Dig III

Today I spent my time washing pottery - getting the dirt off piece by piece by scrubbing with a brush. It is done one bucket at a time; each bucket is tagged according to its location at the dig; most of the fragments are pottery shards but mixed in and sorted are bits of bone, shells, terrazo/mosaic or marble pieces of flooring, and occasionally a coin. The latter are placed in plastic bags and labeled. The pottery is soaked in water overnight, so this is a cool job sitting in the shade playing with water and mud. My favorite piece was a hunk of a Roman lamp.
There are people entering data into computers, bagging and sorting the few pottery pieces that will be saved. making drawings, and marking out the grid with surveying instruments for the next phase - which goes next week and then this fall. It seems a slow, labor intensive process. I will always appreciate in a new way the "ruins" I see in the future.
For the archeologists, the pottery is a language. It tells the approximate age of a dig level - our square in the site was lowered each day by 10-15 cm - the dirt sifted in one bucket out of 5. We did find a hunk of romanesque cornice, but then nothing more. Other squares found walls, flooring and architectural details. The site director thinks this was the courtyard area of a mosque. Finally the dirt was not sifted and at day's end our particular square hole was shut down.
There's an egret rookery off in the distance, white birds clustered in a couple trees. Two hungry female dogs wandered through - they have litters somewhere. Only portions of the site will be preserved; places like this are discovered in so many parts of Israel, whenever sewer lines or foundations for new buildings are being dug. Tiberias literally has pieces of pillars and Crusader era walls strewn about in every direction...tangible proof of powers that have come and gone. I find it humbling.