My flight doesn’t leave until 2 July and the last of the students leaves tomorrow on 1 July. So I’ll make sure everything is wrapped up and then I’ll move on. It’s nice to relax a bit for now, resting in the air conditioning and maybe going for a pizza later tonight. Fuad is also still here and he and I will probably chat later this evening.

My plans from here had been only loosely made. I had kept part of the time open in case I could work at another site, but that isn’t likely to come through, so I’ll travel through Jordan as I’d tentatively scheduled and then meet a friend in Egypt. That meeting was pretty solidly scheduled early on so I’d already booked a flight from Amman to Cairo to arrive on the 9th. But I’ve finally gotten on email and found that he arrives at about 2am on the 9th and my flight arrives at 9pm on that day. So I went to the EgyptAir office today and sat around a bit until an agent could see me. I asked if I could change the ticket to fly out of Amman on the 8th instead and they said no problem. The agent changed the ticket right there and didn’t charge a thing. I’ve always had good dealings with EgyptAir and I’ve flown them often. The first time I was rather worried merely from stupid ideas put in my head by inaccurate opinions of the Middle East. I hadn’t been there before and the general conception was that third world countries would be flying archaic planes in erratic patterns. But of course, flight patterns are closely monitored and bad pilots wouldn’t be allowed, planes have to be checked, etc. I have had some bad experiences with Syrian Arab and even with Olympic Airlines, but most of those have been flights within the respective countries. International are usually quite good and they'll put their best planes on those routes. That first time I flew EgyptAir, it was from Athens to Cairo and I relaxed as I saw it to be a brand new AirBus A320. I was given an exit row seat but as I sat down, my tensions rose again when the exit sign fell off into my lap. Not exactly a good omen, but the flight turned out to be just fine.

I’m planning to see Petra, the main reason I want to go to Jordan, but I could go overland to Amman instead of flying (despite the fact that I love travel, I'm not a big fan of flying. I know it's irrational and it doesn't stop me from getting on a plane, but it does mean I often look for ground transport if it's possible). I’ll consider my options over the next day or two and then see where the world takes me.

But we were broke. Even though we knew the general amount we would have to pay for rent, etc. we still had to pay extra as baksheesh and everyone wanted more than they had agreed on in the first place. Such is the way of things here. In many cases we have to pay what would only be considered bribes in other countries, and yet they are so standard here as to be common and expected. Nevertheless, it is difficult to justify on a budget turned in to the university. After all, there isn’t a column on the expense report for bribes.

We managed to pay the essentials at the Directorate and even to get receipts, stamped and official. Now we would have to find a way to pay the hotel bill. And I would be the last in the country so it pretty much fell to me. I’m sure I’ll get reimbursed at some point, we’ll just have to look closely at our accounts in the US when I get back.

One of the things that had hit us the hardest was diesel fuel. I know it’s expensive everywhere, but it was the item on the accounts that had gone up the most overall. As I traveled over the next few weeks, I would encounter the same thing over and over, that fuel prices were the main topic of conversation. I met Australians and Danes and Jordanians alike who all analyzed the situation and compared prices. One of the first questions asked me, after ‘Where are you from?’ was often, ‘How much is petrol in your country?’ I had to think about that since the unit of comparison was the liter and so had to calculate gallons to liters and then divide the average price and convert to whatever currency (though many still used the comparison unit as the dollar). Typically I found that prices in various countries were running around $1.50 a liter. In England it is over $2 per.

Here’s a picture of a relatively new gas station that sits outside Nefileh. It doesn’t look all that new, though the colors stand out against the steppe. I just like the picture, so that’s why I’m including it here. It’s pretty typical of gas stations in the Jezira and getting receipts from them takes time and explanation. Finally they scribble something down on a scrap of paper and hand it to us. Not terribly official-looking.

I think I’d like to print large format photos of some of my favorite images from my digs and maybe see if I can get a coffee shop show of them in Philly. Maybe kylecassidy can help me with that, if he’s reading…

Today we finished and turned in notebooks, made sure object photos were complete, pottery storage was sorted, artifacts were recorded, databases were up to date, etc. I finished the initial computer maps and we backed up data for taking to the States. Then we began to break everything down. All the office equipment had to be packed away in crates and boxes, shelving came down, tables in the workroom/lab disassembled and stowed. It’s amazing how much stuff we need to operate this dig. And all of it has to be stored in one building that we rent year round. Most other buildings we rent solely for the season and turn them back over to the villagers when we leave. But we do have a smaller building for pottery storage and we’d managed to clear a lot of that during our 2 weeks of work without digging, so now we had some room in there too.

We got a lot accomplished and made the decision to get out of Nefileh today instead of tomorrow. We would send most of the students to Aleppo since they were flying out of that city to go home. Some of us, however, were leaving from Damascus and had to discuss the final workings with the museum officials there at any rate. We would stick around later in the evening to make sure all was squared away and would then make our way to the capital.

The plan was not a bad one, but it was already getting late when it was made. And we still had the most difficult task of the dig ahead of us--Payday. We pay workers every week, but the bigger bills wait to the end of the season. Now is when we pay rent, electricity, vehicles, cooks. And each one requires intense negotiation. It was a bloodbath that went on well into darkness. Finally, the the cooks were paid and they were to go to Aleppo, so they locked up the kitchen (which was now our main storeroom) and left with the students.

Only four of us remained. And as you might expect, we began to find things that hadn’t been stowed away. Despite having told students to clean their houses, many had left their bedding and other sundries. Now we had to clean up after them. And what was worse, we didn’t have a key to our own storage (it was with the cooks). We’d have to cram things into the pottery storage room and hope it would be OK next year. Needless to say, it was something of a mess.

The car dropped the students at Tishreen where they would catch a service to Aleppo and came back to pick us up for our trip to Raqqa. There we would catch the overnight bus to Damascus. Our inspector was with us (he still had to be paid, but that would be done in Damascus at the Directorate General for whom he worked) and we all went to the bus station where we found the next bus was leaving at 1:30 in the morning. We were all dead tired and it was about 11:45pm. We went to the inspector’s house (he lives in Raqqa) and rested for an hour and a half, then came back to the station to catch our late night transport. It was a long trip, bouncing down the desert road in the darkness, trying to sleep while being jostled, knees against the seat in front. Much less than comfortable, but another season was coming to an end and I would soon be off to the next adventure. If I survived this one.

25 June
We decided to keep only a few workers on today, most of our digging is complete, or as complete as it will get this year. There are still drawings to be done, points to be shot, and some minor cleaning and clearing to do. In Op 100 we’ve uncovered a large Seleucid building that was in use and being extended or repaired for many years, and we’re seeing clear evidence that these post-Alexander inhabitants were rather extensive in their occupation of our tell. The stone walls here are substantial and the building overall is quite large. It’s also oriented almost exactly on the cardinal directions and the baulks we initially left sometimes fell right on walls, hiding them and forcing us to take them out to reveal the overall construction.

In the south of this operation we have dug deeper trying to get to the transitional material below. Here there is some evidence of mud brick and perhaps even one of our ubiquitous arched chamber constructions, but we will have to continue excavations at this lower level next season to understand it more fully.

Ops 101-104 were set out to get a better understanding of the constructions built against the city wall. Excavations in the 1970s had shown that the wall had some habitation against it that was mid-third millennium but it had initially been described as spotty, a ‘squatter occupation’. We wanted to know more about this and about the city wall itself where possible, but of course all of these units had to contend with Seleucid burials first. Indeed, we only just took out the larnax today. It was cleared of its body by now, but the overall coffin/bathtub was quite large and had remained in place. We had to lift it out and place it in the back of our flatbed with sandbags and water bottles as packing and shock absorbers. It had a crack down the middle and by the time we got to the storage area, the crack had separated, but it was mostly in one piece.

