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One of my goals this season was to hold a photo show, highlighting photos from work on the tall and in the community to show some of the people of Dhiban what we were doing.  We rarely get visits from local folks so we thought it’d behoove us to bring some of the tall to them.  I intended to do something similar last year, but ran out of time.  It was a priority for the 2010 season.

After a couple of meetings with the mayor, he allowed us to use the Dhiban town hall, a building in the middle of the town that is used for community functions.  We had the photos developed in Madaba, and bought frames there as well.  Hanging them was rough as the town hall, like almost every other building in Dhiban, was made out of cinder blocks.  But after much preparation (including runs to buy sweets and tea) we held the show last Thursday.

Along with the photos on the wall we ran a slide show with a lot more of the images taken from the season.  This seemed to be the most popular part of the show, and people sat and watched until photos of themselves or of people they knew appeared on the screen, then cheered.

A lot of town dignitaries showed up, but not as many of the regular townsfolk.  It was disappointing in that respect, but a good first step.  I’ll have a lot more details in my dissertation, if you care to know!

Saleh and I moved 123 qufaf today, 80 of them before breakfast. A quffa (pronounced goo-fah) is a bucket made out of an old tire–they’re great for hauling dirt around, cheap, and relatively easy to repair. I hope to never use another plastic bucket. Anyway, I swung the pickaxe for most of the day, bashing through a layer of undifferentiated collapse inside my trench. There was a really late (I’m talkin’ TPQ 1970s here–modern screws and some bottle glass, along with a pull tab) pit cut into the eastern extent that was full of cobbles and very dark dirt that was pretty easy to boost out and once that was gone I was able to see that it cut into a relatively homogenous matrix. So, out came the pickaxe.

It was good to finally be able to move on my trench–I had been spending too much time on things like defining the big wall in the western extent and digging this late pit. I worked from known to unknown, removing the dirt where I could see spatial relationships to other architectural elements and moving out from there. A cluster of stones in the northwestern corner became an installation against the western wall, and I carefully cleaned around it to define the architectural aspects versus the stones that came in through the collapse. Soon, I came down to a nice flagstone paving for the room. Well, relatively nice, as it had been bashed up from the stone ceiling collapsing on it. The room terminated much more quickly than I had guessed–only two courses of stones remaining before the ground level. Some nice finds surfaced right above the floor–a nice fragment of a molded oil lamp, a bracelet fragment, and a whole lot of Mamluk-era pottery.

It’s surprising how none of the above description really does justice to excavating on a terrace over a wadi in Jordan. A hot wind whips up through the wadi, blowing your paperwork and any light artifacts. Little gazelle-like ants pause then scatter over my dustpan, too fast for my camera. Late in the day your tools become too hot to touch and any water left in the sun becomes tea-hot. I try to save most of my slow tasks for after our watermelon break, so I can draw or write up paperwork or bag artifacts instead of slinging dirt during the hottest part of the day. Sweat drips down your nose and splashes whatever you are working on, making dark spots on the ground that dry almost instantly. At the end of the day my arms are covered in swirls of white salt crystals that wash over my tattoos like a second skin.

So, today was a better day. I had some nice archaeology come up and was able to work out a few of the grad-school kinks in my back. Tomorrow I’ll finish revealing that nice paving, then photograph, draw, and otherwise fully record it.

Oh! And we found the missing rebar in a dip in the tell about 20 meters from the pit. So my hypothesis was correct: orneriness was to blame.

Saleh has been working with the Dhiban Excavation Team since 2009 and is back this year to help with excavation.

Saleh graduated with a degree in archaeology, but he has had a hard time finding steady employment, much like other archaeologists in the world.  He knows some English and helps me learn Arabic, while I help him with the finer points of English grammar.  He’d love to study Hebrew for his PhD, but would also like to get married.

Saleh’s family is from the local Bani Hamida bedouin and he sang his family-specific song today as we cleaned off a section in the hot sun. He also has blingin’ shoes.

He asked me to post about him today, and I did! Marhaba, Saleh.  See you tomorrow.

Welcome back to the Dhiban Excavation and Development Project Blog! We hope to have regular updates from students and supervisors this year, and lots of nice photos to show how the work is progressing here in Dhiban. 

I woke just before dawn today, to the sound of roosters crowing and a cat bawling in the stairwell.  I felt intensely relieved–I am already sleeping through the first call to prayer, which in Dhiban can sound from anywhere between 3:30-4:30 in the morning and is incredibly loud. It’s a major achievement in sleep and sanity, but it also attests to how tired I was.

I have been on site for three days now, the bulk of which has been cleaning the dig houses and organizing equipment in preparation of the start of field work. It has been good to be back; I didn’t realize how much I missed Katie, Bruce and Danielle, the three on-site supervisors this year and everyone is in high spirits. It’s different than last year as well, the team is still sex segregated, with the boys staying in their old house in the middle of town and the girls on the edge of town, just far enough to have to drive back and forth. The girls’ house is a big improvement on last year and has a small olive orchard, more room, and a nicer layout.  There are also seven sisters living downstairs, and our initial chat over tea was fun and relaxing. 

This year it looks like we will be testing the three terraces of Tall Dhiban to see the extent of the various occupations–we know it was intensively occupied during the Iron Age, Nabatean, Roman, Byzantine, and Mamluk periods, but different remains occupy different parts of the site. By better testing we can target different occupation levels without putting large trenches through the tell, which is how people have dug them in the past.  We are also trying to see how surface collections that were performed last year relate to the remains below the ground.  While I’m a little disappointed that I am not opening up a nicely defined piece of architecture, it should be interesting to dig in different areas on the tall.

I look forward to the rest of the team arriving and for work to officially start.  I’m also putting on a photo show this year, the details of which will become clearer after today.

A Collaborative Research project (Faculty Research) awarded to:

• Dr. Katherine Adelsberger, Assistant Professor of Environmental Studies, Knox College
• Dr. Danielle Steen Fatkin, Visiting Assistant Professor of History, Knox College

The FaCE grant awarded in spring 2009 provided funding for the first season in summer 2009 of an interdisciplinary project in Jordan to develop a paleolandscape assessment of Dhiban as part of the Dhiban Excavation and Development Project (DEDP), an established archaeological project in the area.

The interdisciplinary FaCE-related portion of this project involved a regional survey for paleoclimate proxies and water resources, detailed site-specific survey for previously undiscovered cisterns and occupational periods, and the training of undergraduate students.

The excavations are part of a broader project to develop “best practices” in archaeological scholarship through the integration of outreach, excavation and geoarchaeology, and the project would be the first step in the longer-term involvement of Knox College (and other ACM faculty and students) in the Dhiban Project.

As part of the work of the DEDP, we bring about 20 archaeology students from different institutions to participate in the project. We train them in archaeological field methods by rotating them through various learning stations, including excavation, materials processing, flotation, topographic survey and geologic survey. They are taught to dig, record, and analyze archaeological and geological materials. In addition, there are evening seminars on methods, theory, and history twice a week and two weekend field trips to major Jordanian archaeological sites during the season.

• Field Season Dates: June 23 – August 8, 2010
• Estimated Cost: $5,000 ($3,000 program fee + $2,000 airfare)
• Application Deadline: December 15, 2009 (application must be received by this date)

For complete information and application materials, download the Student Application for 2010 DEDP Field Season (Acrobat (PDF) 106kB Nov24 09).