Dr Nicolae Roddy arrived at Bethsaida for the beginning of Session 2 with 14 volunteers, mostly students from Creighton University, among them his daughter Aurelia, age 15.  Dr. Roddy had first  been in Jordan taking pictures for the virtual World Project (http://www.virtualworldproject.org/) This group of fresh volunteers have been working Area A west, among the complex of Roman structures inside the city just west of the main city gate.  See this area in the aerial photo below.  Great finds have been forthcoming there, including several oil lamps fragments, iron nails, fishing weights, iron spear head?, Roman juglet top, Roman glass, & a small bronze coin; probably Roman.  The coin was soaked in lemon juice (mildly acidic) for a few hours, which cleaned off most of the encrusted dirt, but its still quite difficult to see the coin features.  The coin will have to be cleaned by coin specialists to see what kind of a gem was found.

Excavations during week 3 in one of the structures began yielding what appeared to be a small window, but now that the diggers have taken out part of the stone base of the hard packed floor it appears that it isn't a window, but its a quite narrow door, closet or a niche.  Stone wall are appearing, whose purpose is not evident right now. Stay tuned for next week's report to see how these pan out.

Lots of buckets of rock were removed & each & every bucket of dirt was sifted.  The sifting process is quite laborious, but essential as a number of the finds such as the nails, fishing weights & Roman coin were discovered in the process of sifting.  Consequently, we see that each step of the excavation process is important; removing the dirt & rocks, sifting the dirt, washing the pottery sherds, then "reading" them the next day with Rami. 

It seems that the volunteers can work all week & just take out an enormous amount of material with not too much exciting to show for it; that is no special finds or structures appear.  Experience has shown that this is essentially preparation work for the next week/weeks work, because as they get to lower elevations there is more likely hood that important & interesting things will turn up.  Some time it's the next group that gets the advantage of the previous group's hard work.  Since most of the group digging this week will be continuing during week 5, the preparation work of week 4 will hopefully yield them many fine "fruits".

 

               

             Pictures can be enlarged by going to the photo gallery & clicking the  desired picture.          

               Note : Interesting archaeology blog - http://archaeologydigs.blogspot.com/