The End of the First Weekend

Greetings,

We have completed one full week of excavation and our first "weekend." As I told you before the weekend in Jordan is Friday and Saturday instead of Saturday and Sunday. So things here are more like this:
Thursday = Friday
Friday = Sunday
Saturday = Saturday
Sunday = Monday
So that means we will get back to work on Sunday but for today we spent it resting, doing laundry, shopping, studying, reading, and get caught up on paperwork. One part of our team did take a trip to the Dead Sea.

It gets dirty out on the site, with a great deal of wind blown dust. I have never seen a laundry mart in Jordan so most people wash their clothes in a bucket like this.

Then we hang it up in our rooms on lines with clothes pins to dry. Things dry quickly because the air is low humidity.

Yesterday I did not finish showing you pictures from our trip up the King's Highway, the last place we stopped was al-Rabba a Roman-Byzantine site with ruins in the city of the town.

Here we see Philip Eubanks and Adam Bean taking photos over the fence at the site.

Here Friedbert Ninow prepares to photograph the site and the crew at Rabba.

If you look carefully you can see a crescent moon faintly visible over the Roman capital at Rabba.

The Department of Antiquities preserved this site. Here they stacked up several capitals that once stood along the Roman road. The modern road that runs through Rabba follows the path of the ancient King's Highway and the Roman road (Via Nova Traiana or the New Road of Trajan).

This is the Nabatean Temple at Rabba. The Nabateans had their famous capital at Petra. It was an Arab kingdom that contolled trades of precious items from the east (silks and spices) and transported it across the desert to the Mediterranean areas. They became rich from this trade and florished between 100 BC and AD 100. In AD 106 the Romans during the reign of Trajan took their land and established the Province of Arabia.

Here is an excellent picture of the valley leading down to the Dead Sea. The Dead Sea is the lowest spot on the face of the earth 1388 feet below sea level. In the center of the photo in the haze you can see the Dead Sea.  In the distance on the other side of Dead Sea is the modern state of Israel.

As you descended into the Jordan Valley the tempature increases greatly. The Dead Sea/Jordan river valley is warm enough to grow tropical fruits like bananas and date palms.

The Dead Sea has been shrinking over the past 50 years and is now much smaller than it was. The water from the Jordan River flows into the Dead Sea but not out. The water evaporates and this is why the water in the Dead Sea is salty, it is over 33% salts. This is extremely salty, for example the average salt levels in the ocean is less than 4%. The shrinking of the Dead Sea is caused from the diverting of the water which flows into the Jordan River and on to the Dead Sea. Israel diverts a great amount of water before it enters the Jordan River. Also as you saw earlier Jordan has built and is building dams along the rivers which run to the Dead Sea and the Jordan River.

Here a photo of the group that traveled to the Dead Sea from left to right, Daniel Hoffman, Melissa VanZant, Jody Owens, Philip Eubanks, Mark Green, Christiann DaSilva, and Michael VanZant.

We needed these days off to recover from the week and get ready for another week of work.

John Wineland
Jordan