Postcards from the past: Pella finds

Tags

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: In the trenches at Pella

Tags

archaeology, in the trenches, Pella

January, 2001

My first job in the trenches is to knock down a Hellenistic wall using a pick. I chip away at fill to level off behind a string-line while large stones topple around my feet. Then I clear them away. After lunch I trowel out foundation fill, mainly pottery shards, but also a tiny piece of oxidised copper, and some minute pieces of flint. For the last 20 minutes I continue destroying the wall, keeping it cleanly vertical with a plum-bob.

I gradually learn that archaeology is another name for destruction. I bash away at a wall with a monkoosh and then clean up the mess I make with a hand shovel and a mustereen. I expose and smooth a silky grey surface: Electra demolishes it.

I become enamoured of my monster pit. There my job is clear: to delineate and excavate. It’s my pit, my familiar place, where I feel competent. After a Friday trip to Umm Qais I whizz back down to the dig site to look at it.

I’m not so competent when it comes to baulk-cleaning, where I have to be very sure nothing tumbles down to contaminate meticulous layering. I know I’m not good at this, so when Stephen yells “Straighten it up. It’s as round as a whore’s bum” I’m amused rather than affronted.

Sometimes I am snappy and tearful: I can’t manage the plum-bob; I crack the back of my fingers and make them bleed; and Electra calls me “Margaret”. Sometimes Maggie gives me a quick succession of jobs, none of which I have time to get stuck into. Sometimes when I clean a clump of rocks ready for photography, Steve says “Great job” and I suspect sarcasm. Sometimes it’s hard on the wrist: “scrape hard enough to make your wrist hurt” is Maggie’s standard.

But I become more agile, hopping around the trench as it becomes noticeably deeper, and gradually learn to yell “Bidi goofah” to summon a man to empty my bucket made from a recycled tyre. Try to do it myself so I don’t have to shout orders, and they glare at me. Sometimes four men line up, chanting as they pass the buckets along the chain.

On the second last day, it begins to rain. When I poke my head above the trenches at knock off time, I’m dazzled by the sudden greening of Tell Husn, till now quite barren.

Every time I look around the past is visible, and so is the meticulous task of unearthing it.

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Postcards from the past: daily routine on a dig

Tags

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.

Postcards from the Past: Tell Husn, Pella

Tags

archaeology, Pella, Tell Husn

9th January, 2001

We drive up the Jordan Valley, green, fertile paradise for vegetable growers. When we arrive at Pella we’re taken on an overview tour of the dig site which leaves me reeling: tombs, fortress trenches, the towering Tell Husn, and in the valley of the dead stream, Roman ruins, columns, a church, and a theatre. We pass the pottery dump, carefully marked on the map as such for the benefit of future archaeologists; the walls of a mosque; and an Islamic cemetery, where local children are still buried, giving them a direct route to paradise.

Our guide tells us they found two things today with “diagnostic potential”: a small shard with a Greek inscription, and the decorated side of what was probably a cult stand. We learn a crucial distinction: red dirt is ground dirt; brown dirt marks human additions. I become quite expert distinguishing dirt colour once I start troweling.

However, we don’t work on this first day. We cross the valley to Tell Husn, Mound of the Fortress, breaking a lock with a crowbar to do so. A stiff climb, boobytrapped by loose rocks, takes us past chamber tombs carved in the hillside between 64 BC and 400 AD. We walk down worn stairs through a rock door that opens smoothly on a rock hinge. Inside are several niches, some still containing sarcophagi.

On the top of the Tell there are large level stone platform foundations that take us back to 3000 BC, earlier than Egypt’s Great Pyramid. In another area there is a large complex dating from 300-600 AD. The ground floor walls of stone are still there, but the upper storeys of mud brick and timber have gone. There are also traces of huge cisterns, a fortress, a grain depository, stables and a beautifully reconscructed Byzantine wall. We share the top of the Tell with a shepherd and his flock, and a Bedouin camp fenced with thorn bush. Although we didn’t see them, there are rich Bronze Age tombs on the slopes of Tell Husn, one of which had the skeleton of a servant at the door, legs bound by a huge bronze shackle: the other earlier one yielded over 2 000 objects ranging from gold earrings and copper bracelets to pottery and alabaster vessels.

At midday, the sense of ancient peace is disturbed by the roar of Israeli planes making a very loud statement overhead.

When we descend Tell Husn we look around the Roman Ruins in Wadi Jirm. The odeon is paved with red and white stones. With the arrival of Islam, missing paving was replaced by pieces of altar screen, sometimes made into a careful pattern, sometimes just a torn corner. A mosaic floor has been backfilled to preserve it.

Earthquakes feature in the history of this site. Once, two people were carrying lamps. The material of their clothes fused with their skin leaving traces of silk, undoing theories that these were the dwellings of poor people. Skeletons were also found with gold coins stitched into their clothing. There were signs of houses subdivided, as if times had got tougher, families larger.

