Haven’t updated in a while, I know. The dig barely gave me enough time to sleep, and writing a daily blog for it exhausted my blogging muscles. Now I’m back, after two days of rest (one of which was spent dying of a particularly nasty cold that I seem to have somehow caught from one of the Germans) and have been slowly catching up on internet stuff and various projects I’ve been meaning to get around to.
The dig was a lot of fun, but I’m sort of glad it’s over (because getting more than 5.5 hours of sleep a night is a lot of fun too). Digging in ancient Persian/Hasmonean/Assyrian crap is cool, yeah, but the thrill wears off a bit - or at least it did for me, partly because I live here - after the first week or so. What I really enjoyed was the exercise, which is something I did not have time for in high school. And luckily for me, I got assigned to C4 (motto: “the workout area”) which stayed at the pickaxe-and-shovel stage for all four weeks. We were the ones digging the western outer walls and the gardens outside them (all fill), so there was no delicate work at all.
I found more than my fair share of finds for my area - a couple Persian regional jar handle seals (reading YH for Judah), a gorgeous bronze Persian arrowhead, another jar handle seal with concentric circles - coincidentally the type my area supervisor is writing her (I think) Master’s on. Her reaction: “Next time you find one, put it back! Now I have to analyze 254 instead of 253! Do you have any idea how much work that is?” (I think she was joking.)
I also found a rare rosette stamp seal impression during pottery wash - only the eleventh ever found in Judah! So I’m not complaining - though a stash of Iron Age pottery from D6 almost made me defect…
The best part was probably getting to meet the people there - both fellow volunteers from all over the world and the Israeli staff. I hope to manage to keep in touch with several of them.
Be sure to check out the blog if you want pics of the dig.
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I just started the novel in 90 challenge, and managed to write 812 words this evening (which is probably my daily record for this past year). Hopefully this will become a habit.
This is probably not going to come as news for most of you, but hey - it gets a lot easier once you get past the first 40 words of the session. ^__^