The Millennium Shrimp

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Remember, this is the Internet. Just because you’re not the type of person who would sell your grandmother to Russian gangsters for a dollar doesn’t mean there aren’t a thousand and one other people out here who would. (Sell your grandmother to Russian gangsters that is, and probably their own as well.)

This email was good. No spelling or obvious grammar mistakes. The only warning signs were (a) the sending email address (billing@customerdata.com) and (b) the fact that they attached an html form for the user to fill out. The html document was encrypted and wrapped in a javascript tag. NOT GOOD!!

Advice to novice bloggers: “Blog early and often; volume matters. Don’t think; do.”

Oh well… so much for being the next super star blogger It’s been over a week since I’ve been back here in the States and I haven’t posted anything.

The flight back was fairly uneventful. I did some last minute shopping at the airport duty free store while waiting for the flight. I didn’t sleep much on the flight back even though I woke up at 4:00 to see the dig crew off in the morning. We landed in Chicago around 4:30 pm on Saturday and I stayed over night there before catching a morning commuter flight back to Ohio on Sunday morning.
Getting through the airport in Amman is always an interesting adventure. The taxi driver dropped me off at the wrong terminal, which isn’t a huge deal. The other terminal is across the street. (The airport is probably only slightly larger than Akron-Canton). The security restrictions are different than they are in the US. You have to call 72 hours in advance to re-confirm your ticket and showing up three hours in advance is definitely recommended. I went through two security screenings before I even got to the airline check in counter. After checking in my baggage, I went through immigration and then into the duty free shopping zone. The Duty-free shops line the walkway connecting the two terminals and you’re not allowed to go through the last two security checkpoints to go to your gate until a few minutes before they start boarding.

Ironically, O’Hare felt like more of a foreign country than the airport in Amman. A lot of Jordanians either live in the US or have family that live over here and they tend to speak fairly good English. (At least the people around the airport do). In contrast, I got on the airport shuttle at O’Hare and the driver is from somewhere in South Asia (India/Pakistan) and everyone else on the shuttle was Japanese. And then I go to McDonalds and the girls behind the counter are babbling away in Spanish.

So, today I started handing over C8, the square I supervised in 2004, to a new excavation team. It’s a big hole in the ground, but I have fond memories J (C8 refers to Area C, Square 8). The weather wasn’t nearly as hot today, it was overcast most of the morning and actually slightly humid.

Originally, the plan was that I was going to revisit the probe I dug in 2004 for the week that I was here, just to find the bottom of the 8018 wall, which they were interpreting as a Phase 1 wall. But now we’re looking at another wall, and another couple of features we can’t really interpret. So, Jesse and Suzanne have decided that the square needs to be expanded. So, it looks like Molly and Catherine will be digging there the rest of the season instead of just a couple of days. So far we haven’t pulled out much in the way of pottery, but that will probably change. Tomorrow I’m going to show them how to draw top plans and the bulk profiles. (Bulks are the “walls” of the excavations). I also need to finish writing up my notes for the daily summaries and start the weekly summary for Molly.

It should be interesting to see what they discover this season. It’s beginning to look like this could challenge how Jesse and Suzanne were interpreting the stratigraphy and occupation phases in Area C, which could possibly delay the publication of their first volume, which was supposed to happen this summer.

This evening I re-confirmed my plane ticket with Royal Jordanian. I have to be at the airport at 8:30 am on Saturday. Saturday will be a very long day. I’ll have to leave the hotel around 7:45/ 8:00 to get to the airport by 8:30. The flight leaves at 11:30 am and gets in around 5:00 pm Chicago time. I’m going to overnight in Chicago and fly back to Akron-Canton on Sunday morning.

Well, time for bed.

Another day in the dirt. We finally came down on the black plastic that we had laid at the bottom of the test probe before backfilling at the end of the 2004 season. We thought we were past that point on Monday. We had taken levels (vertical depth of the excavation surface) and one level had come out significantly deeper than what I had recorded at the end of the previous season. So we started cleaning up the floor and found the black plastic yesterday afternoon. We finished scraping that off this morning, took photos of the unit, and then started digging under the 8022 surface. I had described the 8022 surface as a possible flagstone pavement, and everything we’ve pulled up since then seems to be consistent with that. Generally, there seems to be two layers of stone with a very dark brown, silty loam with possibly ash content and some Nari pockets sandwiched between them. We haven’t been pulling artifacts out of the layer, just some of the ubiquitous chert shards that are all over the site. (The local stone is limestone with chert nodules and the walls are all built out of the stuff.) We also have exposed more of the 8023 “rock pile” which is looking more and more like the cross-section of another wall. Perhaps the most interesting thing we’ve found so far was on the bottom of the one rock we pulled up. There are four indentations that look almost like mortar pits for grinding grains, although they are on the smallish side.

