Life on the Kibbutz and the Tel

Yes, we are having the same sense of awe, mentioned in your comments, as we touch the pottery that someone used 4500 years ago! Today I was chipping away the mudbrick that surrounds the stones of the short wall in the area where I'm working, and I was wondering about the person who built this wall so many thousands of years ago. Was he a young married man building it for his bride, or was he one of the city fathers improving a common area where people came to grind their grain. I felt sad to be undoing his work. I didn't find anything of significance today, but Lauren and Zvi found a complete jug big enough to hold about a gallon of milk next to a stone oven they had been excavating. It had been tipped over, and the top was slanted down, but even the handles were intact. Inside the jar they found a lot of organic matter that they guessed might be wheat or barley--unrecognizable after all these thousands of years. Lauren and Zvi are on our team of eleven that is working on area E. (Lauren is a precious, earnest young Jewish girl from Philadelphia and Zvi is a local dairy farmer who just comes to help because he is fascinated. He grew up and farmed in Ohio until 1959 when he and his wife moved to Israel. Our claim to fame now is that we have an alley running through our site, and they have brought in a special archaeologist to work with us as we begin to excavate it. The reason they are taking such care with the alley is that they imagine people threw their garbage out there, and we will find lots of interesting things packed in there.

I must tell you that the leaders are doing everything possible to keep us safe and well. They have erected huge black sunscreen canopies over our work sites that help enormously to keep us out of the sun. Every half hour they enforce a break to drink water. This afternoon for the first time, we had to do pottery washing. Each piece is placed in a box that corresponds to the area where it was found. The leaders look over each box for anything that might be significant. I was happy to see that they were excited about my rim because it had some primitive looking letters drawn in the clay before it hardened. It looked to me like an M and a Hebrew G. I said it stood for Mrs. Goliath, but of course, Goliath wouldn't be born for many centuries after that jug was used.

I found out, too, why there are some meals when we don't have butter for our bread. Ole's rabbinical student roommate has been educating us. We are being served kosher meals, and dairy products and meat cannot be mixed. When meat is served, we have no butter and no milk for tea or coffee. He also pointed out that when we have dairy products we have blue trays and white dishes with blue designs on them. When we have meat meals, we have brown trays and plain white dishes. The silverware for the dairy meals has a hole punched in the end of the handle to assure the eater that this silverware has never been used for meat. So interesting.

Well, it's time for our lecture. Tonight we are listening to the archaeologist who will be helping us with our alley. He is teaching us how to deal with bones we find -- because they are expecting to find lots of bones in our alley. I'd better go pay attention!