly, I traced the edges of Garstang's trench and looked through what the backhoe was digging up, and taking out the occasional find. There were bits and pieces of marble floor tile, as well as little bits of carved stone, mostly from column capitals. The big find of the day was a blue teapot from the 1920s, providing archaeological evidence for the long held belief that Garstang was British.

Perhaps an introduction is in order.

Hi.

This is the official blog of the 2009 Leon Levy Expedition to Ashkelon. And I'm Alter Reiss, the official blogger of the 2009 Leon Levy Expedition to Ashkelon. I got this job by writing about last year's excavation on my livejournal (if you're curious, entries related to last year's dig start at http://dhole.livejournal.com/2008/06/02/.) Unlike last year, when I was a volunteer, I'm on staff this year, so the time I have to spend on this might be a bit reduced. On the other hand, my authority has increased tremendously. I used to be a guy who listened to a square supervisor who listened to an area supervisor who listened to the dig director; now I'm one of those people who'll listen to an area supervisor who listens to the dig director. You can see how I have to struggle to keep this power from going to my head.

What'll I'll be doing here should look pretty similar to what I did on livejournal last year, though this year it's going to be a group blog, so assuming all goes according to plan, there are going to be other people posting about what's going on in their sections of the dig.