"The Wall" #2

The archeologist, Josh, a young Aussie guy who is a great guy and lots of fun to work with, said take off the packed earth floor and expose the cobbles. Instead I found a mud brick wall that is only 3-4 metres long with the large foundation stones running along it to the left and actually resting on top of it bottom end. To the right of the mud brick wall another row of foundation stones for another wall, and the "cobbles", or now possibly "tumble", beside them. You can see the outline of the bricks. Problem is the wall is only one and a bit courses high with the top brick degraded and worn away, and there is a void underneath it that is connected to the void under the big foundation rocks. The void is most probably caused by water erosion over hundreds of years. So at the end of the day more walls than we can fathom, but at least our jumble looks neater than the next door square. Uncovering the wall was about 3 hours work for me and I got the prize for the best find of the day between the two squares. The prize is being told you have won the prize. Then in the last 30 minutes of the day I was cleaning up just to the right of the buckets and found four buckets full of broken Iron Age 2 pottery all in one place which was quite a stache. Helen will be washing and sorting these tomorrow and there were some neat pieces for diagnostic purposes. Everything I touched today made by human hands is about 3,000 years old. i still find it amazing.

So that's what it looks like and how things change and it is hard work. The body is doing well except for the knees that are swollen and sore from all the kneeling. That's the kneeling pad I'm using in the photo which does help.

The square supervisor next door is Professor Dr David Graves - good surname for an archeologist me thinks. Helen and I have become quite friendly with him and his wife Aerena (spelling? - she is Russian, he is Canadian). Aerena digs in his square. He is so interesting. Last year he was in charge of digging the Roman section with its hot pools etc on the lower Tall. On Valentines day one of the diggers asked David what he wanted for Valentines Day. He quipped "an inscription". 15 minutes later the digger found a little pottery oil lamp with an inscription '"Jesus who lights up the world". That's cool. David has led digs all over Israel and has written books on what he has found. He was telling me today he has led a number of expeditions to the Ararat mountains looking for signs of Noah's Ark. With the expedition last year I think it was, they took ground piercing radar and surveyed a major glacier on Mt Ararat itself. Nothing showed up. He has done extensive work on the well publicised rock formation that looks like the ark. Some have claimed the rock is pertrified wood etc etc, but David has found its just rock and the whole formation is sliding down the mountain and breaking up.

If you have access to Google Earth cut and paste and go to and have a look at Jordan's Grand Canon of Wadi Al-Mujib that we visited last Friday. The coordinates are for the restaurant we had lunch at. The road follows the route of the ancient Kings Road. It was about 50 minutes down and up the sides each way in the bus. Spectacular gorge. It runs into the Dead Sea.