Hauled out of bed again… drat. Guess I’m bad at nokia phones, (though having a proper Israeli cell is worth it) which would make using one as an alarm a BAD choice. Thank goodness for Quincy, is all I have to say.
As for Day 1 of Scholarly Endeavors (better entitled HARD PHYSICAL LABOR)…
I can safely say that I’ve never been so dirty in my life.
Let’s think about the word dirty for a minute.
Dirty…y… Dirt permeating every single orifice in my body until I was a big pile of dust.
I was never in the habit of eating dirt as a child, and seem to have made up for it all in one day. See visual Aid “Quincy’s pink Vans”. She very kindly lent these to me, saying that more holy dirt on her shoes was quite alright! Well, wish granted, Quincy.
Anyway even if I dedicate the next several paragraphs to excruciating detail about my dust filled pores or bizarrely crunchy hair, or dust balls (a close cousin of the hair ball), you’ll never get a proper feel for what it’s like to actually ingest dirt, holy or not (unless of course you’ve done it too.) And so I will end discussion of that particular discomfort here. (Have no fear my good friends, there are plenty of others.)
To sum it up, today was intense beyond anything I might have imagined before this glorious(-ly dusty) experience, so it’s a good thing I didn’t bother.
The process: hack at wild weeds. Pile wild weeds into rubber handled bucket type things (known as “goofas”…yeah, don’t ask me.) and haul those off to a pile snaking down the side of the dig site. Get prickled by the enormous and malevolent looking pricklys that Israel’s brand of wild grass is endowed with.
FEW! Now it’s almost eight am! (…so…early…) How’s about that breakfast the hotel packed?
Oh just kidding. Time to go dig up the BOTTOM half of the dig site so that a large snort (bull dozer, if you don’t speak Shantur family talk) can clear some rocks and stuff.
Alright cool…I can do that. We even have a fancy little assembly line thing going on. By now it is hot. Like intense sun happening here. (What did I expect, it’s the DESERT.) Get with it, Annette. I can tell you that time did not go by all that quickly, and we broke for breakfast at nine. Three hours, good lord. (And have I mentioned that 45 minute walk from the hotel to Mt. Zion that morning? Never, ever doing that again.)
Do you have any idea how hard it is to eat food without actually touching it? And all you’re working with is a single napkin and a plastic bag. THAT challenged me, if nothing else today. You see, my hands had gone a funny color of brown. I believe we speakers of the English language would call it “mud”.
So we all gathered for another debriefing from Shimon under the newly erected shade at the top of the site. For some unknown reason, someone decided to bring a box of Argentinean merlot, which someone else that would be a good place to seat them self. Other people sat, more conventionally, in chairs or perched on overturned buckets. I sat in the dirt. (Not like I wasn’t already dirt converted already. Dirt is like a werewolf or something. You get bitten, and then you turn into it.)
Shimon launched into a broad overview of how field sections are classified. Here I will try to record some of it, but I must admit that the heat and three hours of work, the Israeli armed soldiers milling around about fifty feet away, and Shimon’s habit of talking in the other direction, probably obscured most of the finer details.
The area: The Breakfast spot. Each person: A bucket. I’m not quite sure why we were buckets…Perhaps I misheard? Shimon has an accent. (I’ll be honest I’m not great with accent identification unless they are super exaggerated, or are like Lily Allen who is “taking the piss”, as Jessica tells me. Jess is my authority on British accents, because she has one.)
Anyway we are buckets, and in each there are loci. In fact there are several because in any one loci, we might find something Turkish on one end, something Byzantine on the other, and perhaps, as Shimon suggested, an impression of Egon’s backside. (There was certainly an impression of a backside in MY loci…)
But this is from the man who introduced himself by saying that no, he was not suicidal and the long horizontal scabs on his wrists were from trying to move his cat.
Oookay.
But, the best things for archeologists, he continued, are destruction and death, as the former forces people to leave all their stuff behind in a hurry, and the latter eliminates any need for said stuff.
Again, I shall comment not.
Further remarks are provided by another director of the dig,Raffi, who informed us that finding something (a coin for, example) is the most fun you can have with your pants on.
It was about fifteen seconds after he said this that it fully registered.
Sometimes these things just broadside you.
So the long talk continues, punctuated by a phone call for Shimon. He was apparently dealing with some administrative issue. According to Shimon, the Middle East is just fraught with bureaucracy. During this time, an Israeli soldier wandered up to the fence enclosing our site, indicating that he wanted water to rinse his hands. So I gave him a bottle.
It’s about 9:45. Now what? Everything looks so cleeeean! The site has been transformed in a matter of hours. What more could we possibly do?
I’ll tell you. Move dirt from one end of the site to the other, in metal wire-handled buckets.
…
…
…
No, really. For three hours, we shoved dirt into buckets and handed it down lines to be dumped out, this with a varying success rate. It sort of depended on how many people were in the lines, how quickly they could dig, pass, or dump, and how alert they were (this directly correlating with how many minutes they’d been out of the shade.)