Jerry said that today was “very warm,” which translates to 107 degrees Fahrenheit. It felt like it. “Hot” for Jerry is around 117 J I’ve been drinking 3 liters of water and 1 liter of Gatorade out in the field. For second breakfast (archaeologists are related to hobbits) we’ve been having the Bedouin flat bread, Lebanese Mountain Bread (a large leavened flat bread, similar to a pita, but baked directly on the coals), falafel and cucumbers. To drink, Mahkmoud brings Bedouin tea, which has a different taste to it, similar to what’s called Chai in the states. Mahkmoud volunteered to provide breakfast for the dig this season. I think he buys most of it, but his wife prepares the Bedouin bread.

A few quick photos

Me with Fawwaz’s GPS unit on the ridge across from the Tell.

Khirbet Iskander, from the ridge on the other side of the Wadi

Some kids from the local village

The destroyed Desert Culture cultic installation

Thursday was fairly uneventful. Hung out at the Mariam Hotel with Paul and helped get stuff organized. The advance team went out for dinner again, to the Dana (pronounced Dahnah). We met Faisal, a relative of the owner who was visiting from Omaha, Nebraska. He works for Ebay. Sometimes it’s amazing how small the world is. We also met with Zaid to ask if he could find us a bus and driver for work days.

On Friday I went along with Jim and Fawwaz to find the RJGC benchmark and put in a new datum on the site. We will also be putting in datums on the two ridges opposite the RGJC benchmark. These should allow us to integrate our legacy data with survey work done in the past two seasons. We got back in the middle of the afternoon.

Friday, the main team arrived. Louise got in around 4 pm. She and her friend flew in from Cairo, where she’s living now. She’s working on her PhD in Egyptology at the University of Durham in England now. She’s examining dental hypoplasia in animal remains from a site in the Nile Delta, I believe. Her main research focus is on understanding the impact of anthropogenic sources of stress (like moving animals to market, etc) versus more natural things like lack of forage due to drought. Dental hypoplasia is a condition where animals (and humans) have striations (fine lines) on their teeth caused be tooth growth halting due to lack of proper nutrition.

The rest of the crew arrived around 9 pm. Several people from the last group were back: Jerry, the retired Foreign Service Officer from Arizona, Susan Ellis, the long time field supervisor. There was also quite a diverse group of students, grad students, and volunteers. We have a retired nurse from the Bronx in New York, a Danish master’s student who is studying at the University of Uppsala in Sweden.

Saturday was a long day. Jim, Jesse, Jerry and I went out to the site in the morning. Sort of a frustrating day, we didn’t make much visible progress with gridding the site, but we sorted out which transects were the “old” ones and which ones align with the current grid. But the day isn’t all bad. I found a TV station that carries the Simpsons, in English no less!

On Sunday the plan was to be at the Mariam and around Madaba for the day. Slept in late on Sunday and got to breakfast around 9. We had a small church service at 10:00 am. I wanted to attend the local Nazarene church, but their services were at 7 pm and I didn’t make it back in time. At 10:30, the field crew had orientation but I ran some errands in town. Hiked across town to the old dig house and Ziad’s shop next to St John’s (the Catholic church) to give Ziad the writing we wanted for the tag stamp. We couldn’t find the stamp we had used for our tags from 2004, so Suzanne and Jesse asked him if he could find anyone in Madaba who could make one. He took me across town (back the way I had come!) to the printers. The print shop was in the basement of this building, completely unmarked. Then I went to the main drag of tourist shops beside’s St George’s Church (the Orthodox church) and bought some souvenirs. Got back around noon and Suzanne and Jesse were back. They were going to go out to the site to meet Fawwaz. We get out to the site and the first thing we see is brand new road that someone has bulldozed through a circle of standing stones. We were planning on excavating the area this season to determine whether or not it was a cultic site associated with the Desert Culture. I’ll blog about it some more tomorrow, but for now I need to get to sleep. I was out at the site until 8 pm and then got up again at 4 am for a full day of digging today.