Despite the number of graves, we did get a look at buildings against the city wall and they were far more substantial than would be expected for a simple squatter occupation. In fact, one building had a room that seems to have been an extensive house shrine or perhaps even a temple in its own right. In the center of this room was a mud brick altar and finds in the room were reminiscent of some discovered in the late third millennium temple in Op 34, such as a pot decorated with a bas relief lion.

We had a few workers in Op 42 today but we didn’t completely reach the ash layer I was after. We hit it in one area and managed to get a basic feel for its extent. It appears to run a very long distance indeed and it is quite thick. What exactly this ash layer represents I don’t know, but last year’s notes show some stone architecture associated with it and I suspect there will be more. We’ll have to continue it next year to find out, however.

Meanwhile I cleared out the rest of the doorway to Locus 404 and began plan and section drawings of it and its twin to the west. We also did some last minute defining clearance of stones to the north of these chambers. I suspected there would be two more arched rooms here, but as we cleared off the dirt and mud brick, we found laid stone, as if paving or foundation. I don’t think this negates the possibility of another chamber, but it does show that stones were intentionally placed here, perhaps over that chamber. Indeed, the stones are part of a line along the north of the unit that steps down with the slope of the tell. We’d encountered the westernmost portion of this line from the beginning, for it showed on the surface where the tell was highest. It remains as the north boundary of that portion of Op 42 and steps down about 20 cm after around 2 meters of horizontal placement. Then the lower portion of the line continues for another few meters, a bit spotty in places, until it reaches a large emplacement of stones that was also showing at the surface, built up 3-4 courses in height. Beyond this was some stone tumble that had clearly fallen off of the emplacement, and then a low and wide line of stones to the south. The emplacement was probably a retaining wall meant to support the living space to the west and help shore up and contain the leveling at that point. The continuation may have been associated with a separate living space, perhaps also Seleucid and cut into the tops of the chambers here in the east. We mapped all of these stones but have not moved them. Next year, we can take them away and see if there are more chambers beneath.

Usually with big stones like this, the workers bring in sledgehammers and break it up to take away in pieces, but on top of this precipice that wasn't going to work. I called Fuad over to make sure the workers understood what I wanted and to ask them if it could be done safely. Fuad’s English is good and Arabic is his native language, so if things get in a crunch, I use him as a translator. The workers said it could be done; I’d expected them to say that, but I wanted to emphasize that there should be no showboating and that we had to do this carefully and safely. They cleared all the soils from around the block and cut a bit from the walls to make sure it was ready to be moved. Then they shifted part of the stone and brought in ropes to get underneath it. Then they shifted it again and finally got the ropes beneath.

As they pulled, the stone ground upwards, toward the higher block to the south. It took four people pulling on the ropes and Ismaien came to help as well. He is a bit more flambouyant than the others and almost caused the whole thing to topple, but but the more level-headed Hassan stopped him and saved the day. Eventually they were able to pull the stone up and out of the way. It had taken a lot of time but we got the block moved safely and I could have them start to cut down into the strata below.

Moving the double block of the lower threshold was comparatively easy and then we cut farther down in stages, creating a short set of stairs here. Unfortunately, we didn’t find a foundation deposit so we still don’t know what god this temple was dedicated to and we still have no written word from anywhere in the site. Of course, there is some packing material left beneath the western most portion of the threshold since we left a bit as part of the staircase. It would be quite frustrating if there was a foundation deposit right in that small area we left.

The stair cut was quick going after the threshold block had come up. There were no finds at all here, though, most of the material beneath was the clean packing laid at the time of founding the temple. After the stairs were cut, I moved the workers up to Op 42 to complete work there. I wanted to get down to a large ash layer visible in the old Op 42 baulk and we only had one more day where we’d have a full crew of workers. Most of our students and supervisors were scheduled to leave on the 30th and so we would need a travel day on the 29th and would have to close the dig completely by the 28th. But in fact, Michael and I would have to speak with the officials in Damascus before we left and we wanted to be there on the 28th for a meeting in which we would turn in our preliminary report, pay the site guard and inspector’s salary, and other administrative duties that had to be taken care of. So we would probably close the site on the 27th. That still left 25 with workers and 26 with just us on the tell completing section drawings, trench photos, and final documentation.

I spent much of my time examining the overall temple cut. Making sense of the layers here had been one of my primary goals of the season and now I finally had the exposure I needed. Naturally we had paid attention to the layers as we cut down through them, separating lots whenever a change in soil was noted, but now I could look still more closely at those changes in a vertical section and try to understand what was going on.

In the far north was the set of burned layers that made up Locus 321. These often made U shapes, pushed up against something on both sides. Above them, however, were layers of harder material, brick-like and clay. These layers sloped down to the south, severely in some cases, and ended against more brick fall in the middle of the cut. This was also where the curved plaster lines were noted in the floor. Something was definitely here. Individual bricks, though, were hard to make out. Some were clear enough near the ash layers, and these slumped inward, falling into the ash in places but making an overall dome of sorts surrounding the ash. To the south, layers flattened out somewhat and in the far south, near the doorway, bricks were much clearer and I was able to follow them in their laid format. Here had probably been a wall originally, but most of it was not in the unit, only in the SW corner. North of that, there were bricks but in good placement. This was wall fall and when it fell it probably landed atop and against the domed structure in the north.

Michael and I spent the afternoon discussing what it could all mean. We looked carefully at the stratigraphy and the scale drawing I’d made of it all, spraying a mist of water on the wall to bring out the differences in color and texture more clearly. We knew there were three floors in the south and central areas, all covered with ash, heavy in places. The highest floor ended against the curved plaster lines and these were probably part of the outside of the domed feature in the north. It was a long way from the curve to the ash, however, (about 2 meters) and the ash seemed to be the center of the dome. Indeed, we deduced it could only be a very large oven.

Domed ovens are still common in the Middle East. They are used to bake bread and cook other foodstuffs. In fact, the word for such an oven is tanoor and we use this word for most burning/cooking features. But some tanoors are quite large, and often are found in courtyards (due to the smoke they create, they are not often inside buildings). Could this northern area have been an exterior space in the mid-third millennium? After the walls nearby collapsed, the whole area was leveled and packed down to put a small version of the temple atop. Inside this temple, pits were dug (for the storage of grain?) Then, with the second floor of the temple, walls were expanded to the north and a good deal of rebuilding occurred. Finally, the third floor of the temple was put down, covering the pits completely and this final version burned around 2150BC.

Meanwhile I’ve been on the tell during the day and going back in the afternoons for other jobs. The main extra job for me at the moment has been electronic distance measurement, taking points with a ‘laser theodolite’ to make maps of our current units, exposed walls, features, etc. One of the batteries has not been holding a charge, so I can only get about 2 hours of shots in a day and the afternoon is the best time for it. Juls has been my assistant, holding the prism that directs the infrared beam back at the theodolite, which then calculates distance and angles to export x, y, z coordinates.

It can be relatively relaxing to switch into this mode of operation from the hectic pace of the dig days. During the day we have 40 or more workers and everything seems chaotic and rushed. Taking points is somewhat more repetitive and consistent. It’s not always easy, but it makes a nice change of tasks. Of course, the guard and the driver are still there and they inevitably sit in the tent, next to which I have to set up the tripod to work, but they tend not to bother me much. At least once in the afternoon, Ismaien will offer me tea and I tend to dread it since I feel obligated to drink it but it’s usually nothing more than a cup of sugar with some hot water poured in. We call this chai Shafrat, or tea of the Shafrat tribe, and I suspect that overly sweet concoction is one of the reasons the tribe’s teeth aren’t in good shape. But lately, Ismaien has been making coffee for me, and it’s much better. So, while Juls walks the 100+ meters between excavation units to get set up for points in the next trench, I sip coffee and eat biscuits with the guard. Life isn’t fair.