When we return to the dig house we watch in the yard while the morning’s haul of pottery is sorted – handles, rims, bases, designs. Inside the pottery is divided into type by the dig director. The day’s finds are basketed according to material – flint, groundstone, ceramics, shell, and metal – ready to be assessed and catalogued and then redirected for cleaning, drawing, or photography.

Today I walked on 1000 years of human habitation and a million years of human activity. Information came in a deluge, and my chaotic notes reflect this. I’m not sure I’ve got any of it right.

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Getting ready to dig at Pella

Tags

Pella, site history, Sydney University excavations

1

“There are four rules that can’t be broken” says Dr Stephen Bourke, briefing volunteers (including me) for the 2001 season of the Sydney University dig at Pella in Jordan.  I’m uncharacteristically willing to hand over $2000 – and my unskilled labour – in exchange for the excitement, boredom and hard work involved in peeling back the layers of an archaeological site.

“Don’t speak to the trench supervisor for half an hour after work starts,” he continues.  “If it’s clean, khaki, or flies a flag don’t photograph it.  No hairdryers: use one and you’ll put out the lights of the whole village. Most importantly, Abu Sami rules the kitchen. Oh, and by the way, don’t worry about the political situation. You’ll hear gunfire across the river and Israeli bombers screeching overhead, but you’ll be perfectly safe.”

2

People have lived in Pella without a break for 8000 years. Traces of this history are everywhere. Centuries reel by. Neolithic farmers grow crops, care for animals and build houses. Bronze Age workers construct a vast temple-fortress. Traders offer inlaid ivory boxes, imported pottery, alabaster perfume bottles, objects overlaid with gold. Egyptians are eager to buy timber from the forests to make chariot spokes. The city becomes part of the Decapolis, on the frontier of the Roman Empire. Under Byzantine rule businesses do a roaring trade, churches are built, the population swells. Then plague, the silting of the wadi, and an Ottoman victory that puts it in Muslim hands: it becomes a place to stop on the route to Mecca. The Ottomans lose interest in it, except as a source of taxes, and earthquakes wreak havoc. After World War 1 it becomes part of the Kingdom of Jordan. It is bombarded by the Israelis in the Six Days War. In 1979, Sydney University joins teams already excavating there, and in 2001 I volunteer for two weeks as more work is done uncovering the temple-fortress.

3

Over the years, the Sydney University team has unearthed Neolithic housing (ca. 6000 BCE); Chalcolithic storage complexes (ca. 4200 BCE); Early Bronze Age stone defensive platforms (ca. 3200 BCE); massive Middle Bronze Age mud-brick city walls (ca. 1800 BCE); Middle and Late Bronze Age temples and residences (ca. 1800-1200 BCE); clay tablets in a Late Bronze Age Egyptian Governors’ Residence (ca. 1350 BCE); large areas of a Hellenistic city destroyed by war in 80 BCE; the theatre, baths and fountain-house of the Roman Imperial city (ca. 150 CE); three Byzantine churches and a Bishop’s palace (ca. 550 CE); an Umayyad Islamic city destroyed by an earthquake (ca. 750 CE); an Abbasid caravanserai (ca. 950 CE); and a Mameluke mosque and administrative compound (ca. 1350 CE)

Some of the significant finds so far: column drums, a 10th century BC door; 5 million seeds in a storeroom; a life-sized basalt head; cylinder seals; gold hoop earrings; lapis lazuli; Mycenaean ceramics; tiny faience tiles; early basalt vessels; pottery pomegranates; a lion libation pourer; the earliest Aramaic inscription yet found; seven cult stands; and a cow box for burning incense.

This season the plan is to dig the temple “madly” in an attempt to find out how it was built.

4

Two months after the briefing, it’s pick up time in Amman. The driver of the bus taking us to Pella comes in and introduces himself cheerfully. “We’ll be out of here shortly” he says. “It’ll take a few minutes to check the undercarriage for bombs and then you can start loading your bags.”

 

Map showing Pella

A view over Pella

 

Pella dig site map from Wikipedia

 

https://commons.m.wikimedia.org/wiki/Pella_in_Jordan#/media/File%3ATemple_Precinct_2007.jpg: photo by Ben Churcher

If you want to know more about Pella and Sydney University’s involvement:.

Detailed history of Pella from Wikipedia

A brief history of the site, written by Ben Churcher who has been involved with the excavations for many years and is currently the field director at Pella

Conversation with a Pella archaeologist. The Pella part of this interview begins at about 9.58

Conversation with Dr Stephen Bourke, dig director in 2001 and for many years before and after

Daily life on the dig

A photo album of the dig 2011

Wikimedia commons gallery

 

 

This is background to the next series of Postcards from the past.