Sand Storms and Dolemans

We knocked off early today because of a sand storm. About 1pm the wind came in strong from the SSW bringing with it a cloud of sand from the Sahara and Sinai Deserts cutting visibility to about 500m, plus it whipped up the talcum powder consistency dust from our own site. I just looked up Amman's forcaste and it says wind and sand, with a special symbol for sand. It is not a pleasant experience. Hard on eyes and breathing. The forcaste for the next couple of days is for cool temperatures (7C in Amman), strong winds and passing showers. The outlook for snow has disappeared thankfully. If it does blow we will be having a day off tomorrow.

On the dig, before the sand storm, I shifted close to a tonne of dirt digging out a layer of dissolved mud brick and ash - great fun. The big news from yesterday is the the square just up from us reached the foundations of a monumental mud brick building, meaning a large religious or administrative building. We were all invited up this morning to see what they found. The building must be large even though we can only see a little bit of intact mud bricks in the 1.5m walls, but it is the signs of catastrophic destruction that is amazing. Ash and more ash, burn marks, sun dried mud bricks that have been fired by intense heat and are like kiln fired bricks when they shouldn't be, chared timber - and - down in the hole you can smell the burn. They have only uncovered 9 sqm, with the whole square being 36 sqm, so by the end of the dig much more will be revealed. And today, in the ash on the floor level, they found fine pottery, called black and white because that is what it looks like with the designs on it, and they found a set of bronze scales, two small plates that hang from a bar type. So everyone is quite excited. And its from the Middle Bronze Age, the time of Lot, and fits the destruction of Sodom account in the Bible time wise, and destruction wise.

Incase I haven't told you the prevailing theory that more and more evidence is confirming, is that an airburst meteor destroyed the area with such force that is was like an atomic bomb without radiation. It came in from the SW and exploded just below the rim of the rift valley over the Dead Sea area sending out two shock waves. The first was a concussion wave like when a bomb goes off with enough force, by the evidence, to rip off the top soil over a wide area of the valley, and when it hit the city of Sodom it simply ripped the buildings off the face of the earth on the lower Tall, by the evidence, and doing much the same on the Upper Tall but as some structures missed being in the direct blast foundations remained. Almost simultaenous with the concussion wave came the plasma wave of intense heat hotter than the sun that incinerated what could be incinerated, melted rocks, shattered pottery with thermal expansion, turned the side of the pottery exposed to the plasma blast to glass called trinitite, baked mud bricks. The blast sent up such a huge cloud of dust and debry into the air that it settled back as ash which I have become very familiar with. Some of the rocks in the debry cloud were in liquid form and crashed into other molten rocks of a different kind and solidified again into amazing looking conglomerates. They are saying that much of the Dead Sea was vapourised and the salt was spread over the area poisoning the land, and people didn't come back for 700 years. They were saying this morning that the chemical analysis of the destruction ash are identical to the chemical signatures of other airburst and solid hit meteor sites. So its all very interesting. And have they found human remains from that destruction? In the lower Tall they have found bones that have been broken and show signs of being burnt.

In our two square we are still in Iron Age 2 layers that equates with either Moabites or people of the Tribe of Gad during the reign of King Solomon. The layer I am stripping off now should be the last of that era, and MB is next, about 60cms away. We can already see it in the road side cutting we are working beside.

Talking of old the picture is of a Dolman. This is a rock structure made of three big rocks with a fourth making a flat type roof. There are thousands of them up in the hills overlooking the valley. They are dated as belonging to the Catholythic Period so are between 7-10,000 years old. Their purpose? Something to do with death but they aren't burial sites. The theory is that they were used to put bodies on to allow the elements to decompose them, then the bones were collected and put somewhere else. Many Dolemens have one bone per person covering thousands of years of time buried under them, so they could also be family sites dedicated to the memory of the ancestors. The very first layers of settlement at Tall El-Hamman are from this period.

Helen spent another day at the hotel and although she has a bad cough is feeling much better and is aiming to do more pottery washing and sorting tomorrow.