The temple cut is finished, or at least as deep as I’m going to take it. We began finding floor surfaces in the south, a meter and a half below the lowest temple floor. I had the workers clear off one of these in the middle and step down to another in the south. The central area of floor is level with the bottom of Pit B, not surprising since I’d found a small tanoor, or burning pit feature, at the bottom of B last year. This tanoor was not in use at the same time as the pit -- why climb down a pit to burn something at the bottom? Therefore I’d already expected that Pit B had been dug down to the level of a much earlier floor and now I had proof of that. This floor extended northward to a double plaster line. Both of these lines were curved and probably represented two episodes of construction, the northern most first and then a thick re-plastering later. The plaster lines could be followed in the section wall for some 20 cm and then they disappeared. We didn’t have a great deal exposed here, but whatever that construction was, it was rounded and not all that regular. Furthermore, this central area of the cut, directly under the western buttress of the temple, was also the region in which stratigraphy changed the most.

In the south, there were several ash layers. One followed the line of the floor at the base of Pit B, but there were two others below. Both of these also delineated floor levels and in one there was a sort of channel containing thick ash. We cleared this feature out and followed its ash into the wall of Pit F. As I’d been digging in that pit only weeks earlier I’d seen layers of ash in the walls that did not continue across the pit itself and knew that this pit had cut many earlier floors. Now we were defining some of these floors but we still couldn’t do it completely since our cut was crowded and narrow. Steps and pits reduced the total width exposed in places to 55 cm. But the main purpose of the cut had been exploratory, to get an idea within one season of what might lay well beneath the temple. With this information we could make better plans for what we needed to clear in the next.

I documented the floors, their depth from datum, their layout as far as could be seen, and began looking for clues to construction that was associated with them. There were clearly bricks in the section wall and some were apparently intentionally laid, so I began defining the bricks by seeking out their edges. This process is known as defreeting and it is common in Near Eastern archaeology but not nearly as easy as it might sound. You might think that bricks have boundaries that are easy to see, and indeed modern bricks might, even baked bricks might, but ancient mud bricks that have been covered by mud and surrounded by fallen bricks are not at all clear. We use our special picks to feel the edges out. When the fine point strikes solid brick, it is a distinctive thud. When it hits deteriorated brick, that thud is different, and when you find the edges between bricks, you can often see how the packed-in fill breaks away in a line that can be followed. Or at least, that’s how it is supposed to work. Sometimes you end up having cut through a wall at an odd angle and the lines of brick don’t cooperate. Other times, you follow fallen or slumped brick and eventually find you’ve wasted your time defreeting bricks that are out of place. But it has to be done and you start to get used to defining bricks and looking closely at their orientation. It’s the main thing in Near Eastern archaeology I’ve found that is different from all other regions I’ve worked in. Other places have mud brick (like Egypt, for example) but not like this. The mud bricks in Egypt were typically made from Nile silts and thus have a very different color, dark brown or even black, and stand out clearly in the surrounding sands.

I still needed things for the workers to do, so I had them begin moving the threshold block at the entrance. Since I’d widened the southern part of the temple cut to take out Pit F, we’d now limited our access point and would need another set of steps. The best place to put this would be under the old doorway and I also wanted to find out if there had been a foundation deposit here. It was quite common in the Near East to place items beneath the threshold of a temple when the building was constructed. These items might include a tablet mentioning the king who built it and the god to whom it was dedicated as well as ritual items to insure the longevity and sacred status of the building. We had three sets of thresholds, however. One was higher than all the temple floors and outside the door, a kind of welcome mat placed late in the building’s history when the outside dirt had gathered high but the inside temple had continued to be swept clean. The next was between the doorjambs and pretty much level with the latest floor. This block was, like the high one south, massive. Beneath it, as I could see in the stratigraphy of the cut, were two blocks that had formed the original threshold. If there was a foundation deposit, it would be beneath this initial set.

The problem would be moving the big one above. We would leave the southern most in place, it was not in our way since it was stepped back from the walls but the threshold of the latest floor would have to be moved. It was about 150 cm long and 90 cm wide with a thickness of 15-20 cm. It would take several men to move and what made it worse, it was sitting now at the top of a 2 meter drop into the cut.

22 June
The ‘other tomb’ is indeed like the first. The upper layers had Seleucid material but we quickly got into more secure 3rd millennium finds. The walls here were a little harder to define than the other chamber, but the same arched construction is apparent. There are also more stones here, probably slipped out from the high foundation beneath the mudbrick walls that were in pretty bad shape, especially on the east side.

Two things have been particularly interesting here. First of all, one of my students, Juls, was excavating and handed me a fragment of something. "What kind of pottery is this?" she asked. I looked it over. Yellowed and thin, it was nonetheless strong and curved, looking like a cross between bone and ceramic. "It’s not pottery," I replied, "It’s eggshell." Naturally, she didn’t believe me. We all know eggshell is thin and fragile, right? Ah, but this was not chicken egg or any other small avian. It came from a very large, flightless bird: an ostrich. Indeed, ostrich eggs were used for a variety of things in the ancient world, often made into cups, bowls, and vases. They are quite sturdy and preserve very well. They are also relatively exotic, even in this region at this time, so they tend to mark the higher end of finds, e.g., the more valuable objects to the people. Such a discovery was exciting, especially in this large a piece. In fact, we were to find many large pieces of shell in this layer, scattered throughout the lower areas of the chamber. I suspect we could reconstruct an entire egg or perhaps two from the pieces we collected here, but none show incised decoration or working that I could see in cursory examination.

There was also a small rim of a pot showing in the wall near a large clump of shell and at the edge of the stone foundations. We cleared it off and found it to be a complete miniature clay bowl, fine and quite elegant. It was sitting on its base as if on a surface but there was no good floor here and similar fill continued below. The same partial surfaces we found in the other chamber were occurring here as well, possible plastered areas at different heights throughout the fill, but never completely covering the chamber. Whatever happened to fill the room to the west also happened here.

As we worked deeper into the pit, we needed to clear away the overhang of roof left standing in the west since the arch widened underneath and it became dangerous to work under the overhang. The wall wasn’t going to hold it, so I decided to knock down the upper portion. Juls had been wanting to use the big pick for some time -- for some reason the destructive power of such a tool appealed to her -- but I only allow big picks in certain situations. This was one of them, so she wailed away. It came down quickly.

Under the remaining fill I found more stones including some that seemed to be arranged in a circle. If this really was a circular feature, it would be unusual since this is such a small chamber. How could any feature be used inside here? Perhaps it was intended to contain something, but I’m not convinced it really is an intentional feature. I’ll have to clear the soil around it and see if the stones are all at the same level sitting on a finished surface. I’ll also have to compare the inside and outside of the feature and look carefully at the stones to see if they were really placed here for a purpose or if they could simply have fallen in this arrangement.

Our site guard, Ismaien, has been collecting agrab (scorpions). At mangeria he showed us a plastic water bottle that had a few of them in a small amount of fluid at the bottom. He explained that the fluid was rubbing alcohol, but I’m not sure if that was to kill them or to try to preserve them. A little after mangeria we noticed Ismaien waving frantically to us from the back of the tent. Juls, Shiloh and I went up to see what he wanted and found him locked in mortal combat with a camel spider. Well, maybe not mortal combat, but he was determined to show us this giant sputha that was clinging to the tent, and he was equally determined to catch it.

It was definitely a big spider and the students were duly impressed, but Shiloh said she had expected these things to be everywhere. She sounded a little disappointed that we hadn’t seen more of them. Of course, she also didn’t want them killed. But Ismaien would have none of that for he wanted it in his bottle of collectibles. So he searched for a tool with which to catch the creature and ended up with a pair of tongs that were part of his nargileh set. A nargileh is a water pipe, also called a hooka or sheesha pipe in some areas. The tongs are used to move hot coals onto or off of the ceramic bowl at the top which holds the tobacco. Today they would be used to chase down and capture a camel spider.

