I Volunteered for This?! Life on an Archaeological Dig
and most of the unusable sherds discarded. Some of the better discards were kept by the staff and volunteers for private study collections. Sometimes there were enough sherds of a pottery item to make it worth reconstructing. In that
case, all the sherds in that bucket would be labeled for restoration and set aside. The bones were put into paper bags,
labeled and sent back to the university for further study.
At 9:00 a.m. we stopped for half an hour for breakfast. By this time the sun was up, and it was getting warm; the
jackets that had seemed so cozy a couple of hours earlier were off, and all kinds of sun hats were on. Ami sometimes
extended this break with a tour and lecture on our dig, or had Bob Mullins take us around the Roman ruins being excavated at the base of the tell. Then it was back to work again until a 15-minute rest break at noon and more work until
1:15, when we packed up our tools, covered work areas with plastic sheets against the rain and went down the tell to
get our ride back to Kfar Ruppin.
Our dig consisted of three Late Bronze Age temples built on top of each other. One aspect of our work was to find
the relationship between them. The director and the staff spent most of their time drawing what we were uncovering and
measuring the areas and relationships between them. When it was decided we had dug enough, Ami would tell us to
“clean up the area,” and then he would take a series of pictures. My most exciting find was the Cucumber Goddess, a
6-by-1-inch cylindrical stone, naturally rounded at each end, with what appeared to be two eyes, a hairline and an
inscribed belt. Other interesting finds included two bronze arrowheads, a bronze kettle handle, pieces of alabaster containers, cooking and storage pots, a small stone dove and many other items.
We had lunch at 2:00 p.m. and then were free to shower, change clothes, help sort pottery with the staff or just
relax until supper. The staff spent the afternoons and some of the evenings sorting, identifying and dating pottery sherds,
and working on the notes and drawings that they had started during the day. The day ended with the evening meal at
the dining hall at 7:00. With a 5:15 wake-up call we usually went to sleep early.
The weekends (from Thursday afternoon until Sunday morning at 6:30) also were free. I spent some of the time
resting at the kibbutz and two weekends in Jerusalem with others from the dig, going to museums and exploring the Old
City. Twice I rented a car and went to Haifa, Akko and other places in the Upper Galilee. Because it is my trade, I was
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