The WordPress.com stats helper monkeys prepared a 2011 annual report for this blog.
Here’s an excerpt:
A New York City subway train holds 1,200 people. This blog was viewed about 5,400 times in 2011. If it were a NYC subway train, it would take about 5 trips to carry that many people.
Apologies for not posting more frequently, but my time over the last few weeks has consisted of scanning pottery for 10-12 hours. My wife and kids flew back to the States at the end of August. So now all I do is scan every day. Angela’s brother had come out to tour around Jordan so we had a car for his time here. I kept it for a few days after to return whole vessels from Safut to the DOA warehouse and to explore the Baq’ah looking for some of the Iron Age sites.
I was specifically looking for the sites Pat McGovern had worked on in the early 1980′s, so I headed up to Umm ad-Dananir first. The khirbet McGovern worked on consisted of a small Late Bronze and Iron Age settlement within the small village of Umm ad-Dananir. Unfortunately this village has continued to grow over the last 30 years and I could find no evidence of the Iron Age settlement or perimeter wall. Its possible that I wasn’t looking in the right place and its likely that some remains still exist in backyards of the town. Despite not finding any ancient remains in this area it was my first time driving around that side of the valley. One has a direct view across to Safut to the south and towards the Wadi Zarqa to the north through the wadi cut. Its a very well protected ridge located where two wadis connect and run out towards the Zerqa.
After leaving Umm ad-Dananir I descended down to the valley floor and found Rujm al-Henu East and West. The two Iron Age “forts” are located in a field next to the huge satellite dishes. Rujm al-Henu West is not nearly as well preserved as East, but wall remains from each can still be seen. I picked up a nice wheel burnished, red slipped late Iron Age bowl rim and the rim of what looks like a Roman krater. These two Iron Age towers likely controlled traffic through the valley floor with the ancient road running between them, as well as acting as storage for the agriculture production being carried out throughout the valley.
Wall of Rujm al-Henu West
Corner of Rujm al-Henu East
It was very enjoyable to walk through the valley and experience the different perspectives offered, to imagine the landscape as the ancients would have experiences sans satellites.
I really love playing fantasy football and planned on only playing in one league this year. Somehow I am now in 3 leagues, two of which are drafting on the same day. Being in Jordan I will have very little time for my teams this year, but I thought I would pay homage to my current hometown. So, my team name in each league is “the Amman Citadels.” Here is the team logo I whipped up:
Temple of Zeus and Goal Post
I wanted to highlight some of the work I did for the last map from my previous post. One of my goals when doing the survey work was to get enough high quality photographs and corresponding GPS points to be able to georeference the pictures in Arcmap. Georeferencing is the process of aligning spatial data (in this GPS points) to an image file (in this case photographs of architecture). By doing this I can check previously drawn top plans of architecture and make adjustments or if I want I can use GIS Arcmap to draw new top plans. This ability is especially important because there are a few squares excavated where original top plans were never drawn. Below is a picture of the photographs from Area C georeferenced.
I have been extremely busy over the last couple weeks. I finished my survey work, scanned material in the Salt Museum, worked on getting my project report in to the DOAJ, and worked on my ACOR fellow’s lecture. All of this is now done and its back to scanning.
During the last few weeks we realized that the amount of pottery (115 crates worth) I have to sort is too great to finish in August and so I am now staying through October. So this last week was also taken up with changing my ticket (a huge process) and finding a place to stay. I found a nice little one bedroom near the University of Jordan. It has a small washing machine, a kitchenette, and wireless so I am all set. I will now be returning on the 30th of October (and then two weeks later flying out to San Francisco for the annual archaeology meetings).
One of the main things I was working on for the fellows talk and the department report were new maps for Safut made using the GPS points I took during the survey work. Below are two maps, the first showing the areas excavated (compared to the original site map) and the second showing the possibilities of the software with georeferenced pictures of areas A-C and the perimeter walls highlighted.
New Site Map
Old Site Map
Yesterday I completed my survey work at Safut. With the help of my wife Angela (and kids) and James (a fellow fellow) we successfully took pictures of areas A, B, C, and L using a boom camera setup.
We took off from ACOR around 6AM and finished taking pictures around 1PM. I had to take GPS readings on points we marked throughout the pictures areas and I didn’t finish until 3PM. A long but successful day. The purpose of marking points within each picture area is to georectify the pictures in ArcMap later. This allows the pictures to be aligned accurately for photomosaic purposes, for easy comparison of drawn top plans, and to actually draw new top plans if necessary.
Over the week of my permit I was able to set up some new control points on the tell (tied in to the UTM 36N grid, which is the most accurate designation for this part of Jordan), mark out the areas excavated, map the visible walls, create a new topographic map, and take pictures of the main excavated areas. Now to process everything. Tomorrow I am off to the Salt Archaeological Museum to take 3D scans of the whole vessels located there.