Ismaien wielded his short tongs deftly, clamping down on one leg, or almost at any rate. He didn’t get a firm grip and the feisty arthropod (for they aren’t arachnids, instead they are more like scorpions or lobsters, with 10 legs and long bodies) darted away across the side of the tent. Ismaien jumped back but quickly regained his nerve and again the valiant guard lunged with his makeshift pincers. He caught the ‘spider’ by two back legs and it squirmed, biting at the metal that held it in its grip.

Now he tried to force the overlarge beast into the narrow neck of the water bottle. This seemed an absurd thing to do, but he wanted it to be with his other nasty creatures so he pushed while the thing continued to squirm. Its body was larger than the opening and his tongs’ grip on the legs loosened. Again the sputha ran off and again Ismaien chased it; an odd sight, his tongs held well in front and wary but at the same time reckless in his apparent abandon either to impress us or just to catch the beast.

The battle waged on, but Ismaien once more got hold. Again he pushed and, after a good deal of damage to the body of the spider, it finally squished into the neck of the bottle and with a last kick of its 10 legs, the sputha fell into the alcohol below, mostly dead already. It was not a pretty sight, but for some reason I had watched in - what was it? Shock? Horror? A strange mixture of puzzlement and a sense of the absurd? Now the triumphant Bedou of the Shafrat tribe held his trophy aloft and began animatedly to show everyone on the tell his conquest, telling elaborate stories of his heroism.

I went back to work.

21 June
Longest day of the year. The summer solstice. Just another day on the tell.

We’ve begun cutting into the new ‘tomb’. Here we’re finding a lot of Seleucid fill, probably washed in from the trash pit that fronted the tomb. Since the pit exists here and the tell has sloped away, denuding the area, I don’t have a lot of hope for this one being unlooted. Regardless, it can still help us to know what the chambers were for so long as at least some intact material remains. Even a few human bones, for example, will indicate that it may indeed have been a tomb. So far, we haven’t found anything but a possible finger bone, but that was very near the roof and is not in good shape, so hard to identify.

There are pieces of pottery but most are late (Seleucid) not matching up with the mid-third millennium stuff we found in the chamber to the west. Of course, all the material we get is important and tells us something about site formation, and we need to see the chamber as a whole, so on we dig. The north wall is in good shape and is obviously a continuation of the same wall in the other chamber. A thick wall between divides the two and arched roofs set them off from this thick support wall. There are bits of plaster throughout the fill and some areas that seem leveled as if part of a floor, but this was the same thing we found in the other chamber and I begin to wonder if it is not just plaster falling from the ceiling. Of course, that would imply that the chamber had been open and filled slowly, during which time pieces of plaster from the ceiling fell to be covered by more fill later. Such a scenario doesn’t seem all that likely. Where for example, would the fill be coming from if the chambers were sealed? Instead you would expect that they would fill in after they were opened in a looting event, or have been intentionally filled before being sealed.

There’s a lot of laid brick in this area of the operation. We were confused by it last year as we tried to expand the early Op42, but pulled back from it when we found that most of the area north of the plastered surface (now Locus 400) was almost completely laid mud brick still in place. We think now it may be the roofs of more of these chambers to the north. In fact, corbelled arches have been rather frequent finds in this tell. Our first indications came deep in the mud brick fortification wall but we didn’t believe there could be chambers there. Yet the more we looked, the more it seemed there really were such areas. Later we decided these must be structural, i.e., when you build a very big, thick platform or wall, you don’t necessarily want to put down so much brick, instead you build chambers that you then intentionally fill with rubbish to make them solid. Such chambered constructions usually with no doors and used only as structural supports are known as casemates. Perhaps the entire fortification was established on this type of construction. But here in Op 42 we are on the top of the mound and casemates would not only be unnecessary, they also would not be plastered on the inside. Why waste time and effort on plastering walls inside a room whose only purpose was structural support? Even if we have casemates deeper in the tell, these can’t be such rooms. And who knows, maybe those chambers were also something else? Maybe we have a giant mound of arched tombs with a temple atop? I think that unlikely, but we always have to keep an open mind.

I’ve now completed the section drawing of Pit F, the one near the temple entrance that I split in half by narrowing the overall temple cut. Now that I’ve documented it, I will expand the southern portion of the cut, almost completely obliterating the pit itself and revealing the stratigraphy beneath the threshold blocks that led to the temple. Pit B will remain in section and the stairs will still cut down to it. I’ve also found and left some portions of at least two floors deep in the area of the narrow southern cut. In the section wall are many interesting things that were difficult to notice as we cut through the hard layers. I’ll have to expose more and perhaps wet down the section to get a better view of the stratigraphy and how it interconnects, but I think we do have the remains of wall fall beneath the temple foundations and that we will be in mid-third millennium living spaces here rather than in earlier temple.

Locus 321 to the north is coming down to the same level as the rest of the cut and there is clear evidence of multiple burning events here. The compacted ash layers are surrounded by slumped mud brick and whatever is here left a very different pattern in the soils. We don’t have the whole thing exposed, however. It was quite large and with a narrow cut it is difficult to determine just what it was. We’ll try to clear a bit more and examining the strata will tell us more soon.

I’ve been searching more on the coin we found in the upper layers of Op 42. I still think the best match is to the Antigonid prancing horse design. This emblem was used on the reverse of coins by a few regions, but the majority are in Thrace, a largely Antigonid (or Macedonian) controlled area well west and north of us. Here is a comparison of our drawing (made with no knowledge of the prancing horse design, only an interpretation of what could be seen directly on the corroded bronze) and a 4th century coin (silver but I did find similar in bronze as well).

20 June, afternoon
Late breakfast this morning. We’re trying to make French-press coffee with too fine a grind on the coffee grounds (the Arabic/Turkish coffee is ground very fine indeed) and so it comes out a bit muddy, but it tastes pretty good. And I don’t mind Nescafe myself, I rather tend to expect it in field conditions. I’m only a coffee snob when I’m in the US.

In fact, I don’t usually eat either of our breakfasts in the field. We have first breakfast normally at 4:15 and second breakfast at 9:30 (also called mangeria, it’s more like a work break during which we have a snack of sorts). I tend to eat nothing at first breakfast and then have a few cookies at second. When we have a lie in and only one breakfast, I may eat a little bit of eggs and some zattar (an interesting mix of spices that you dip olive oil soaked pita into).

Next it was out to the tell with many of the student supervisors. A lot of them are still working on burials and they need to get them out soon, we only have about a week left in the season and there is much more to investigate around and beneath. We’ve even got our artist and lab supervisor out helping with many of the tasks now.

It’s hot. Now there’s little wind, so we’ve gotten past the problem of sand blowing in our eyes, but the heat has settled in and we’re baking. That’s to be expected but I’m not sure which is worse really. You just put it out of your mind, drink water often, and keep going.

In the northern portion of the Temple cut I’m finding some pieces of copper and still a lot of pottery. The southern portion is much lower now and I have had to leave steps to get down into the cut itself. Yet I also want to expose a complete section wall to draw and photograph the stratigraphy. At the moment I leave the steps sealing off the north, Locus 321, to separate it from 320 to the south. I’ll cut through half of the steps later to expose the complete profile beneath the west wall of the temple.

In the south we are starting to find some cultural material again. After we broke through the hard clay layer that is probably the sealing, packed foundation of the temple, we cut through mud brick fall for another 50-60cm and began occasionally to find pieces of animal bone. Now some ash pockets are showing up and more bone and finally we are getting pottery again. Not much, but some. It is rare not to find any pottery in a layer, in fact sherds are so common that you can’t walk anywhere on the site without seeing them. So it does seem that the material below the temple floor is intentional clean fill, made so clean perhaps because it was a sacred space.

