Update Reporting from Amman

Greetings,

The day off from the dig, and some much needed rest. The crew traveled to Petra (more on that later). One of those on the sick list, Don Garner, headed back rejoin the work at the excavation. Several people(about 9) headed for home since they had only schedule to be at the excavation for the first half. Two of us are still in Amman, Jerry and John. Jerry is feeling better and hopes to return to work this week. I am also feeling much better but I need to go home early to make sure this foot is completely healed.

Here are some pictures from the work on the site.

This is a great view of our site from the Fajj (the valley to the east of the site) You can see the walls of the fortress and the small building where we store our equipment during the dig.

We divide the excavation into Fields or Areas of excavation which we label with a letter. This is Field D on a cloudy day (which is a rare thing) You can see the squares and the Iron Age wall lines and pavements. This field is in the northwest section of the fortress.

The supervisor of the work in Field D is John Mark Wade pictured here holding dustpan. (photo submitted, we have not analyized it yet for any photoshop altering)

We do a variety of work on the site. Here Adam and Leslie Bean excavate together using small trowels and dustpans. They will be moving after the excavation to Baltimore where Adam will begin his doctoral studies at Johns Hopkins University. They are our only couple at the dig.

There are many other activities on the site. First thing in the morning is a progress photo. We use a meter stick marked with black and white section which are 10 centimeters long. This provides scale to the photorgraph. Also we use the arrow to point to north.

Another big job and an important one is shift the soil from the squares. It is at the shifts that we find the pottery, metal, and bones being excavated. It is hard and dusty work.

There is also a great of drawing to be done. This is a top plan. It is a "birdseye" view of the square. Each square is drawn each day and final top plan drawings are made at the end of the excavation. We also draw all of the "walls" or balks of the square too.

Another job is trimming the balks so they straight. This way we have clearer idea of the layers that the excavators dug through. These layers are very important because we seperate the artifacts from each layer to determine the dating of the layers.

We do get some beautiful sunsets, here is another.


John Wineland
Amman, Jordan