Thursday, August 23, 2012

Wrapping up the 2012 Season

Today (Wednesday, August 15th) we swept out Areas AA and BB for final photos.  Afterwards it was back to Ort Braude College to finish up processing pottery and lithics.  Tomorrow, everything has to be packed up for the return to Jerusalem.  It's hard to believe that 5 weeks have come and gone.  We learned a lot, we laughed a lot, we ate a lot of schnitzel and drank a lot of Jump Juice, and who knows maybe we'll all be back next year!

Drishat Shalom - Ma'a Salama

The Marj Rabba Team

Sunday, August 19, 2012

Teeth brushing on camera

Here I am sorting flint
The other day I was washing bones when a guy with a video camera approached us and started interviewing people. I didn’t expect him to be interested in what I was doing so I went about my brushing as if he wasn’t there.

It wasn’t until I had just started to scrub a huge chunk of bovine jaw that the man approached me and started to ask me questions. I agreed to his interview, and while holding onto half of a cow mandible I gave him my name, Francis Flanagan, and explained to him what I was doing.

Now I had never been interviewed before, and thus was pretty nervous about the whole thing. So I tried to be articulate as possible and did my best to speak as if I knew what I was doing and that I wasn’t a complete rookie. But really there wasn’t much to say about the situation anyway, I was washing off some bones and sorting them out, not exactly enough for a news article. Still I said what I could and let him get some close-ups of the jaw piece, a gnarled hunk of bone with every crevice crammed with mud.

He then left to talk to someone else and I went back to brushing cow teeth, hoping that I hadn’t made a complete idiot out of myself on camera.


and here I'm helping out with flotation