3500 year old jaw bone.

Dig this jaw Bone!

Netta the anthropologist on the Ashkelon dig is holding a jaw bone from the Canaanite tomb we were excavating. She extracted a molar from it to send to the lab and get DNA for study. It dates from about 1500 BC.

The rest of that skull can be seen in the blue tub. We later glued it back together. So cool!  

Dear Dig Firends

Here are two dear friends from my Petra dig in 2002. Lin Hammond, wife of the Director Philip Hammond and Eudora Struble the Field Supervisor. I am still in contact with both of them. They are sitting on the front steps of the Edom Hotel where we had our headquarters. We were waiting for transportation to the dig site.

Painted Stones

Many of the stone walls of Petra were rough uneven and unsightly. To make them look good the workers put heavy amounts of plaster on the walls and drew in the stone blocks to make the wall look neat. Some of the walls were so uneven that the plaster in places were almost a foot thick. Workmen still do that to some degree.

I had some work done on my house and noticed some big cracks between joints. I asked the workers about the cracks in the wall. 

Their reply was, "That is why they make painters putty." Sure enough they filled the cracks with putty and painted over the error. Some things never change.

Caged Art

Here is a follow up picture of the caged art and you can see  how much has been chipped of and damaged over the years. There is also smoke damage from cooking fires. You can see why it had to be protected.

Take Lots of Pictures

One of the things we do during a dig season is take lots of pictures. I am so thankful for the invention of the digital camera. I took hundreds of pictures and did not have to develop any of them to see them. It was so easy to shoot and then look at the picture. If it was a bad shot I deleted it and retook the photo.

In this picture my friend Eudora is taking a picture of two thousand year old art work. It is behind bars to protect it from tourist who use to remove small pieces of it. Grrrr.

Survey The Dig

The first week of the dig included the job of doing a survey of the dig site. All of us took our turn with the equipment. Our starting point was several survey markers placed by official surveyor's when the dig began. Then we checked the markers placed by the previous dig team.

Only then were we ready to set the markers for our dig.

I chuckle to  notice how clean and fresh our clothes were. That was about to change when we started digging in the dirt.

Digging In Petra for missing pieces

As I look at this picture that I took in 2002 I remember the excitement we felt after we found this column stone in this place. This was actually the base for the column that once stood there. We did not however find the rest of the column so the question is "What happened to it?"

This is not all that was missing. Most of the stones that made up the walls were also gone. But where?

In 363 AD an earthquake shook Petra and this temple shook apart. By that time most of the people in Petra had converted to the new religion, Christianity. Just up the hill from this temple is a big Christian Church That was built some years after the big earthquake. The fact that there were a lot of precut stones just down the hill was attractive to the builders. Much of the old crumbled pagan temple became part of the Christian Church in Petra.

That practice happened all over the Roman empire.