“I thought we were getting a conveyor belt!” Bob, a gentlemen participating with his daughter of 16, announced at one point.
I said ,“I think we are the conveyor belt…”
All in all, I haven’t done that much scrambling around a dangerous area since my two weeks on Appledore Island off of Maine for that Environmental Marine Biology course. It’s probably not a great thing that the only thing I can compare it to is our experiment which involved trekking around the island through the intertidal zones to count black backed gull chicks. (Those birds are way too big for comfort…We’re talking like a small cat that can fly.) Hazards included slippery rocks covered in seaweeds, crazy cliff faces, and poison ivy which came in the varieties of fields, shrubs and trees. (Come on, who’s ever heard of a poison ivy TREE.)
Anyway this was similarly nerve wracking, and I’m lucky to have escaped with, if not my life, than my functioning spinal cord. The dirt bucket passing definitely got a big hairy at times, as we were lined up along a ridge that fell away into a trench about seven feet deep.
All in all we found MORE pottery, some coins, and a Zurich library card from 1985.
…Oh yes, and a couple of Murex shells, which were used to make blue dye for prayer shells. Fished out of the Mediterranean Sea, it took thousands to produce the coloring. Dr. Tabor thought this could really mean something, but was met with Egon’s response-- “You can’t build a case on two Murex Shells!” Guess if we find several thousand more, we’re in business… Oh yes, if I haven’t mentioned, we’re also looking for the final third of a very large scroll. Wish us luck.
At long last we broke (early, not less!) and finally went back to the hotel. (That was a process in and of itself. I shall not discuss. Suffice it to say that my body felt like what I imagine getting run over by a bus might be like.)
And then I scrubbed in the shower regretting the lack (and impracticality) of steel wool, climbed into bed, and fell asleep till almost five pm, when for the third time Quincy and Melissa got the privilege of dragging my lazy butt out of bed. (Turns out shouting my name works better than just trying to knock the door in.)
Off we went dinner (I had a lovely chicken Shish t-ook, or however you want to transliterate it. A skewer. There was rice, and so I was happy.) Then I purchased as many wet wipes as I could get my hands on (there was no way I was going to that breakfast experience) and then the trouble of getting home presented itself.
Packing five people into a taxi is, as it turns out, illegal in Israel. They will take your cab license away for thirty days. But we found one that would do it! He was quite good natured, and risked his license for a mere fifty sheckels. That’s just foolish if you ask me. I sat on Quincy’s lap (sorry Quincy) and good-natured-driver went some back route where there are no police.
…I'm so glad we do it the LEGAL way here. ;)
I received another unexpected and Hilarious text from Solomon at around 11:30. He’d got me a map, as discussed. Lovely man. Here are the two texts for your amusement (with some parenthetical commentary). Perhaps you will be able to decipher more than I could.
Message 1
Masahal hair,
Dear *Anette* :)( he put in stars and a smilie cause now he knows it's not "anat". No wonder he thought I was jewish!)
Hope you've had a nice day, full of positive Mc2. I'm just coming from the Book Week Fair, where bought you an exact J'lem map in English.
Hope to bring it to you within ca next 20 minutes. Upon arrival I'm going to text you an extra msg. Dear Sister, if you be asleep then, pls don't worry, then I'd leave the map 'for Anette' w/ the receptionst.
TVB & GN (I dunno what that is...must be short hand for like peace love and understanding :p)
Your humble Palestinian-Jewish bro :)
poet sulayman, inc.
Message 2
FROM: Poet, Inc.
TO: Dr. Annette, Scholar-in-Residence
SUBJECT: Cartographical expedition accomplished :D
As it turns out, Solomon went this evening to the book talk he mentioned earlier, where he accidentally met some guy who was imprisoned for 18 years for illegally reporting to the west goings on in some weaponry business in the Middle East. I suppose interesting people attract interesting people…Or something.
Solomon is kind of an odd ball for wandering around a night in Wadi Joz, a poor Arabic neighborhood. I saw him taking up with an Arab gentleman across the way from the hotel. (It’s a residential area.) Makes me wish I knew enough Arabic to just talk to people. That would be brilliant.
Anyway, Solomon mentioned his clandestine living situation, in which he somehow registered to live in the Muslim area, and didn’t change this when he moved somewhere else. This has something to do with some resolution that may get made in the future. Apparently, Solomon hopes that if he continues to live where he does now and the land is given to the P.A., he’ll get a Palestinian Passport. (Dunno what good that could possibly do him. Also he’s not Palestinian at all, to my knowledge.)
He also got yelled at for taking pictures at night of the Lions Gate. I guess people get nervous about any sort of nocturnal activity.
Anyway if I don’t go to sleep now I have no hope of survival in the next few days. (We’re looking at about 3/5 hours of sleep tonight.) There are walking tours or lectures every day in addition to morning work until Thursday and that’s just not gonna go well, I can tell.
Cheers!
|
