Ending With A Whimper

After nine days of hard digging, hauling dirt, washing pottery, exposing walls, hitting bedrock, and sweating buckets, the dig ended today with a whimper.  

Tools of the trade.  Pick ax and hoe, hand pick ax, trowel, brush and bucket

No pick axes or hoes, the main implements of digging through layers.  And no hand picks or trowels, the tools of finer processing of exploring a level.  Today we used brushes.  Our task was to clean up the site as much as possible to prepare for detailed photos and overhead drone pictures.  We brushed off dust and debris that had accumulated on every surface.  We brushes off dirt, so that they could see layers of changed soil colors.  

Brushing off a wall

More wall brushing

And then we weeded.  Pulled up every scrub brush or thorny weed (and almost all of them are thorny) that had grown up over the last year in cracks and crevices.  And we exposed a whole hillside that was covered with weeds so that fallen rocks and vaguely defined walls could be seen clearly from the overhead drone pictures.  

Weeding a hillside

I know it was important work, but it felt anticlimactic.  There were no finds today - no pottery, or bones, or glass, or coins.  Just weeds and gravel being expunged from the site.  I think we were all feeling a bit sluggish with the bittersweet end in sight, tired from two hard weeks of work, hot because the sun shade we had built to shield us was being removed for the final pictures.  And then we were done. All tools put away, all areas secured, all work finished.  

The bathhouse, cleaned up and ready for pictures

We ended with a tour of the sites we had been working on and an explanation of what we had discovered over the last two weeks.  the bus was waiting on us and we slipped into the air conditioned coach and headed back to the kibbutz for lunch.  Goodbye Hippos Sussita, until next time.

PS - I will write about some of the things we discovered in my section next time and wrap it up with one last post on my second short weekend of touring the Dead Sea area.