Near the division of strata where ash is more common, we made a very interesting discovery. It was yet another piece of bone (and many of the pieces coming out of this fill are relatively large) but this one had markings on it. It was an intricate geometric design, a kind of netting of diamond shapes, curving around half of an animal long bone. The piece had been shaped as well and on the edge was part of a hole where once a rivet of some sort had been placed. This was part of a haft to a weapon or tool, one that had been highly decorative. And inside the engraved lines was a dark pigment, probably rubbed in intentionally to make the design stand out to the eye. I don’t have the photos or drawings of that piece, perhaps I can add them later. All of the official photos went back to the states with my colleagues and I didn’t get a personal photo of that artifact. The pottery coming out with it, however, is quite clearly mid-third millennium, so the handle itself seems to come from that period, around 2500 BC.

20 June, morning

Last night we went to Kalat Jabr for dinner. The restaurant there is owned by the former head of the Raqqa museum and he is a good friend, so we typically go there once a season. It’s about an hour and half away from our dig and it sits along Lake Assad so the surroundings look much different, a welcome respite from the ever-present desert steppe. Here it is seemingly more idyllic, more Mediterranean perhaps. The water, the grape vines that cover the restaurant, the hills, and the sunset are all impressive. But what truly makes the scene is the massive 11th century castle looming over us.

Despite the current Mediterranean feel, Kalat Jabr is rather far inland. Thus, the Crusaders never got here, but the defenders of the land built the castle to watch for them just in case. It’s a big castle and it’s always interesting to tour such things. It’s relatively late and the site is closed when we get there, but we are quite literally handed the keys to the castle.

They’ve been doing a lot of restoration work on this site, so the area at the entrance is largely new brick. But as we wander up the main access point, we get to older and older parts of the citadel. Like most forts, this one was used for a very long time and thus there are many different periods represented, many rebuilds and additions. There are also many areas that have been investigated archaeologically. The Germans had a dig here for quite some time and the remains of their dirt removal system are still visible. They used a narrow gauge railway to carry off cartloads of overburden and they dumped it out into the lake, or what is now the lake. The end of the line can still be seen perched precariously out on a wooden platform that drops 40 meters to the water below.

We took our tour, took our pictures, and then as the sun began to set, we gathered round our guest table. There were a lot of us and there was a lot of food that came out in waves. Hummos, salad, mutebbeh, pita, various tahina and oil dips, mahamra, and all sorts of mezze were brought out first. Then sodas (mostly local brands like Ugarit and Mandarin, but major brands are finally making headway in Syria as well, particularly Pepsi) and beer (local ‘al Shark’ beer, meaning ‘the east’, it comes in recycled bottles and tastes a bit of glycerin) as well as nargileh (hooka pipes) were brought for any who wanted them. Next there was chicken and fish, and finally fruit for desert. It took a long time, as meals like this should, and we talked well into the night.

I like dinners like this, but I also get rather tired since our schedule is set to get up so early. The problem with being near so much water around the lake as well is that there are more mosquitoes. But we finished by about 11 and were back in Nefileh around 12:30 am. It was now Friday and we would again not bring workers to the tell (which would save our budget a bit since we have to pay double on Friday). We called breakfast late the next morning and I went to bed.

19 June
The temple cut is getting deeper and longer. I’ve taken it all the way to the entrance of the temple, narrowed to cut the bell-shaped pit in half and will be ready to draw the section line of that pit soon. South of the buttress in the middle of the west wall we ran into some extremely hard layers. About half a meter down from the top of the earliest floor there was a thin layer of clay that had been tamped down and probably allowed to dry in the sun. It took great effort to move through it even though it was only about 5 cm thick and it came out in plated pieces almost like pottery. It was much like a floor itself, but there was no ash or sand or finds on it and I think it was s prepared surface from which the temple would be founded. There were three layers above it, one of solid packing (basically the same stuff mud brick is made of but not in the form of individual bricks). This stratum has no finds in it at all. Not a single pot sherd has come from it and that is rather unusual. I suspect it is intentionally clean fill as a foundation for the sacred space above. And atop it were two distinct episodes of plastering. The lowest plaster was very clean and white while the upper was more pinkish and much thicker, up to 18cm thick. This was almost certainly laid in many different events, but the exact layers are difficult to make out. The thickest is typically closer to the door and this area may have worn thin more quickly due to foot traffic here, thus having to be more often re-plastered.

We’ve broken through the hard clay layer into mudbrick fall and continue down more than a meter now. The curving portion of the bell pit begins at the hard clay and moves up, narrowing to a 70 cm opening at the floor level while the diameter farther down is about twice that. The pit to the north is around 1.3m in diameter and not as deep. Nevertheless, the best guess we have at the purpose of these pits was for grain storage. They could store somewhere between 6 and 9 cubic meters and there were four pits total in the temple. Texts from Mesopotamia proper tell us that temples were often involved in economic issues, such as loans of silver and grain (standards of value in the ancient world), management of land, and even the issuance of grain rations to workers. Perhaps this was one of the duties of this temple?

The stratigraphy in the north of the temple is definitely different, however. At the north edge of pit B there is a hard layer of brick but just beyond is a much darker, ashier fill. I’ve been cutting into this as a separate locus and have noted a very high incidence of pot sherds, burned animal bone, charcoal, and other cultural debris in stark contrast to the material to the south. On the earliest floor of the temple uncovered last year I also noted a difference in this area. Just north of the pits, the line of white plaster ended and the floor was then only red clay. It seems to indicate that the temple was narrower when first built, i.e., the floor did not extend past the plaster line or the pits. When the second floor was put in, the temple seems to have been expanded. At this point, the north bench appears (a stone bench about 50cm high that runs from the north edge of the buttress all around the north wall, it is founded on the second floor and this floor runs the length of the north-south region of temple but still maintains the pits). I still don’t have evidence of the old north wall, if it existed, so I can’t yet be sure that there was one here. I’m not sure what else would cause the difference, however.

One of the things I always tell my students (and most of the workers already know this) is that when digging soils where you get chunks of material out (such as pieces of mud brick) you should always break them apart rather than simply tossing them into a zambiel to be carried away. To most the reason is obvious, there might be important artifacts caught in that clod of dirt. Some feel that with mud brick it isn’t important because, what could be inside a brick? But anything can be in a brick and we got good confirmation of that in Op 42. Here, Juls (one of my students) was working on a pit that cut east of Locus 400. She broke up one of the fallen mud bricks at the edge and found a green point jutting out from it.

We carefully broke away the rest of the brick and found a complete bronze pin (at left is a drawing of a similar pin, not the exact one), about 12 cm long and with a rounded knob at the end. It was originally used to fasten clothing and was typical of the Bronze Age pins we’ve found throughout the site. Somebody must have lost their pin when making the brick, or perhaps it was in the clay material they collected for the brick, but it was an interesting find nonetheless.

The area where this pit cuts was hard to define for many reasons. The pit is expansive and may represent several digging and filling episodes, including animal burrows. It is also a part of the top of the tell that has deteriorated badly because it is at the edge where the tell slopes off to the east. Originally we had a lot of backdirt here, but we’ve moved that and have cut down into the degraded mudbrick in the area. To the east of Locus 400, however, there is one small region of plaster that is clear and it is at the same elevation as the plaster on the roof the chamber to the west. It fades away quickly, however. We have had the workers cut down 40 cm or so to the east of the plaster and as I clean this level off, traces of white are showing through. I had an idea of what this might be, so I got into the pit and tried to follow the remains of the south wall in front of Locus 400 east into the pit and wawi hole (a wawi is a jackal and they often dig in our units, as do other animals. In fact, animal burrows can be a real hassle here, especially in pit fill where it’s softer dirt). I managed to find traces of plaster and realized that the wall is preserved here, just not very well. Finally, I lost the plaster, but that’s what I expected.

