Step Aside, Indiana Jones – Part Two

We found pottery roof tiles, thick pottery oven lining, and the occasional mosaic piece. Oh, and I found part of a ring-shaped pottery stand for pointy-bottomed pots. Meanwhile, the excitable young man hit the jackpot: he found not one, but two coins in his drain! Tiny, slightly irregularly shaped coins no bigger than the tip of your pinky finger. People crowded around to see and photograph them.

Pretty soon it was 9 am, and time for breakfast. The dozen or so of us all sat under the low-slung tarp near the entrance, and while I ate my yogurt , my cheese sandwich, and a few almonds, everyone else dug into the puddings, peppers, cucumbers, grapes, blue cheese and very white “dark wheat” bread sent by the hotel where they were staying.

And we were back to work. Our square was no bigger than a small room, and there was some difficulty in fitting up to six people in it at once. I had trouble knowing what to do with my feet and legs, and spent a lot of time crouched on my heels (a decision I was later to painfully regret). But if I thought I was having trouble, it was nothing compared to that of a big, burly Paul Bunyan sort of guy by the name of Tim, who spent a lot of time carting heavy goofas of dirt away from the site.

As I dug, I came upon half a dozen or so palm-sized potsherds that looked like they belonged together. Rather than being tumbled amidst soil, they looked like they were laid out on a surface. Our leader noticed what I had found, and got a little excited. It just might mean that we were reaching the floor of a room. As I continued uncovering shards, he coached me to lay aside my trowel, and not make the mistake of prying them out of the ground. They were to stay just as they were, while I brushed loose dirt away from them with a small broom. Meanwhile, in another corner of the room, stones were beginning to appear. I’m under the impression that we were digging in the Late Roman Period (after the destruction of the Temple in 70 AD), with a few first century items popping up here and there.

People were going by on the path above the site, and on the sidewalk below it: Ethiopian Jews, some in white suits and kippas, a colorful Christian group from Africa, a few Israeli adults on tour with a personal guide, large groups of Israeli schoolchildren on field trips. They all asked the same question: “Did you find anything?” I had enough Hebrew to understand the question, but I didn’t have the Hebrew to answer. Besides, I didn’t know what they’d been finding there all week long, before I got there. “Yes, a few small things,” I said once.

“Time to clean up!” Someone took down the canopy, and almost immediately, I felt myself beginning to dehydrate under the intense sun. Whew! Thank God for shade while it lasted! Some people got busy squaring the edges of the areas with a miniature pick, while others swept away loose dirt. Anything that we came up with from these actions was thrown away, since it wasn’t clear what layer they were from. As a result, one of the ladies go to walk away with a really beautiful jug handle. (Yes, I said “beautiful.” When you’re dealing with innumerable faceless flat shards of pottery, rims, handles and bases have a lot to say about the vessel they came from).

And just like that, we were done. Everyone’s cameras came out, and people snapped last pictures of the site, pictures we’d been too busy to capture before. We stacked all the equipment by the wall that separated us from the road, which separated us from the parking lot. To get to the nearest opening in that wall would’ve been a bit of a hike, so some resourceful person had leaned a ladder over the wall. And that’s how we got down to the street.

Arriving home dirty and elated, I was amazed at how fresh I felt. Of course, a couple of hours later, my knees and forearms began to be very sore…and by the next day, I was hobbling around painfully and feeling like an octogenarian myself.

But it was all so worth it!