First Day on the Dig

Today was our first day on site and my first opportunity to see Hippos in person.  Over the previous months I have spent many hours scouring the internet for pictures and videos of the excavations at Hippos, so in many ways the site seems familiar to me.  Still, it is altogether different to see this place for oneself in three dimensions.  This gives the opportunity for close inspection, finer details, a better appreciation of scale, and a more comprehensive view of the site as a whole rather than just a compilation of images.

The day begins early, on the bus at 5:15 am, on the trail up the mountain five minutes later, still dark but just enough dawn breaking to allow for navigating up a winding, rocky road with frequent spots of loose gravel.  By 5:30 we are gathering tools that will be needed and heading to our assigned work site.  I am part of a crew excavating a roman bath house.  It is the precise area I was most interested in.  I debated requesting this assignment, but decided to leave it in the hands of God to place me where he wanted me, I was delighted to find that this is where I will spend the next two weeks.  

Our first task was to build shade out of a large tarp, a bunch of sting and a bunch of PVC pipes serving as poles.   Shade is essential because of the extreme heat.  It was over 100 degrees (I heard people with readings of 104-108 on their phones) and it sounds like this intense heat will continue the rest of this week at least.  

Erecting the shelter - a work in progress

Overview of the site where I am working.  The large black tarp is the shade we erected

My specific assignment is to work on a small section between two walls that are just starting to be revealed.  We will dig out the fill between these walls, exposing the contours of this room and looking for evidence of what purpose this room served.  It is on the edges of the bath house so there is some question as to whether this is part of the bathhouse or separate.  I am working with a woman named Sue who has been on the dig a number of times before.  She is a wealth of information about the site.  

My partner Sue and the top edge of one of the walls we are exposing.  You can see the top of a doorway arch that will be exposed in days to come.

The second wall that we are digging between.  We will be exposing the space between this wall and the wall with the arched doorway in the rear of the picture (and in the above picture).

That is the project.  The process is really quite simple.  We break up the dirt with a pick axe, then use a hoe to fill buckets.  When all the buckets are full we form a bucket line among the whole team and pass the buckets down the line to be disposed of away from the site.  In these first few levels we are not really looking for artifacts.  Pieces of pottery are found in almost every bucket, but it is of little value to the excavation. This is a destruction layer (from an earthquake) and pottery found here does not have much to tell us about the room.  The pieces are small fragments and indistinct - not much help in dating or developing a chronology.  So we just toss them away.  I kept a few pieces as keepsakes, since they are just garbage.  As we get deeper, we will be more concerned with the pieces that are uncovered.  Probably starting tomorrow we will begin to collect small finds in a seperate bucket for the area director to determine whether to keep or not.

That's about it.  Over the week I hope to show you the room being exposed little by little each day.

We also took the first part of a tour of the site and I have a bunch of pictures from that, but that would probably be information overload for this blog.