Here’s my theory: the upper portion of plaster marks the roof of another chamber. It only extends some 20 cm east because the tell slopes off here and so the plaster and roof itself have mostly washed away, down the side of the tell. As we get deeper, however, preservation is better, so the second layer of white 40 cm down extends a meter or more east. This layer is the inside of the plastered roof of a sister chamber to 400. The wall to the south held the door to 400 and where I lost the plaster in the pit was probably the door to the new chamber. I had the students change locus numbers, for I was certain we had another ‘tomb’. It would be Locus 404.

[I'll be on a boat for the next three days and so may not be able to continue my recap of the season until after that. Stay tuned...]

18 June

Midway through the season and we’re out of coffee.

Many people wanted more than Nescafe, so we brought some coffee grounds from the US and a French press. It lasted quite a while, but it’s gone now. Panic has set in. Well, maybe not quite panic. The fact that they’ve had to switch to Syrian whiskey has started the real panic.

We are below the Seleucid levels now in Op 42 but the pattern remains the same, i.e., our unit is split in two by another wall somewhat below the stone of the one that split the Seleucid area. There was a great deal of mixed fallen brick in the soil beneath and around the line of stone, but in the center it firmed up into a wall, following the same line as that above. I wonder about this continuity in use of space and about the date of this earlier wall. If it is late third millennium, that’s a long time before the Seleucids and why would those people 1500 years later follow a line they presumably didn’t know existed? The Temple enclosure wall (if it is such a thing) was certainly still visible but the later people altered the line of that wall by adding a second wall cut into it. This new wall connected with part of the larger enclosure wall but ran at a slightly different angle and was only rebuilt in the top 5 or 6 courses. A similar wall (not cut into another but rather founded on fill) was uncovered last year west of this one in the reduced area Op 42 of that season.

These upper walls, like the lower cross wall beneath the stones in the center of our unit, are made with the square bricks that run around 36x36x10 cm. This is the same sort of brick used in the late third millennium addition wall in the temple, so you would think they were made by the same people at around the same time. But, it is quite high up in the stratigraphy.

It’s possible that the additions were created around 2200 BC and that the Seleucids uncovered some of these walls in order to use them instead of building their own. But if these walls of thin, square bricks are late third millennium, why are they so high up? That would mean that there had been a great deal of soil build up (a meter or more) north of the temple before the additional walls were made. The temple itself, however, does not seem to predate the late third millennium, all three floors we have exposed have pottery from that period. So why so much dirt to the North? There was certainly some build up over the life of the temple; we have a high threshold block in the south, but it was only about 30cm above the level of the latest floor. The higher north portion just doesn’t make sense. But if the walls are Seleucid, why are they built with so similar bricks to the ones in the temple? That temple was sealed with burned roof beams dating to 2150 BC, so the Seleucids didn’t make the addition walls there.

To the east in Op 42, we have mostly finished out the ‘tomb’ or mud brick chamber variously known as Locus 400 or Tomb 50. The mudbrick is lain on stone foundations that are 2 or 3 courses tall. This brick is about 12cm thick and only around 25cm wide. It was laid in a sloped fashion, making a slow arch of a room in a kind of corbelled vault, and the entire thing was covered with thick white plaster (which was also used for mortar). Where brick meets stone there was a possible floor surface, but it was not continuous and it is hard to tell if it was intentional. It would have made the whole thing quite short at around 65cm (to the tallest part of the roof, the door would have been only about 40cm tall if this were the floor). We cut through this partial surface and found another at the base of the founding stones. This one was much better and sitting on it were many laid mud bricks closer to the 36x36x10 type. They seem to have been part of the blocking meant to seal up the chamber, standing in rows at the entrance and inside. I found only two courses in place, but presumably they originally reached to doorway height.

The chamber walls slope up and the doorway mimics this slope. To the bottom of the foundation from the highest part of the roof is just over a meter and the interior at the base is about 1.2 meters per side. The north wall is particularly well built and it seems to continue east and west, meeting the temple enclosure wall (which actually abuts the tomb and therefore postdates it) to the west. In the fill we found many fragments of a metallic ware strainer that is quite impressive and most of a nice bowl, both of which I think can be put back together. Yet we found no evidence of human remains. What was this chamber’s purpose?

Last night, Michael examined the small copper piece that I found in the doorway of Locus 400 under magnification. He laughed oddly and told me to look, asking what I saw. I was shocked to see what I could swear was an ankh. A tiny ankh, green from patina, but it looked real. Could it have been a fluke, a flaw in the copper, an artifact of our cleaning process? Others looked and most said they didn’t believe it. I can’t imagine why a small ankh would be on a piece like this, or why so far from Egypt unless it was a trade piece and I’m still not convinced that ankh really exists on the piece as an original intentional marking. However, I have found in some research that there were makers’ marks of the Seleucids that looked something like an ankh, and they sometimes put such a mark on coins or other metal pieces. This is certainly not a coin, it is convex and seems to have a spiral motif, but it might be a Seleucid artifact that got into the fill.

In Op 34, the temple cut proceeds, but it is slow going. The material beneath the third floor revealed last year is very hard, intentional fill for the floors I suspect, and it takes a good deal of effort to move through it. There are some differences showing more clearly in the north now and so I have the workers digging mostly in the south. I will explore the ashier fill in the north soon.

14 June

I made the two day challenge, but my students jokingly say I didn’t specify 2 days of working, just 2 calendar days, which would have been the 12th and the 13th, thus losing the wager. Of course, we didn’t really wager anything, it was simply a challenge. We were not out at the tell with workers on Friday, but I did go out to do some drawing the in the afternoon. But the actual work on the burial lasted from about 9am on the 12th, with work in the afternoon, a tiny bit on the afternoon of the 13th, and then from 5am on the 14th until all the bones were removed at about 11:30am that day.

13 June
Friday the 13th, and I’ve got a skeleton on my hands. Progress went smoothly yesterday as I uncovered most of the body inside the cist grave. We made today a lab day, however, so we didn’t go to the tell in the morning. This was a good decision as it allowed us a bit of respite from the hardest schedule and let us sleep in an extra hour or so before breakfast. I left the skeleton covered with plastic and a thin layer of dirt to keep the sun off of it. This afternoon at 5 I went out to draw the body; but then I was seized by a massive headache. I suppose you could say it was the curse of the undead, but I attribute it to the bright sunlight, heat, and perhaps a bit of dehydration. I’m good about drinking water constantly, but even the best of us lose too much fluid at times^.

The body was in far better condition than those near the city wall. It was buried in a cist grave at the base of a pit, the workers came down at the edge and found foot bones, so we stopped them. That was the 11th. On the 12th, I cleaned off to the capstones, most of which seemed intact, and it seemed this would be a fully extended body. Thus, the burial went well into our baulk and I had the workers cut a notch into the side of the trench in order to retrieve the whole thing. It’s bad form to leave half a person in the ground just because they weren’t completely in your unit.

Human bones are fascinating things, but also can have deep reverberations in the moral realm. Some people feel it is wrong to disturb the dead, others that we should learn from the past, and still others see the dead as a way to find grave goods. I fall into the ‘learning’ category and wouldn’t be upset if someone dug me up, though I’d prefer that they were genuinely interested in studying my life, not after the paltry ring or coins I might have with me.

Since this burial was half in our baulk, it was easy to study the stratigraphy above. As the workers cut down through the pit fill, I drew the different strata, seeing that there had been at least two pits here. Into the fallen mudbrick there was a sloping cut, shallow at first, then deeper. At the base of this lay the cist stones and cap stones of the burial. Then, a sharper cut came down from above, probably an even later trash pit, that seemed to have reached the level of the burial and stopped.

