Pottery Lecture

I didn't know it at the time, but pottery was about to become my life for the duration of the dig. 

Two Israeli women, Revital and Batami, came from Ben Gurion University with Gunnar as our pottery experts. The three of them can tell a lot about a piece of pottery from the smallest sherd (a shard is glass, a sherd is pottery). 

The first day we collected 30 buckets of pottery. Said pottery has to be washed before it can be studied.

When we get off of the bus, we are to bring the pottery and other finds to the patio where someone else will soak them. Often the beauty of the piece does not appear until it gets wet. Be careful not to put clay pieces in buckets of water or they will turn to mud. Likewise bones should be kept in a separate bag and not soaked.

Each bucket is labeled, and must be kept apart from the others. The label is transferred to the strainer.

 They are put out on tables to dry.

They they are brought inside to photograph. 

Some are quickly returned to the Tell. Others are labeled. Gunnar decides which ones are keepers and which ones are tossers (later known as Shit or Hit).

After the dig, the women will take it to the pottery lab at Ben Gurion -- a seemingly magical place located 3 1/2 hours away by car. 

The vast majority will end up back at the Tell.

The original plan was for each group to wash their own pottery. This way everyone would become excited about seeing their finds come to life. That didn't work out as some groups found more pottery than other groups.

One thing that was failed to be mentioned was that during the day Ahlam and her mother, Fahrah, washed buckets of pottery. The six groups maybe did two buckets each in 90 minutes, leaving 18-25 buckets for the fifteen-year-old and her mother to wash.

Two thoughts on the Arab ladies:

1) They were very hard workers and shattered my preconceptions about Arabs.

2) The volunteers at the dig site had no idea these women were washing pottery and thought they were doing it all. Clueless?