May 30 - Floors, Floors and more FLOORS!

Hello All!

Exciting things happening at Tall Jalul square W2 today!
So yesterday we uncovered the pebble surface and today we dug beside it to see what could be underneath. Mostly we were trying to find the wall connecting our square to square W5, and in doing so we discovered in the stratigraphy under the pebble surface that there are two more surfaces below! About 1 foot below there is a clear plaster surface about 4 inches wide and below the plaster there appears to be another pebble surface!!
We will create steps and see what kind of pottery is in between each surface to date the layers. This is really exciting because these are sealed layers with no contamination from other occupations.

Pottery reading today for the surface showed some Early Iron II and Iron II pottery.  I will let you know what we find beneath the surface.

Oh, an exciting development, a group of us is planning to go to Jerusalem for the weekend, so bearing all goes well with hotel reservations I will be able to share with you my experience in Israel for the first time. Should be a great time.

Goodnight! 4am comes early..

May 29 - first day digging

Sorry everyone, posting pictures is proving to be much more difficult than I anticipated. Internet is sporadic at best here, I can't even get online with my laptop.

Anyway, we got to Jalul at 5am and right away put up our Canadian flag! There are quite a lot of flags represented here this year; Puerto Rico, Venezuela, Brazil, Russia, Croatia, Belguim, and Canada! We also fly an Andrews University flag and of course a huge Jordanian one.

After our flag was securely hammered into the ground we gathered up our tools for the morning (wheel barrow, hoes, large picks, small picks, brushes, dust pans, guffas etc.) and set about marking off our Baulks. Baulks are a meter wide and run the perimeter of the square in which you excavate.

We started digging in the south-eastern diagonal of the square to find the floor that we discovered at the end of last season. The floor was covered by two loci of dirt and we broke through to the surface by second breakfast (about 9:30). The surface would be best described as similar to a gravel driveway. It Is made up of many small pebbles, ceramics, even a few bones are wedged in between stones. I'm not sure at this point if we will keep the floor or break through to see what lies beneath the floor.
After second breakfast we started digging on the other diagonal of the square in hopes of finding the continuation of a wall discovered in the square North of ours. Sadly we found only dirt with hardly any pottery. Perhaps tomorrow we will dig deeper and find something.

Archaeologist Mantra: "Hopefully we'll find it tomorrow!". Lol goodnight!

Jerash: A Roman City

We spent our first day in Jordan at the ancient Roman city of Jerash, also known as Gerasa.
The first major settlement at Jerash is attributed to the Greeks at about the time of Alexander the Great (333 BC).  However, it was under Roman rule that Jerash truly flourished. Pompey conquered the area in 64 BC and Gerasa became part of the Roman province of Syria and then a city of the Decapolis.

There were hardly any tourists at Jerash, which meant I got to take a lot of photos void of people! We wandered around the whole city for three hours without feeling rushed and really enjoyed our day. I'm trying to post a few photos, but it seems the internet is too slow right now, I'll try tomorrow after the dig.

The digging commences at 5:30 or so tomorrow! We will have breakfast at 4:30 (A.M. by the way...)  Load up the cars at 5:00 and start taking photos before the sun rises. I'll be sure to document our digging process tomorrow to share with you.

Goodnight!
-e

Tel Jalul here I come...

Hello Everyone,

I've started this blog because I would like to share with you exactly what I'll be doing in Jordan this summer. I will be posting photos and keeping you up-to-date on our findings and adventures.  I am joining up with Andrews University at Tel Jalul for two weeks of intense digging and enjoyable falafel eating :).

Here is the link to the official Tell Jalul blog.
http://jalul.wordpress.com/

See you in Jordan!

-e