Hi everyone,

This has been a busy week. First, it's been beautiful weather, the tail end of a long spring blessed with some late rains, so the flowers kept on coming. I was not happy about having to go back to the office after two weeks of vacation outdoors, but there was a huge pile of work on the desk. Took me a couple days to clear it away, just chugging along.

My new graduate student from Holland needed to be settled into work, so I used that as an excuse to take the train north to the Carmel, where he is working on biodiversity data in the park Ramat HaNadiv. Admired the wild hollyhocks along the way, which are clustering along the sides of the road. In Ramat HaNadiv I met the student for the first time face to face. He's a nice guy, a slender Dutchman with freckles and curly blonde hair (the local girls will love that), alert and bright, but shy. The manager for research at the park (which does a lot, since it is funded by the Rotschild family) met with us and had him squared away within an hour: desk space in the offices, transportation to and from the park to home, contacts for getting around, and a first excursion to get familiar with the park set for later afternoon. Liat, the manager, is one of the best administrators I know in Israel, which is one reason I opted to focus some research on this park.

I'll be seeing a lot more of Ramat HaNadiv in the next few months, so I'll describe it. The park is actually in Ramat Menashe, the hill country just south of the Carmel massif, and is adjacent to Zichron Ya'akov, one of the earlier modern settlements in Israel, started by Baron Edmond Rotschild. It sits on a hill overlooking Caesarea, and in fact there is a Roman palace and aqueduct that collected water from the springs of that area and fed water to Caesarea in Roman times. About a quarter of the park is landscaped garden, but the rest is the natural forest and maquis of the region. It is very diverse and beautiful. There are about 30 different monitoring programs going on there, and it is a partner in the Israel LTER (long term ecological research) network. I've been holding workshops on botany, vegetation and habitat mapping there for years.

So David Jobse, the student, is started but will need a lot of guidance, so he comes to Jerusalem this coming week to meet with me and my EBONE project team, and we will also meet at Ramat HaNadiv a couple weeks after that, to decide on how the work progresses. This will continue for two months, and then David moves to Jerusalem to focus on the analysis end. I was able to get him a zimmer (guestroom) near my house, so I'll be able to supervise him and he has help nearby. Nice arrangement although it may be a stress for a hermit like me.

The next day was one to which I'd been looking forward a long time. Our staff archeologist has a dig going for a few weeks at Antipatris, also known as Aphek. This is a park which is also our Central District headquarters, and they had landed a grant from the Rotschild Foundation (yep, same family) to extend the excavations there. It's a fascinating place. Once the seat of the Egyptian governor in Canaan (pre-Philistine), it developed well during the Classical period uner Roman rule, and we've found a Cardo (the main street of a Roman city) and other amenities of Roman life. The current dig is on a structure that was first called a theater, but is too small, so it is now being called an Odeon (which was roofe, in contrast to a theater, and used for musical events). Then they found piping that looked like water for baths. (Our archeologist is joking that maybe they had baths with music.....)

My job was to dig in the area under what had been the stage platform. It was the first time I ever was on the pickaxe end of an archeological dig, and I wanted to see what that's like. That's like hard labor on a road gang, let me tell you. I was swinging a pickaxe or using a brush, depending on the material under my feet. Sorting through and pulling out the pottery shards and other artifacts, putting them in separate collecting bucket, an putting the rest in endless buckets to be hauled away and dumped. I was doing my square meter in the classic way, with the archeologist coming by regularly to check on me.

At one point he decided I needed a break and he decided to teach me how to sort the shards which I'm finding. Mostly late Roman/Byzantine shards. There were pot rims and handles, which we saved and the rest got dumped. But there were also bits of roofing tile and fragments of a taboon, or oven made from pottery, and we also foun some slag. Not that the Romans were smelting under under the theater platform, but the place was used as a dump after an earthquake destroyed it in the 4th Century, so it had all kinds of stuff. Not very sensitive because it's not "in situ" so he could put a beginner there.

But I had such fun as well as physically working my little butt off. We were in among the Roman arches and tunnels, and I was learning a lot very fast. I wanted to get on this dig because I have in the back of my mind to delve into archeology when I retire and wanted to know if I like the practical side of doing a dig. Yep, I do. It's hard work and I don't know how fit I will be in ten years, but whatever I can do, I'd like to do it. Some parts are a lot easier than swinging a pick; washing and sorting the pottery, for example. I find that part very soothing, rather like knitting or something. And as you grub around in the site, it does start to make more sense to you. The archeologist pointed out to me some features of my corner that were odd, and I hadn't noticed after a morning working on it. Like, the arches had solid stone support on the outer end, but only stone fill on the inner end, which didn't look very stable. (Shoddy buiding practice in the 2nd Century??). Trained eyes. I have it for landscape, so I can respect it in his work also.

Yeah, this is something I'd like to do in later years, and I think I have the right mindset to do it. This would get me outdoors, stimulate my mind, and there is always work for old farts that don't have a lot of physical strength. But it is nice to know I can work like a Beduin even at age 55, swinging a pick and hauling buckets of stones and dirt. Nor was I exhausted or stoved in the next day, as I expected. It's healthy work, in fact, and used muscles I don't often use.

That's it for now.

Shabbat shalom,
Linda

If I am not for myself, for whom shall I be?
If I am only for myself, what am I?
--Akiva