Indiana Custer

I only have pictures from Week 1, but I thought I might as well post some. So, here you see us at the archeaological excavation just north of the Sea of Galilee. First our whole group and then some of the girls on my team. We had to get up super early in order to not have to work in the heat of the day, but we had gorgeous sunrises.

The archeaologist is pretty sure the site can be identified as Bethsaida, the hometown of Peter, Andrew, and Philip, three of Jesus' disciples. Even though the site is no longer directly on the lake's shores, they've found plenty of fishing tools including heavy weights and anchors to suggest at one time the lake was closer.

Our job was to move a lot of dirt and rocks. I got assigned to the sifter, which I LOVED! Every bucket we carried up to the sifters was an opportunity for a really cool find!

The only not-so-fun part was having to shovel out the sand from underneath the sifters every 30 minutes or so. That was back-breaking, but we tried to make it fun.

Since they opened up a new locus (square for digging) for our group, we spent the first two days moving rocks and digging through top-layer stuff. Finally we got down to some 1st century Roman finds. Even so, we did better with more "recent" discoveries. Some of our cool finds (besides gobs and gobs of everyday pottery) included a piece of an oil lamp rim (actually old), a 1962 Syrian coin (hey, I found that one, so let me enjoy my glory), and an 18th cenutry Austrian coin (can you imagine how excited I was to get to help read it with the archeaologist!!!):

Finding coins was always highlight! At the end of every day, all the finds - pottery, flint, fishing weights, grinding stones, coins, Roman glass, animal bones, and anything else special - was washed and taken back to camp where we had "pottery reading" every afternoon. This was when the archaeologist, Rami Arav, went through each locus' find and took out the things he wanted to keep, dated them, and explained the significance for us. Here you see me sorting and counting a locus' find (sometimes over 1,000 pieces of pottery!), Rami explaning some pieces to us, and the photographer taking pictures of the ones worth keeping:

Well, that's most of the stuff from the excavation. More of Israel to come.