Of course, we knew we had a pit initially, and when we were digging it, we found many stones and drew them in, separate from the Seleucid living area into which it had cut. Then, we ran into phalanges. We pulled the workers out and looked still more carefully at the stones, realizing that amongst the mix were the long, flat capstones of a cist grave. We removed the extraneous ones and then dug into the baulk. Last year, in fact, the nascent Op 42 had been south of this area, but the workers had cut a staircase to get in and out of the pit they were creating right here north of their trench line. Reading the notes from that year I found that when they cut their stairs, they didn’t save anything from that dirt or record anything. I always cut stairs inside my unit, where I can knock them down if need be, but these guys had done so outside and then decided that, since it was technically outside their unit, they didn’t need to record. Mistake. Regardless, they had trouble with the upper portion of their stairs because it was smack in the middle of soft pit fill. They just missed the body, but it seems they took the end stone of the cist, and thus, we ran into feet without stone.

12 June

Much happening in the Ops these days. I first transcribe a bit I wrote in the field on paper, of all things, then explain more below:

11jun08                                    (transferred from handwritten)   Sweyhat Temple, 6:24pm

Wind carries sand into my eyes as I attempt to write an article for the Raqqa newspaper. The article will be translated into Arabic and may run a picture or two. I had talked to Ahmed about it before we started work, but then we had time, now we don’t. It only has to be basic so I guess I’ve got it now at around 350 words.

Now I’m writing notes for my journal because I haven’t had time to do that. I sleep only about 6 total hours and work much of the rest of the time. It’s a grueling season but there are some good things about it.

I’ve finished pit F down to a similar floor to B only much deeper, about 1.74 meters, and am now beginning to cut the temple floor down to meet it. I’ve already knocked out walls and part of the cella and much is also coming out in Op 42. There is a lot of Seleucid material there, we’ve found paving stones, walls, 4 whole storage jars all upside down, a bead, a coin, and now we have a burial (probably cut from above and maybe later than Seleucid). To the east we have the strange plaster feature we think is a tomb because high end pottery is coming out of it but we have not found a body there. We’ve got the walls pretty well defined but will have to go in through the roof because there isn’t enough room to dig fill through the 40cm entrance. Perhaps it was looted or maybe it wasn’t a tomb at all.

We have decided to make Friday a lab day, so that will help ease the heavy work schedule so far and allow us to catch up on artifact processing. Perhaps I will finally get a chance to do some writing. My next mystery novel will be set here in Syria.

Indeed, while we were doing our enforced study season, our representative had asked if I would write a short piece for the paper. He was most interested in my computer reconstructions of the temple and thought they would go over well. But he didn’t mention it again until today, so I did what I could while out at the site itself. I typed it up that night and handed it to him on a flash card since he is going to Raqqa tomorrow. Who knows if it will really get into the paper. If I could get a copy of it, though, I’d cut it out and then I guess I’d be playing Raqqa, paper, scissors.

In other publication news, I’ve now edited the article Michael and I wrote for the British popular publication, Current World Archaeology. I sent in those edits before we started working. The article itself we wrote just before we left the US. Not sure when it is set to publish but it should be soon.

In Op 34, the addition wall came down to its stone foundations, nicely squared off at the top. This construction of stone must have been a bench of sorts before the mud brick for the addition was laid. The stone seemed integrated into the original construction, with the original wall rising up from it covered in heavy white plaster, behind the addition wall. Next, I had the workers cut into a part of the cella. Here, 5 courses of brick stood atop a jumble of stones. The rocks of this foundation were haphazard as if thrown in, but then they were covered in mud to level them off and the bricks were laid atop. The wall behind the cella showed heavy white mortar lines, larger brick than the addition, and was part of the original construction. Above the 5 courses of the cella then were laid a few bricks that were covered in heavy plaster to make the tripartite podium that surrounded the central buttress. Here was where the cult statues may have stood.

While the cella cut was being completed, I worked hard in Pit F, going well below where an expected floor would be. Beyond 1.5 meters there was still no sign even though the nearby Pit B had clearly struck its base at this level. In fact, I continued over 1.7 meters and finally found the light, grainy layer that marked floors elsewhere. In the wall of the pit above this were two layers of ash, but neither of these continued across the pit itself, showing clearly that the pit had cut through layers of ash that probably marked floors in the past. Why this one had been dug lower than the others is a puzzle, but the farthest east pit had also reached about this level, so it wasn’t perhaps so unusual.

1.74 meters did make it very difficult to get out without a ladder, however. I managed a few times in and out to make the final photos, then I marked off the area we would cut to section these pits. The purple area in the outline from yesterday shows the intended cut but I narrowed this cut in the south to split Pit F in half so that I could get a good section drawing of it.

In Op 42, we have discovered an arched doorway leading into the mass of mud brick that made up the odd ‘platform’. This doorway is plastered on the inside and seems to have been blocked by a jumble of mud bricks that were not at quite the same angle as those of the walls themselves. This means we have an intact chamber inside, its roof plastered above and showing that another room sat atop. It’s rather exciting and the only thing we can think that would be this small and narrow at the opening (40cm wide and about 65cm tall) would be a tomb. We have taken some of the fill from inside through the doorway but will have to remove part of the roof to investigate the room completely and safely.

In the western area of Op 42 we have come down on a Seleucid living area including stone foundation walls, stone paving, and four pots left upside down. The corroded coin we found is a dead giveaway as to period, at least that it is not Bronze Age. Coins were not created until around 650 BC and this coin, though difficult to identify, is almost certainly from the Seleucid period.

Perhaps the coin shows a bull? Some coins of Seleucus Nikator have a galloping bull on them. And Antigonus Gonatus (no snickering) had some coins that had a prancing horse with rider, but why would an Antigonid coin be in a Seleucid area? Trade perhaps? I hope we can get an ident on this coin, but I have my doubts. The artist also thought she saw what could be a flower if the thing were turned the other direction. Or perhaps it is a bull’s head, who really knows? The drawing at left is what I think I see in the corrosion, our artist obligingly created it. And it is surprisingly like the prancing Antigonid coin, particularly if that is a raised horse leg, not that of the rider. Of course, the artist thought also that the image might be a flower if the entire thing were turned the other way around.

09 June

Our concern for the tombs in the wheat fields grows. So far, our guard has located 13 of them, all collapsed or in the process of collapsing. This is a new area of tombs for us. We excavated some to the north of the tell proper in 1995, but these new ones are all located to the south. And yet, according to the official agreements, neither of these areas are now considered archaeological. It’s all linked to the idea of cash-cropping and, yes you could say, greed.

I understand the desire to better the standard of living -- grow more crops to make more money to buy more Pringles and bootleg DVDs (the staples of Syria apparently) -- but I also understand the desire to protect cultural heritage. It is easy to prove that these tombs, as well as the overlying outer town, are archaeological and that the extent of the protected site should go well beyond the high tell and inner city wall. Looking at a Google Earth picture will demonstrate the clear expanse of the site, the outer town wall is clearly visible and in fact some occupation expands beyond this. Yet, from some 45 hectares, we are reduced to only about 15 that is now protected by the Department of Antiquities.

[Google maps of Sweyhat]

(looks like this link works, it's a little off-center but you can see Sweyhat in the upper left and the outer town wall is clearly visible in the cultivated areas. Tell Hajji Ibrahim is also visible, much smaller but a brown dot in the middle of a field to the south east. Here's an old satellite photo as comparison:
 

Oh well, it’s their decision. It is a shame, however, that the tombs are opening up due to major irrigation works and the farmers themselves don’t want gaping holes in their fields. They want them filled in so the land becomes available again for growing another handful of wheat and/or cotton. But the department is saying that the tombs need to be investigated. And yet, they won’t let us do it. It has become the duty of the Raqqa museum.

