Day 17-19: Beginning of the End

Sorry for the delay in posts. The last three days have been tiring. Monday followed the same pattern as the other days on the site. We awoke early, ate breakfast after a couple of hours of work on the site, left by noon to avoid the sun and so forth. Tuesday also followed a similar pattern except for one minor detail. Around 11 a.m. a sandstorm began and forced us to leave after 40 minutes of attempting to continue digging. The best way that I can describe it is that it was like snowstorm...but with sand. Our eyes were watering profusely, and we were coughing violently. I luckily had my kaffiyeh on and was able to cover my mouth and nose, but the wind had a sneaky way of unwrapping it from my head. When our directors decided that it was getting too bad to work, they pulled the plug, and we called it a day.

Today followed a similar suite as our other days. Today, our square director decided that we had dug down far enough (around 1.8 meters--not a small feet for four people working in a 5 x 5 meter hole). We spent a majority of the day sweeping, cleaning, and straightening our baulks in preparation for the taking of publishable photographs tomorrow and Friday. Our square was so deep that we had to lower one another in and pull one another out. It made for some fun and sometimes interesting times.

With the dig coming to a close, I am already preparing my trip back next year. One of our dig leaders (she broke her ankle at our Wadi Mujib hike and has not been able to make it to the field with us) is returning next year to dig at her old stomping ground--Petra (one of the Eight Ancient Wonders of the World!). It would be a blessing to be able to dig there and to continue learning from a group of people that I have come to respect greatly.

That is all I have for the day, but if you will allow me, I would like to share the topic of one of our professor's lectures with you breifly. Every night, we have a lecture from our dig leaders and on Monday night, Dr. Byron McCane spoke to us about archaeology and the Bible. He taught it through the guise of a troubled relationship--two endeavors that continually try to unite but two endeavors that continually fail to connect with one another. One relies on the examining of textual evidence to discover truth; the other relies on physical remains to discover truth. Please note that I am not dividing groups into Christian, ahtiests and other religious groups. Each faith tradition has representatives on both sides of the argument. Dr. McCane suggested that we need to stop relying on one or the other but use both in our quest to discover the past. It is an interesting argument that many of us have experienced. Books such as The Da Vinci Code add to this debate as they add their own ficticious arguments into the popular world of religion. It is becoming harder and harder to weed out the good from the bad, and it is becoming harder and harder for good professors to make their work known.

I have much more to say on the topic, but I am going to get a quick nap in before the US dominate the third game of the World Cup. Thanks for reading.

Brad