By Emilee Lawrence
Floating in the Dead Sea on our mid-season break (Photo by E. Lawrence)
Mid-Season Break and More Pottery!
This work week started off with a fieldtrip! We were all excited to do some adventuring and spend the day outside of the lab. We teamed up with the Dhiban excavation team living next door and visited Khirbet al-Mukhayyat, Machaerus, ‘Atarus, and ended the trip at Dhiban. We arrived back at the house exhausted and very, very hot – and I felt very thankful at that moment that I was not working outside in that heat everyday. Our day of adventure ended with a BBQ overlooking the Dead Sea with Mashur and Thamer. On the ride to the Dead Sea DJ Thamer showed us some “traditional” Jordanian music, and Chef Mashur provided us with an amazing meal of BBQ chicken and vegetables.
Monday marked the beginning of our mid season break, and we were all excited for our “girls weekend!” The five of us packed our bathing suits, sunscreen and non-archaeological reading material for some necessary relaxation in the sun. After a sad goodbye to Adam who was leaving to go home, we were off to our Dead Sea adventure. We arrived at the hotel mid day, spent a good deal of time “oooh”-ing and “ahhh”-ing over the large beds and working showers, and then headed down to the pool and beach areas. We spent the required time covering ourselves in the Dead Sea mud and then floating in the uncomfortably warm water, which served as our cultural experience of the day. The majority of the time was spent relaxing by the poolside working on our tans!
Today we were back at work! I am currently working on the Moabite painted pottery assemblage from Tell Madaba. So far, this has included digging through the storage room looking for specific diagnostic pottery from different squares, organizing what I hope will be beneficial to my study, then drawing the sherds, collecting data, and digitizing my drawings of the sherds. I do believe that by the end of the season I will have memorized the entire Munsell soil colour chart based on the amount of quality time spent with this precious resource!
Overall, we had a very eventful, exciting week, and we came back to Madaba refreshed and ready to tackles the remaining few weeks left in the season.