Postcards from the past: Umm Qais

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Jordan, Umm Qais

January 2001

Umm Qais was the second Friday excursion from the dig at Pella. Our route was along the Jordan Valley, armed with our passports because we were so close to Israel, but a seller of cos lettuce directed us up a very steep windy road, past a dam and olive trees instead.

Umm Qais, fortress and frontier town in ancient times, is now an extensive suite of ruins, with a view to the Gollan Heights and down through haze to the Sea of Galilee. We entered the ruins through an Ottoman village of black and white stone. The columns in the ruins included basalt, not the creamy pink of Jerash. I went through an arch which was in fact the vomitorium of a basalt-seated theatre which was being reconstructed. The top rows were a jumble of stone.

The cardo paving was quite intact, with clearly defined wheel ruts, and grass growing through the paving. It was edged with marble supporting columns. The arcade of shops with squared lintels was very similar to the souq in Damascus, although more regal in stone.

A large stone door, opening on two round stone hinges led into an underground mausoleum, with burial niches still containing sarcophagi.

We ate lunch – mezze, chicken and chips, and a can of beer – on a terrace with a spectacular view, the sound of goatbells the musical accompaniment, and then drove back along the Jordan Valley, past flimsy guard posts, and very close to the traffic travelling Israeli roads.

For a much more detailed look at Ajloun, Jerash and Umm Qais, read Cathy’s account of her adventures, and revel in her wonderful photos.

Postcards from the past: Pella finds

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archaeology, Jordan, objects unearthed, Pella

January 2001

The day before my dig experience at Pella began, a couple of things are found with “diagnostic potential”: the side of what was probably a cult stand decorated with a pattern; and a small piece with a Greek inscription. This prepares me for the minuteness of discoveries and knocks on the head any Tutankhamen’s-tomb fantasies I might have had.

My first trench excitement happens as I’m scraping out the pit in XXXIIG. Something the size and shape of a broken paddle pop stick emerges from the dirt. It is in fact shaped bone, polished to a gleam and is worthy of its own plastic bag.

Some days there is a lull for volunteers as the local workmen move piles of dirt. This is a chance to see what is happening elsewhere on the dig. In the next trench they’ve just exposed two loom weights, in a small room which may have been a loom room. In another trench, the lid of an amphora, more complete than any others found on this site so far. One trench is particularly giving: a ceramic horse’s head; a female figurine with poked-hole nipples; a broken but reconstitutable vessel; a piece of faience; a couple of scarabs; an iron knife blade. Abu Khalifa found a tiny blue frit bead – the trench men have eyes like hawks attuned by long practice to notice impossible things as they wield their picks.. In my trench, in my pit, a bowl. These are all designated “plot objects”, up to 100 of them halfway through this dig session.

Sometimes trench work seems pointless, scraping away, thinking I have a pit, only to be disappointed. No treasures for me. The sharp-eyed pickman is the one who finds treasures: a couple of loom-weights, and an almost complete juglet. Eventually I figure out that I’ll be happier if I give myself a goal – this square, self-designated, and now that.

The tedium is broken by a summoning cry: a basalt grinder and a grindstone; half a basalt bowl; and half a basalt ring; a copper alloy pin; and one day a huge piece of column being moved 20 feet down a slight slope by half a dozen men with crowbars, everyone gathering to watch, applauding as it’s angled upright against a baulk.

One day, large shards, emerge from dirt in our trench – a pot, about 900 BC, the time of King Solomon. One of the volunteers unearths it and the dreaded Maggie takes over “Because I want speed, not because I don’t trust you, or because I want honour and glory.” Oh, no.

Another day, as the trench foreman begins wielding his pick he exposes signs of a partially unbroken 12th BC pithos (a large storage container). The design around its neck may have been the imprint of rope. After pottery sort, three of us return to the trench until sunset to retrieve as much as possible: a whole base, bits of rim and handle, and heap of shards as big as my hand. This excavation urgency is to make sure no marauders helped themselves to bits and pieces when the site is unwatched at night.

The sorting and classifying of finds is in the hands of the experts. Each day’s haul is basketed according to materials: flint, groundstone, ceramics, shell and metal. Then it’s assessed and sent off for cataloguing, cleaning, drawing and photographing. Potential museum pieces are identified: good stuff stays in Jordan, but duplicates might end up in the Nicholson Museum at Sydney University.

Sometimes after work I return to the site. I watch the dig draughtsman as he draws the top of a piece of wall to scale, and look around taking in the site of 8000 years of human history. It is peaceful on the hillside in the late afternoon sun, absorbing the feeling of this place of Roman theatres, Byzantine Churches, late Bronze Age and Iron Age temples and administrative buildings, and towering Tell Husn.

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Here’s another version of life on the Pella dig, with excellent photos.

Postcards from the past: daily routine on a dig

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archaeological dig, cleaning, Jordan, Pella, sorting

My series of Postcards from the past came to a sudden halt a while back, mainly because I reached a point where I had plenty of memories, but no images. I’ve decided to deal with that hiccup by means of a words-only interlude.

