The wind is rattling the branches on the corrugated iron roof (as I type this the night before venturing to a couple of lesser known Decapolis cities and an internet cafe in Irbid). We’ve been so lucky with the weather thus far – it’ll be gutting if it all goes to pot as the pointy end of the season approaches.
I’m currently attempting to ward off the cold both my vollies have had with medicinal nips of Bushmills; typing is also a bit difficult, as one of my fingers has a cut – they take it in turns to get snicks and gashes, and feel like sandpaper, but the thumb I fractured a couple of months ago is holding up ok which is a relief and the rest of the old bod is doing ok. In fact, it’s not as creaky as I feared it’d be. I’m even starting to get a tan and tone up a bit – maybe there’s a few years left in me yet.
I’m pretty lucky as I have the ‘money trench’ this season – about time, considering Birq started me in a silly triangular sliver in ’97 (I think I was the only one who could fit into it) and then I had several trenches of pain (due to rock-breaking). This week turned up a unique Iron Age two-faced idol candlestick holder / incense burner – it’s pretty crude, as opposed to the nude bed figurine, but has a certain charm. Like most of the buckets of pottery I’ve found this season, the idol is covered in a gunky green residue which is universally recognised on digs as ‘potty ware’. Whether people were crapping directly in the pits, or using sherds as a rough form of toilet paper is debatable, but we do seem to have a disproportionate number of broken handles cropping up.
One of the virtues of all the pits I have in my trench is that they give us an insight into what lies below, and it’s pretty exciting... if 10cm thick yellow plaster surfaces are your thing. Apparently they had similar surfaces in the Late Bronze Age (Egyptian) Governor’s Residence which they dug here in the late 80s, and they also appear in the section of the Middle Bronze Age temple just to the east, so there’s little doubt the building I’m digging down to is going to be a ripper when I (my long-suffering workmen) shift the metre or so of mud-brick collapse which is lying on top of it. In the meantime, one of my vollies, Michael, exposed 2 x 2m of stone cobbling today (see photo) which is pretty impressive but going to be a bugger to plan. Like the lower yellow plaster layers, it extends to the west, so it’ll be even more impressive when it’s fully exposed.
News from home is less good – the flat’s been burgled and I’m having hassles with my visa / citizenship. Apparently 20/20 in the ocker Aussie test isn’t good enough. The cops haven’t been able to spare anyone, since the tennis is on – my workmen all agreed that theft was ‘haram’ (sacrilegious) and offered to lynch the buggers who broken in. Gina said they didn’t seem to have taken much – just irreplaceable things primarily of sentimental value, rather than the old tv and dvd player, virused computer and cds. It’s pretty spooky, considering that we’re a 2nd storey flat on a quiet street – it’s not exactly an opportunistic walk-by robber. Such is the society we live in... and people question our safety travelling in the Moslem world.
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