Just finished our first week of excavations here at Ashkelon. We're kicking back here in the hallway at the Gane Dan. That's our hotel, and 'we' is me and a bunch of folks from the dig. I've been making them listen to Led zeppelin for the last half hour, and now we've moved away from that because apparently not everyone can handle excellent music.
The excavations are going smoothly, and I'm getting used to the different modalities of supervisory work (about 4 volunteers work directly beneath me, hierarchically speaking)(If we're excavating a pit, then sometimes they excavate beneath me, spatially speaking)(and if they ever make terrible jokes, then I usually consider those beneath me, qualitatively speaking). Clearly, I have yet to bleed myself completely of the paper on polysemy that I wrote a few weeks ago. (bring more leeches!)
Surprisingly, we had a fantastic discovery in our first two days of digging. As we took down a few balks we discovered a cypro-minoan stamp seal, another indication that this script was used to write the language spoken by the philistines. (since the script has yet to be deciphered, we're not sure what language that was, exactly. probably something like pig latin).
I've been trying to make theoretically responsible decisions during excavation, were precision and rigorous collection sometimes give way to exhaustion and the irritation at having to write up (yet another) MC tag. (Material Culture - anything man-made or man-modified that's not architecture). It's also been a good experience to be confronted with a square under my control, and therefore to face the task of creating, in light of past excavation, research questions to guide my digging over the next few weeks. (although it's not really up to me, since there are broader interests in play...). Right now I'm looking at a large Late Bronze (~1300 bc) outdoor surface, like a courtyard, with evidence of grain processing activities (large pits, work platforms, grindstones). The area is cut by a large Egyptian wall (~1250-1200) and so I'd like to take that thing out to have a clear view of everything beneath it (sampling a tell with squares is restricted enough, it gets a little ridiculous when you limit yourself even further), but I may have to wait on that.
As usual, I'll be heading up to Tel Aviv and Jerusalem sometime in the next few weeks to visit a few friends coming through town (B, G, R, J...maybe M?). If you're in the country and I know you, and you read this, send me a message or something.
Time to go scrub some pottery.