The story so far: in 2000 I was a paying volunteer on an archaeological dig at Pella in Jordan, with a team from Sydney University.

There were three aspects of the work I did on the dig: cleaning a variety of finds; sorting the morning’s haul; and action in the trenches. I have photos of work in the trench, but for some reason the camera didn’t accompany me when I was cleaning and sorting.

Inside work

On alternate days we worked inside, or around the dig house. My first archaeological job was at the cleaning table, toothbrushing bones in water: camel or donkey teeth; a small lower jaw; some brown marbled bone; and heaps of slivers I didn’t dare discard. In the midst of bone I came across part of a small ceramic oil lamp. I cleaned mud from its spout gently with a toothpick.

There were two unexpected jobs. One was poking holes in cheap plastic sieves. The other was the manufacture of cotton buds: we sat there, intently winding cotton wool around a matchstick. We used the buds to clean glass with ethanol. This required deep concentration: the glass was delicate and often sharp. In my pile, there were a few very fine clear fragments, some with a subdued opalescent surface, some with dirt-filled tunnels below the rim; and a few heavy green bits. One piece stood out: a beautifully shaped handle, green with long swirls of red.

More energetically, we relocated boxes dating back to 1984 from between two mud brick walls, forming a chain and working in dusty camaraderie. I absconded before we were too deep amongst spider-webs, beetles and scorpions, fearful of the legendary camel spiders that gnaw hunks out of camel humps.

Pottery sorting

After a morning in the trenches, buckets of shards were lugged across to the yard of the dig house and emptied one by one onto mats for sorting.

Steve, the dig director, circulated, keeping an eye on volunteers and offering advice: “That big heavy clumsy piece is a tile. Keep it: it’s complete” or “That green piece there with rounded ribbing stays. There’s nothing else like it in this lot.” I was anxiously meticulous, until Steve explained the process in rigorous scientific terms: “Look at it. If you think that’s one of those, chuck it on on that pile. If it looks much the same as the other stuff in the pile, that’s where it belongs.”

All painted pieces qualified for keeping, as did any piece at all distinctive or unique. At the end of the session we counted the discards and dumped them in the pile outside the compound, carefully mapped as a scrap pile. When we left the dig, we each souvenired a few shards.

This work was necessary and sometimes exciting, but the trenches were where the real action was.

Backpacking in Syria and Jordan, 2000: background

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Jordan, Syria

What am I, a woman in my mid-fifties, doing, lugging a backpack around Syria and Jordan on my own in 2000?

I’ll tell you. I’m trying to keep up with my family. 

J is walking the scenic rim, guided by a mud map and a snake, and sailing a boat across Moreton Bay – he’s never sailed before.

H and his mate (and dogs) are exploring the tip of Cape York.

S has just embarked on fatherhood.

F and her then partner are packing their pushbikes for a ride through Borneo, Sarawak, Bangladesh and India.

R is picking tomatoes manically to top up the budget so she can cycle alone through Laos, southern China, across the Sinai, through Jerusalem, to Sardinia, via Paris.

And me? I’m living a banal, routine life, going to work and coming home (mind you, sometimes that’s three days later.) I settle down with the Saturday paper, and suddenly I’m on full alert. Sydney University is looking for paying volunteers to go on a dig at Pella in Jordan. That’s me. Always interested in archeology since reading my uncle’s books as a child. In funds, because that same uncle has just left me money. Familiar (sort of) with travel in the middle east after three weeks in Egypt a few years before.

So I apply, face the interview, get my teeth and appendix checked, and feel secure in the thought of travelling with the group.

Until I settle down again with the Saturday paper. This time I open the travel section, and I’m confronted by a full page colour photo of the Treasury at Petra viewed through the slit at the end of the siq. That photo! Well, I think. Nothing daring about hopping on a plane with a group. What if …? And before I know it, I’ve booked flight to Syria and extended my stay in Jordan.

That’s how I end up in Damascus, backpacked and travel weary, muttering the mantra against my terror: “Other people do it: why not me?” There’s my hotel, the Al Haramein, just up that alley. A man accosts me offering to carry my bag. I say “No thanks”. He lunges and tweaks my nipple. I say “Get out of it.” He disappears. I feel my self-confidence expand: if I can deal with that, jet lagged and in a strange place, I can deal with anything.

On my first morning alone in the Middle East I make my way to the ancient covered market and walk under ruined Roman arches to the Umayyad mosque with its striped walls and unreadable Arabic calligraphy. I sit on the cold marble of a decayed fountain and watch the orange juice man throw water over his uncut oranges; boys playing shuttlecock, old men drinking tea, boys cantering on horses decked in bells, cars moving through impossibly narrow spaces. Then the haunting call to prayer.

That night I ditch my go-go-go itinerary, because I’ve discovered the pleasures of following my nose and of pausing. 

Such is the personal background to my next series of Postcards from the Past. The other unspeakably awful background is the destruction and death taking place in Syria now, which make my blithe reminiscences seem almost indecent.