Friday I setup a new grid at Safut using the GPS RTK system we use at Tall Jalul. Saturday I planned on walking the site and gathering points to make a new topographic map, but the GPS rover unit would not communicate with the base station. I spent four hours trying to fix it. Eventually, with the help of my friend Matt back in the States, I realized that one of the radio channels had been switched from 10 to 0. I have no idea how this happened, no one should have any reason to change the channel. In any case, that afternoon I mapped all of the areas that had been excavated and yesterday spent 10 hours walking all over the site for the topographic map. I calculated that I walked over 3000m in distance and elevation change. This afternoon I will (hopefully) finish taking points for the topo map, I just have the very steep slopes down to the wadi left to walk. Tomorrow I will map the architectural features at the site and be almost done.
The slopes on the right are what I must traverse today.
For a nice account (with pictures!) of an afternoon working at the site see my wife’s blog.
I am between touring around with my parents and sister, and beginning my survey work on Friday so there has been no time for blogging. Just wanted to stop by and give a quick update.
My parents and sister flew in for 8 days and we spent the time touring all over Jordan, from Jerash and Umm Qais in the north to Petra, Wadi Rum, and Aqaba in the south and everywhere in between. We all had a great time, saw a lot of great sites, ate a lot of delicious food, and were all quite exhausted by the end.
Of course, the next day I had to give a presentation at the Second Annual Regional Archaeology Conference in Madaba. The point of the conference is for all the different digs that are in the field during the summer to get together and share what they have been working on. Even though I didn’t dig at Jalul this season, everyone from the team left Jordan about a month ago, so gave an overview on phase 1 of excavations at Jalul (the first 10 seasons) with a focus on what was excavated this season. Other digs that gave talks included: Wadi Zarqa Ma’in, Tall Madaba, Tall al ‘Umayri, Tall Hisban, Wadi Thamad Project, and Dhiban.
This morning I went to the Department of Antiquities and picked up my project permit. It was very exciting to have in my hands. I was amused to note that I am apparently Dr. Owen Chesnut on the permit, hopefully in a year en shallah. Friday I begin working by setting up a new benchmark and control points on the summit of Tall Safut and then Saturday and Sunday I am walking the site with the GPS to create a new topographic map and outlining any walls.
A couple weeks ago I received a text from one of my Jordanian friends “I was wondering if you would be interested in looking at a really old Bible looking book my uncle came across.” I was intrigued and told him I would be happy to take a look. He emailed me a picture and I recognized the object immediately:
The tablets in this picture look remarkably similar to the “lead codices” made public a few months ago. Those tablets are largely considered by the scholarly world to be forgeries. However there is still some debate being carried out on their authenticity. So, despite my first assumption that these were fake as well, I thought it prudent to do some investigating. I was invited over to the home of the uncle who lets say “dabbles” in antiquities. I went hoping to look at the tablets, take pictures, and attempt to find out more information about their origin. My friend took me to his uncle’s house and we had a very nice visit with good food and homemade wine (which was quite tasty).
Unfortunately the tablets were no longer there. The person who was trying to sell them (9 tablets for 85,000 JD!) had taken them back to show to another potential customer. Apparently this customer was not willing to give two of the tablets back and had somehow been shot in the leg and was now in jail. Now I might have some of the details in that previous sentence wrong, but the uncle was speaking a combination of English and Arabic (and the more wine and scotch we had the worse his English got). I think the meeting went quite well and before we were ready to leave the uncle admitted he had a disc with pictures of all of the tablets. But with a twinkle in his eye he said those were for next time. As we were driving back to Amman my friend apologized and said he would try to get the pictures for me, but also said that his uncle really liked me and would tell me more about the man trying to sell them next time.
Hopefully I will have more to say on this subject in the near future. And hopefully I will have a complete set of pictures of the tablets as well.
If anyone has insights as to the inscription on the tablet pictured above please let me know.
The past two weeks have been void of writing. The time has been spent scanning and drawing pottery full time. I’m afraid the remainder of my time here might take that form. However there are still plenty of sentences to pick from, so here we go.
The recording system used by the Tell Safut Project differed from its first five seasons to its last five seasons.
During its first five seasons a simple recording form was used, which was a variation of the forms created for the Tell Heshbon excavations carried out by Andrews University in the 1960’s and 1970’s. This form included basic information such as “progress of excavation” and “locus description” allowing for narrative recording. There was also a second sheet for “associated pottery.” During the second five seasons the Tell Safut Project used a version of the Madaba Plains Project recording notebook designed by Larry Herr. Unlike the old forms, these new forms contained many detailed prompts for filling out data. Unfortunately if the person filling out the information isn’t properly trained or properly supervised errors occur and details are left out. These things happened repeatedly in the excavation notebooks.
