Day thirty-something.

So how often do you get to do archaeological work on one of the most important historical cities in the world? Well I got to do it for two whole days last week! Of course it involved giving up some of our free days, but it was well worth it. Our entire group volunteered to help out with the excavations on the site of the city of David, just south of Old City Jerusalem. What does this actually mean? Well we had a large supply of pick-axes, dirt-scrapers, and buckets. The way excavations are set up is by organizing the site into a grid, laying down sandbags or whatnot as dividers. Each square is slowly and painstakingly excavated by a group of diggers, which is where we come in. As we dug down, we collected pieces of pottery, bone, or anything else interesting that we happened upon. I was really surprised at the sheer volume of pottery shards that we found even just a few inches down. Unfortunately nothing we dug up was very intact, however, although we did find some neat handles from pottery (lamps perhaps?).

The experience of it all was really more rewarding than anything we actually dug up. It was great to just get off the Moshav, get all dirty, and work hard for two days. And it was fairly hard work. On top of digging up the soil with our pick-axes and scooping it into buckets, we also had to form massive bucket lines to move all of the dirt out of the excavation area and onto the road, where the earth-movers could haul it off. So for what felt like thirty minutes at a time we would just be passing buckets along down the line. Then we had to fight with the Israeli diggers just to get some more buckets to keep working, but that was more in fun (as I saw it) than actually problematic. I got a couple of opportunities to speak to Israelis while working, though not nearly as much as I would have liked. Some of us are planning to go back and volunteer again for a day though, so I look forward to that!

Enough blab, have some pictures.

You can see the sandbags positioned in such a way so as to create a grid, and each crew working on their specific plot.

There were lots of buckets.

I mean there were lots and lots of buckets.

This was a very exciting find - a fully intact lamp from the byzantine(?) period. The archaeologist is explaining the artifact to us in this picture.

And I went as batman that day, in my $3.50 batman shirt that I haggled my way into from the old city!