By Adam Kuntz
Overlooking Madaba, the home away from home for the members of KMAP (Photo by A. Kuntz)
The first week of the study season is done and we hit the ground running. It was a busy week filled with arrivals, settling in, lots of cleaning, and organizing projects. We all started our individual projects for this season and were immediately tossed into the fray.
This season I am focusing on laying the foundation for the site wide GIS for the KMAP project. This means that I’ve begun digitizing and georeferencing all architecture that was uncovered during last year’s excavations. As straight forward as this sounds, it can be a very problematic process. There have been many speedbumps along the way, but after some tinkering the wrinkles were ironed out. I have made slow but steady progress this week and am hopeful that as time goes on I can speed up the process and increase the results. So far I have worked my way through Fields A and B, and have starting solving the puzzle that is Field C.
Our typical work week starts on Saturday and ends on Thursday, with Friday being our day off. However, with Dr. Foran’s birthday falling on a Monday this year we worked a half day on Friday and got Monday off to celebrate!
We used the much welcomed day off to do some exploring around Madaba. We visited the Shrine of the Beheading of John the Baptist Catholic Church and climbed the bell tower to take in the view from the top. The view is amazing and you can take in the entirety of the city. We then went to the Archaeological Park and viewed some of the best mosaics in all of Jordan. We ended the day with a celebratory dinner at Haret Jdoudna, where we enjoyed hot and cold mezzas. Shanklish is by far my favourite. Afterwards we went back to the dig house and hung out on the roof where we surprised Dr. Foran with some birthday sweets. This wrapped up our busy and exciting day off. As night began to settle in, we became focused again on our upcoming work week, where we all will keep tackling our projects, counting down the days until our next day off.