I
had to leave the tour with my friends in India early because I needed to get
back in Jordan for the start of an excavation season at Ghor al-Safi.
I
arrived back at ACOR in Amman on Wednesday November 20, but I only spent one
night there before going down to Ghor al-Safi the following evening.
On
Thursday November 21 I had time in the morning to do only a few things before Dino
Politis, the director of the excavations in Ghor al-Safi, picked me up. We did some
shopping before going to the airport in the evening to pick up two other
participants in the project. It was a challenge to fit all four of us, our
luggage and lots of groceries into the small rental car for the two-hour
journey to Ghor al-Safi at the south end of the Dead Sea.
The
dig team stayed at the Museum at the Lowest Place on Earth at the foot of the
Lot’s Cave monastery site, where I had worked with Dino during his excavations
there starting in 1988. I had last joined Dino for an excavation season in Ghor
al-Safi in 2004.
The
museum at Christmas time
This
season we had come to continue excavations at the main Byzantine and Islamic
urban site of Khirbat esh-Sheikh ‘Isa located in the south area of the Ghor
al-Safi oasis. The core members of the project were Dino as director and Alex,
Ana, Andrew and me, with several others who came for shorter periods – Anni
from Greece, Peter from Australia and his wife Penny who worked as registrar in
the museum, Mario, who worked with me for a week, and Tony from the UK. Dino
used our group photograph as a Christmas card.
Our group photo
Quteiba,
a surveyor with the Department of Antiquities, came for a few days at the end
of the season to take elevations and photographs with his boom.
Quteiba
taking photographs
We
employed twenty local workmen who were generally the best I have known in
Jordan; I usually had four or five workmen with me each day.
The
workmen who were with me most of the time
Two
of my overachieving workmen
Our
normal work schedule was to arrive on site at 7:00 am, but that was still well
before sunrise, until the Jordanians ended summer time on December 20, so we
die not really get underway for a while. We had a break between 10:30 and 11:00
and finished at 2:00. In the afternoon and evening we would put in a few more
hours doing notebook work and processing pottery and other finds.
We
worked six days a week with Fridays off. We lost two days due to high winds
that made work on site impossible, and so I had a total of 24 days of work in
my trenches.
The
excavations in Ghor al-Safi had two components this season. The first was the
Mamluk period sugar factory and the other was the main urban site of Khirbat
esh-Sheikh ‘Isa across the road, where Dino has been directing excavations
since 2002. I excavated in the Khirbat esh-Sheikh ‘Isa site in a building that
can now be identified as a Byzantine period church with the first phase of
post-church occupation dating to the Abbasid period, with later major phases of
occupation in the Fatimid and Ayyubid-Mamluk periods.
The
depth of stratigraphic deposits down from the surface to the level of the
Byzantine church was three meters. That depth made it awkward to get in and out
and clean up for photographs.
A
workman brushing away the last footprints in my trench for a photograph
Khirbat
esh-Sheikh ‘Isa is a rich archaeological site, and we found our share of museum display
items. The prize in my trench was an intact marble post that was part of the
marble furnishings of the church.
The
marble post and the six workmen who managed to get it out of the three-meter
deep trench
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