Unfortunately, the Raqqa museum doesn’t have the manpower, the equipment, the time, or the money to excavate 13 tombs. We don’t either. But we could do one or two and backfill the rest. The battle rages on, and we don’t know if, when, who or how these tombs will be dealt with. The big worry is that they will remain open and then be looted, leaving no information for anyone. For now, we have to forget about them and await rulings from the powers that be.

And of course, we have our site to worry about. Even at only around 15 hectares, there is still a great deal of material here. In fact, we have other graves popping up all over the place, inside our jurisdiction. In virtually every operation from 101-104, we have at least one burial, and often several. These are Seleucid graves, cut into the old inner city wall area and into the mid-third millennium occupation there. In the time of the Seleucids this area was no longer occupied. Instead, the Seleucids themselves inhabited the area north around the main tell and the top of the mound as well. We used to feel that the occupation of this period was not overly extensive, but were puzzled by the enormous pits that were clearly Seleucid in origin. Now we know there is much more Post-Alexander inhabitation on the tell and we are exploring much of that in Op 100.

The Seleucids are named after Alexander the Great’s general Seleucus. He was the one who, in the aftermath of Alex’s death, got control of the part of the massive empire that extended outward from Syria across Persia to the borders of India. The other generals who split the territory were Antigonus in Macedonia and Ptolemy in Egypt. Thus, the occupation of which I speak, spawning so many graves and major trash pits, is post 323 BC, the only major occupation on our site beyond about 2000 BC.

The graves are simple interments, mostly flexed or at least partially flexed, but they are not easy to dig by any means. Talk about ‘sink or swim’ archaeology. The students are fascinated by human remains, but face the challenge of properly excavating, documenting, and removing the bones from a clay-like soil that is not kind to bone. We give them as much assistance as we can, but mainly let them move at a slow pace that means we will have less time to investigate the mid third millennium beneath, one of our primary goals for these trenches.

One of the burials is particularly intriguing. Placed inside a clay ‘bathtub’ (called a larnax in Greek), this burial is somewhat unusual for the area. The larnax is in the background of this picture, a covered cist grave is in the foreground.

08 June

Nefileh is expanding. It had only a few hundred residents when I first started working at the nearby tell but now it’s in the thousands. It’s also increasing in complexity. Now there are cell phones in virtually every villager’s hand, fluorescent lights in front of every door, motorcycles, combine harvesters, water pumps, a few satellite dishes and even a kind of general store. Of course, the man who runs the store works as a pickman on the tell, so it’s not often open in the daytime.

The village, once of mudbrick nestled in the harsh steppe, mainly making its living off of sheep, has become an agricultural machine. Intensification means more luxuries for some of the people and it means an expanding population can be supported, at least for a while. Now, they no longer build in mudbrick, but have brought in cinderblocks; buildings made of this material can go up quickly and relatively cheaply. Their farm machinery is increasingly more sophisticated and the extent of their cultivable land has jumped. So has their seeming greed.

Cost of living, naturally, increases in this kind of world and worker’s salaries are up comparatively. Costs in Syria have been rising at a rate of about 30% a year over the past few. And with the declining dollar, it all signals trouble for us.

Along with the rise in complexity and density of population, come other struggles. I refer to rising crime rates. I’ve always said that there is no violent crime in Syria. That’s still largely true, even though there are harsh rivalries between tribes in the Djezira that can lead to killings. Maybe the harshness of punishment in a police state deters most violent crime, or maybe -- as Adam Ant would say -- “What’s the point of robbery when nothing is worth taking?”

With rising standard of living, however, what you really get is an increasing distance between the haves and the have-nots. I believe this leads to discontent and, in turn, to rising crime rates. Why do I harp on this? Because last night I was, for the first time in the real sense of the word, a victim of robbery in Syria.

[--My house, one of the concrete foundation, mudbrick superstructure types. Wood is at a premium, so most doors are made of sheet metal, like this one. Inside is barren except one post helping to support the roof and a set of plastic flowers hanging from a beam. The whole roof is made of narrow wooden beams supporting newspaper and plastic which in turn support clay.--]

Perhaps you could say it was my fault for not putting a lock on my door. But I’ve been working in Nefileh off and on since 1996 and have never had to lock my door. Oh, it’s true that occasionally a pen would go missing from our office/lab or maybe some paper clips (which became a legendary tale -- years ago when we casually mentioned our paperclips had gone missing, the town immediately turned itself upside down searching for them and the culprits, two young boys, were soundly clipped round the ears and had to apologize profusely, returning every one of them). This time, however, my room was entered, ransacked, and a Swiss army knife, $40, my Syrian change, and an old cell phone were taken from me.

It could have been much worse, and when I reported it to our representative, he quickly found those responsible, or so he said. He produced a $20 bill that had been torn in pieces and said that it was children who did it, for only children would lack the understanding of money so as to tear it up. Perhaps this was true, I don’t know, but the story that my door was wide open and thus led the children to investigate was blatantly false, I always close my door, if not lock it. Needless to say, from then, and now and forever, I will be padlocking my door in the once-docile little village that is opening to the modern world so quickly.

07 June

The season progresses and we now have a horde of workers on the tell. From the intended 40 we have expanded to over 50. I have two sets of them, one in Op 34 and one in Op 42. We have not yet begun the big temple cut, but are starting in 34 by tearing out part of the addition wall in the north to see the earlier phase and will then progress to a cut through the raised cella in the east to have a look at its construction. It feels odd to tear into such a major construction that has survived for nearly 5 millennia, but it is the only way to understand it completely. Not only that, the elements are taking their toll already and the latest phases are melting away with the winter rains and summer winds.

And those winds are buffeting us badly today. It’s nice to have a breeze, but a howling wind is another story. Only a few years ago, they would have carried so much sand that we would have been unable to work at all. In those days, less of the Djezira (the area in which we are working in, literally translated as ‘island’ though it is really the extensive spit of land between the Euphrates and the Balikh) was under cultivation and so the sandy topsoil would easily sweep up and form walls of orange looming in the distance. And when it reached you, it was as if you’d been transported inside one of the brick walls we excavate, not being able to see anything and having the oppressive weight of the desert bearing down upon your chest. Now there is so much irrigation due to the global economic phenomenon of cash-cropping that the soil tends to stay down, except in the immediate vicinity of our excavations. Thus, our own backdirt chokes us but not quite so badly that we have to end work. Perhaps we should have, but we feel the need to remain since we’ve already lost so many days.

The worst part of the self-created sand whirls (ajaj as they are called in Arabic) is what it does to our eyes. It is difficult to see and many of us tie our khafiyes around our faces and put sunglasses over what might remain, the Secret Agent Bedouin look. Yet still we have sand in our eyelashes and constant pain in and around our eyelids.

We persevere. Only to subject ourselves to it once more in the afternoon.

Our schedule is intense. We awake at 4am, have breakfast at 4:15 and arrive at the tell by 5. We work till 9:30, take a half hour break, then hit it again until 12:30. Lunch is at 1:30 and we rest from 2-4, then work again, either in the ‘lab’ or back out at the site, often until 8. Dinner is at 8:30 and I try to go to bed not long after 9. Many of the younger set stay up, drink the whiskey they brought from Aleppo, and smoke the nargileh.

I set my workers in 34 to their task and spend most of my time giving the students a feel for the excavation and what is expected of them. They are keen to learn but are having difficulty with the wind, as are we all. We decide to move the spoil heap to the east so that we can make sure to have a true 10x10 meter unit over the scraps of what Op 42 had been in the past year. Now it will be squared up and make for a true unit. Here, however, the tell originally sloped heavily and we had been placing dirt from excavations in the region for years. Now it has to come down and this type of soil is particularly loose, adding to our sandstorm.