Dig Day 6

May I introduce you to "Osay" - haven't a clue how you actually spell his name. He is the grandson of the Bedouin owner of this part of the Tall. He is holding "goofah's" that are the buckets for carrying dirt made out of car tyres. He carrys and dumps these all day until he just about drops with exhaustion for 10JD a day. He can't speak English but when his brother or cousin translated to him that his picture was off the NZ tonight he was really chuffed.

The Tall is drying out and getting really dusty. When we get back to the hotel we have already dusted our clothes as best we can. The first thing we do is go into the bathroom, take our clothes off and shake them like mad into the shower cubicle and bang them like carpets to get the dust out, making sure that the door is closed so the dust doesn't go into the room. Helen has developed this system of washing where we have a shower standing on the clothes that need washed, then they are washed in the handbasin, wrung out, then placed between two towels on the floor and walked all over, then hung up to dry. As long as we leave the window open they dry OK. Why are we doing it this way? The hotel washing is charging 1JD per item (half price) so that's about 12JD ($24NZ) a day for both of us and we can think of better things to do with the money - and no one has found a laundromat anywhere.

Helen has established herself as the pottery washing and sorting boss. Everyday now we are bringing trays of diagnistic pottery back to the hotel where the whole of Saturday is taken up by the archeologists who interpret the finds, whether a square is digging in Iron Age 1 or Middle Bronze Age, and what the sherds were part of. When we are digging we have two buckets. One for the plain sherds that are counted for statistical purposes, and the diagnostic bucket is for sherds that have a rim, handle, or designs, from which you can tell the age pretty accurately.

I really enjoyed today. It is interesting when talking to the archeologists who are always coming up with theories about what we are seeing, with the proviso that the theory would probably have changed by lunch time and then again by pack up time. Today I took about 5 sqm down about 10cm (with Helen's help after pottery washing) and uncovered a cobbled stone floor under some big rock tumble already exposed. The tumble will have come from the wall foudations, and it means that we are at floor level of some sort of building. On the cobble level I got my first two big diagnostic pieces - a big handle attached to a big bit of sherd with a rim - interpreted as from large storage jars. Iron Age 1 (1200-1000BC) because the handles were monkey ear handles as opposed to elephant ear handles from the MB age. This knowledge will be of immense value when I find the next bit of broken crockery in the garden at Herbert St. Then my first "object" , a peice of pottery seive. It was flat, about 5cm across, part of something much larger, with holes in it. It got plotted on the site map, depth below datum recorded, picture taken, then my picture taken with it. Then it disappeared into the diagnostic bucket and that was it.

We are both well and getting match fit. The people we are with in the team are really nice. We were sitting at a table tonight having dinner with a bunch of Americans. Apparently it is the Superbowl in the early hours of the morning. Helen and I without rehearsing looked blank and said, "What's the Superbowel?" The look of their faces was priceless. Then Helen went on to say it made the news in NZ once when Janet Jackson's outfit failed and she showed a bit more than she meant to. It was funny - to us anyway.

Last word on the cobbled stone floor I uncovered today. Tomorrow I will probably be tearing it up to find whats in the next layer. That's the nature of archeology.