We finally found a layer yesterday that shows an inhabited level.  It was a great accomplishment for our team whom have been working feverishly to get down through the earth to reach this level.  In fact the structure that we thought might be something turned out to be nothing, but underneath it we found a real wall.  The earlier rocks may have just been the collapse of the wall, but we don’t know…what we do know is that we have a wall of stacked stones probably dated from the Late Bronze Age (1500BC-1200BC).  Also in my square the other folks working have found a complete vessel; meaning they have found a broken clay bowl, upside down, that is totally there.  One of the things that Philistines did was to put “foundation deposits” in their homes of two bowls stacked on top of each other (the top one upside down) with some sort of offering within them.  Tomorrow we will bring the bowl out to see if indeed it is that.  It would extremely exciting if that is the case.  We are hoping to start finding other “goodies” as well, but of course that is up to whether the former residents left us any to find.  I hope so!  In another square near mine they have found what appears to some sort of furnace.  The Weismann Institute in Israel has been on site to analyze various things and they determined that the ash found was made by a fire that approached 800 degrees Celsius; which is much to high for ordinary cooking.  Our Area is suddenly becoming a popular place.

On a humorous note; one of the things that all area supervisors are crazy about is clean sandbags, so everyday we sweep them.  But everyday another area supervisor always comes to our area to stomp on our bags because he knows how annoying it is.  So today we ambushed him with squirt guns after taking two of his helpers hostage.  Who knows what he will do in retaliation tomorrow, but we will be ready.

Again I am sorry for the lack of posts.  We are literally going from before sunup to after sun down and that makes for very little down time.  A typical day looks like this for me.  I wake at 4:45am and make myself horrible tasting Israeli instant coffee.  Then after getting dressed I am out the door by 5 or 10 after 5am and immediately start gather “Gerry Cans” filled with water, or anything else my supervisor asks me to carry.  We leave at 5:25 and arrive on site at 6am.  We climb up a mountain basically with our gear and start working until 9am where we have breakfast of many weird foods (plain tuna is served at every meal) on the Tell (hill); I usually eat PBandJ and pudding.  It’s back to work at 9:30 until 11:15 when we have our fruit break and then work to 12:30 when we take all our gear plus the many buckets of pottery down to the waiting buses.  We arrive back at the Kibbutz at 1:30 and immediately go to lunch which is the big meal of the day when they have lots of meat and because this is a Kosher Kibbutz, they don’t mix dairy and meat at the meals.  After eating we head straight to pottery washing where we wash the dirt off all the previous day’s pottery.  That goes to about 3:30-4.  Then two times a week there are field trips to other sites at 4 that run until 7 when we hopefully return on time for supper.  After supper we go straight to a lecture about archaeology which starts at 8 and goes to 9-9:30.  Then if I’m lucky I can hop on the computer to shoot off a quick email to Renee and then to bed.  And then it all starts the next day.  But tonight we are having pizza and I am excited about it a lot!

 PS- I forgot to say in my July 12^th post (not sure if I posted it then or later) Happy Anniversary to my wife Renee.  It was our 10^th anniversary and I am spending it without her digging in the dirt.  But thanks to the internet, I was able to send flowers to her.  Again, Happy Anniversary Renee…I love you (and Ivan and Maris and baby