Photos from the advance crew and the first week of digging

 Rebakah and Mason staking out points
 Jeff running the gun

 Emily Drennen
The complete and whole Herodian lamp Emily found

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

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...
Read more

First Week, continued

Third Post, Installment 2 Students also saw the 4 th and 5 th century synagogue floor at Hamat Tiberias, which was built of black basalt at the site of hot springs on the west coast of the Sea of Galilee. The wheel of the zodiac in the mosaic floor is a bit startling if you’ve never seen one in a synagogue before. I imagine it would be like encountering a large pentagram in the floor of the Washington Cathedral. It would have been the second zodiac we saw that day, but we missed the turnoff to Beit Alpha, where the 6 th century synagogue sports a similar floor that was discovered in the 1920’s after the discovery of the one at Hamat Tiberias. Since those discoveries many more have been found, including one at Sepphoris. Next came swimming in the Sea of Galilee, which the students did with some enthusiasm. I was not surprised that all went in because earlier they all had piled out of the vans to photograph one another on the banks of the Jordan when we crossed on our way north fr...
Read more

Week 2, 2010

This week’s posting is late because we worked through the weekend to make up for lost time. We worked only a half day today (Tuesday, June 8) to get a brief break, and we will return to full schedule tomorrow. We will also work next Sunday. The work is going well, and most crews have made significant headway bringing down balks. Just two days ago, one balk gave up a ceramic vessel that has stumped all of us. The vessel looks like ½ of a ceramic pipe (semicircular in cross section), around 10 inches long, with one end closed and the other open, and around 20 holes of about a pencil’s width punched all around when the clay was wet. What in the world is it? Some sort of sieve? We’ll send it to the Israel Antiquities Authority for restoration, and perhaps identification. The soil in and around this object has yielded about 10 small bronze coins so far, which certainly has galvanized the crew that found it. The team has come together well. Getting along, it turns out, is important for d...
Read more