Humayma April 21-May 6 Part Four

We excavated at Humayma for only two short weeks, so we needed to bottom out onto sterile soil in each of our trenches within a few days in order to finish everything. So we chose to excavate small-sized squares of 2 x 2 meter or smaller. But once excavation had proceeded down beyond a depth of a meter or so, it became progressively difficult to get in and out of the small squares. In one of Steve’s squares the unexpected appearance of an early-phase wall reduced the amount of space to move around in to a small wedge.

Steve in his square

Anja and Ilse in their square

We back-filled each of our squares after we finished. We would put some modern artifacts at the bottom of the trenches to let any archaeologists working here in the future know clearly that the soil here had already been dug up. Anja and Ilse had both participated in an excavation in Iran a year ago, so they had an Iranian coin to put at the bottom of their trench, which will puzzle some future excavator.

The big find of the season was the intact reliquary in one of the churches. It had survived undisturbed by the recent illicit digging on all sides of it. The reliquary stone was badly cracked, so we had to remove it with care in order to keep it from breaking up. Wrapping it up with duct tape did the trick.

Moving the reliquary

The day we removed the reliquary a sandstorm hit that was so strong that we had stop work early. The next day I discovered to my chagrin that so much sand had gotten into my camera lens so that it no longer worked properly. Fortunately that was at the end of the season, so my camera malfunctioning was not a big problem.

A general view of one of the churches taken with my now defective camera.

One other interesting thing we did was to make a video of each of the excavators explaining the results of their trenches. The videos were taken with Steven's video camera. Unfortunately the sound quality left much to be desired. But having the excavators explain their trenches is such a good idea, that it would be worth doing with a higher quality video camera.