By Ashley Paling
Students hard at work in their trenches. (Photo by B. Norton)
Week two of the excavation came and went extremely quickly! Sunday was Jordanian Independence Day, so we decided not to wake up our neighbours at 4:30am, and had a “late” start, beginning at 9:00am. We also altered our work day slightly and cleaned up the old site at Tell Madaba. This consisted of a lot of weed pulling and picking up trash. I must say, although it was an extremely hard day, the site looked excellent once we were finished with all of our cleaning.
On Monday we returned to Khirbat al-Mukhayyat to continue our previous work. In my opinion, getting back to work after having almost three days off was a lot harder than I’d expected. In Field A excavations in the step trench were still concentrated on a single square at the top of the trench, where we hoped to hit some sort of architecture.
Tuesday was a much different experience for me, as I was helping Abby Buffington, our paleoethnobotanist, with all of the flotation samples. I really enjoyed the whole process, and I was finally able to see what happens to the soil samples we send out from our squares. I also came to greatly appreciate the job of soil flotation; as the day went on, the temperature got higher, and we had a large vat of cool (albeit muddy) water to soak our hands in. Unfortunately for me, Tuesday was also the day that Field A finally hit architecture. I made a point of hiking up the hill just after second breakfast to take a look—it’s amazing to say that we’ve only been digging for 2 weeks and we have such great finds.
Due to the progress in Field A, the students were split up into smaller square assignments, and we were spread out over Field A as well as the new Field B to the south. Our work began Wednesday morning with the difficult task of braving the intense winds while digging in new squares, and then suffering through the scorching heat when the wind died down. Unfortunately for my square we were dealing with a lot of rock tumble. Let’s just say that my arms got enough training in tossing rocks that I feel confident I could now pick up shot-put as a hobby.
Thursday continued just as the day before, although with Mother Nature showing us a little bit of mercy. Progress was being made in the top of the step trench with the architecture, and Field B had some very exciting finds at the end of the day. They uncovered two nearly complete vessels in one of their squares, and I made sure to take the opportunity to get some great photos.
On top of the job of excavating on site, we as students also spend two hours each day cleaning the pottery, bones, and objects. Despite the pesky flies and the muddy water, this is actually an interesting part of the field school process, as it allows us to see the beginning of the processing and analysis of the artifacts we find. Each time there is a new and exciting find it reminds me that all of the picking, hoeing, and hot days are extremely worth it. The end of the work week came with the promise of a very exciting Week Three and even more to look forward to as a student with the opportunity to be digging on this field school.