Posting photos soon!

Finally got around to moderating my comments, so you should be able to see them now. Got out to the site this morning with Jim and Fawwaz. Took some pics, but my camera’s batteries died (well, they were the ones that came with the camera…). I’ll try to post some of them later. Back in town now. Field crew should be arriving this evening. The dig is getting up to speed.

Food is always one of the highlights of travelling to Jordan. The first night here, we ate at the hotel restaurant beside the pool. I had the Shish Tawook, grilled, marinated chicken, along with a cucumber and tomato salad. They have a specific name for it but I don’t remember it. I think they washed the vegetables in salt water, the dish was fairly salty. We also had Baba Ganoosh and Humoos and plenty of freshly baked pita bread. Dinner at ACOR was a lamb meatball in a tomato sauce served over rice, and baked zucchini. At the Pizza shop I went with the Kebab, which was served with a traditional unleavened flat bread.

We’re always scouting out the cheapest places to buy bottled water. At the hotel a 1 ½ liter bottle of water costs JD 1.00 (roughly $1.40 US). Across the street at the liquor store it costs 50 piastres (JD 0.5). The dig is buying water from a local supplier for JD 1.00 per 20 L. I drank 2 1 ½ liter bottles of water yesterday, in addition to several glasses of water with each meal. The water we were served at dinner last night tasted funny so I switched to a diet coke.

You have to be extremely careful with the tap water in Jordan. Locals will drink it, but they’ve grown up with it and don’t get sick from it. D’Angelo and Suzanne were reminiscing about their experience with securing access to clean water in the mid-eighties, when they used to camp on site. At one point they were told that water pipes had been laid out to the area from Dirban (the nearest town) and so people were using that to brush their teeth and take showers. Turns out the pipes hadn’t been hooked up to the Dirban water supply, so the water they were getting was straight from the Wadi. Several people got violently ill (from using un-boiled water to brush their teeth and take showers) and had to be taken to the hospital. The tap water in town is relatively safer, but it’s still not something you want to drink.

Which reminds me: what’s the best way to tell you’re in a Christian neighborhood in Jordan? The presence of liquor stores. Sort of an interesting contrast to the US. Jordanian Christians (predominantly Roman Catholic and Orthodox) traditionally operate the distilleries, wineries, and breweries as well as stores and restaurants that sell wine, beer and liquor. Since it is an Islamic country, there are no such things as bars and you’re not allowed to drink alcohol outside of restaurants and private residences.

Wednesday, May 29^th. Got up around 6 am local time, head down to the lobby to use the wireless network and check email. Today we’re headed to Amman (the capital) and ACOR (the American Center for Oriental Research). ACOR is sort of the mothership for American archaeologists working in Jordan. They help with coordinating logistics, cash, rent out equipment, and provide storage space for ongoing projects like KI. They also have a really good cook and great coffee. Mostly, the first couple of days is mainly about paperwork, getting dig permits, getting the camp set up (we have to order water deliveries, figuring out sleeping arrangements for 30 odd people), and figuring out what equipment we still have from last season, what we need to rent from ACOR, all that good stuff. We also have to re-establish the grid, which won’t be happening until we get official permission to dig from the government.

We took a cab to Amman in the morning. The cab driver spent a great deal of time yelling into a cell phone while driving. But, it was actually a fairly sedate experience, compared to what Amanda has said about cab drivers in Equador. Amman is a fascinating city, mainly because it’s so westernized. Driving into town along the highway, you’re visually bombarded with advertizing for KFC, Hardees, Popeye’s, and half a dozen other American fast food restaurants. There was also a latino restaurant, Pollo something or other, that I didn’t remember from 2004. To me, the most interesting part is that you see restaurants like Popeye’s, which you don’t really see much outside of the southeastern United States, not just McDonalds.

We had dinner (lunch, but the main meal of the day) at ACOR and then got back to Madaba around late afternoon 3:30-ish. I took a nap until around 5 pm and then went downstairs to see if I could figure out how to configure the hotel’s wireless network. For supper we went to Haret Jdodna, or as Iskanderites usually call it, “the pizza shop.” The name in Arabic means something along the lines of “court of our ancestors” or something like that. It’s in the courtyard of an old stone house from the early settlement period (1880s-1890s).