Day 2 & Monumental Walls and Sling Shot ammo

Once you leave the city the country side is open. There is not a fence to be seen. The country people are Bedouin and belong to tribal groupings and each tribe has land which is held in common, although family ownership is becoming more common. On our bus trips we look down on valleys and gullys and see little shack houses with satellite dishes and cars and a sheep fold with stone walls and a gate made of spikey shrubs. On the hills there are flocks of sheep of up to a hundred, sometimes with goats mixed in. Each flock has a shepherd, sometimes kids right through to old men. As we had a break today we sat on the edge of the Tall and watched an old man make his way just below us walking slowly and calling the sheep who followed him, and as you can see in the picture, eating the lush grass at this time of year. It kind of turned to custard for him when his cell phone went and he had a 10 minute conversation and the sheep at the back of the flock started to wander off to where they had just come from. He tried to get them back by throwing stones a great distance but three just kept going, eventually rounded up by a grandchild who turned up and was sent off in chase.

Today at the Tall was was another hard physical day clearing another 2-3 tonnes of surface stones and removing vegetation and top soil down about 30cm to the top of the mud brick wall they are interested in. It is of interest because we are actually in what was thought to be a domestic housing area where we were going to dig down into the destruction layer. The wall is so thick that it indicates that it was part of a monumental building, meaning a public building of some kind or part of a defense system. So when we are finally underway tomorrow digging down and around it in 100mm layers recording everything we find so that context for dating is kept exact, the bosses are saying we will probably be finding some significant things. In the road cutting that has exposed the wall we can see it's stone foundations and destruction layer ash - so I'm excited.

Helen has attracted the attention of our two supervisors, not only by the amount of dirt and rubble she shifts in a day in rubber baskets called "guffahs" made of old car tyres and keeping up with the Jordanian lads who have joined us, but because of her knowledge of pottery. In the top layer of rubble we dug up about four buckets of pottery sherds today, some iron age and some bronze age. Although the archelogists can tell us the time period and what kind of vessel it was by its shape and handle position, for example handles up near the rim mean they were cooking pots so you didn't burn fingers, Helen spent the day explaining how they would have made the different types of pots on a wheel and how they were fired and why some are only fired on the outside and not on the inside and all that hands on techinical stuff. They have been fascinated and said they learnt alot today. The result was that at dinner tonight the two supervisors told the deputy director that she should be part of the sherd washing and classification team, actually only her and the expert pottery person who is coming in a couple of days. That's good because it leaves me as a grunt digging with no reminders about lifting too much.

We are learning a lot and loving it. Find of the day. A sling shot missile which is a stone that has been shaped into a ball about the size of a base ball. Apparently they come in different calibres and going by some of the graves they have dug here and elsewhere dint heads real bad.