Kathleen inside a cave

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First Letter from Nazareth 2023

Sunday June 18, 2023 Dear Family and Friends, I’m late with this first letter, so I’ll do my best to catch you up on our progress. I landed on May 30 with a small early crew. Most headed to Nazareth to start preparing our storeroom in the hotel and the site for the dig, while Tom and Mary Lynn McCollough and I drove to Jerusalem for a couple of meetings with folks at Hebrew U. The next day we joined everyone at the site to supervise the delivery of our tool container and toilets, and to get shade over our squares. Tom McCollough, Motti Aviam, and I walked the site, discussing where to re-open old squares and where to sink new ones. The weather has been kind to us. That has been the general pattern this year, with the exception of one day that hit 40 C/104 F, and yesterday, which got close to 38/100 during our tour of Megiddo, Beit She‘arim, and Caesarea. Most days have been somewhere in the 80s Fahrenheit, and today the high is predicted at 81. Two Fridays ago, we left the fiel
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Second Post 2013

Dear Family and Friends, I missed writing last week because the weekend was completely filled with obligations, some welcome and others just plain tiring.   Friday was our first kiddish celebration: a welcoming of the end of the work week and the beginning of Sabbath rest with a little service that entails blessings in Hebrew over candles, “fruit of the vine,” and bread, some readings from the Bible and a book of prayers (the readings are our own idiosyncratic additions), a singing of Psalm 133:1 (“Behold, how good and pleasant it is when brothers and sisters live together in unity.”), and then a round of hugs accompanied with the blessing, “Shabbat Shalom” or “Sabbath peace.”   Dinner follows.   Last Saturday we took our first weekend trip to Sepphoris and Capernaum and ending with a dip in the Sea of Galilee.   It was blazing hot.   This was the first year we’ve gone to a pay beach, which means we had access to a clean area under trees with chairs, a grill, bathrooms, and ma
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Third Letter from Nazareth Dear Family and Friends, Last week’s letter is my Father’s Day post.   I’m writing on Saturday because of a change in plans.   Today the high temperature will be 101 ° F/38 ° C in Nazareth where I am and 109 ° F/43 ° C at Kinneret College where I had planned to be.   No.   So tomorrow when it will be merely 85/29 up here and 96/36 down there, I and a few others will travel to our shipping container to organize artifacts and collect some for study.   Along with trimming balk, taking line level elevations, and pottery reading, no one makes movies about this aspect of archaeology.   We will have to reward ourselves with gelato afterwards.   Today, therefore, I write. Speaking of archaeology, the biggest surprise this year has been the Late Bronze age (1500–1200 BCE) pottery that has begun to turn up in the eastern squares of our Field I.   We only have about four or five sherds so far.   The first was a “wishbone hand
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