Day 1

Hi All. I have finally had a second to sit down and write this blog entry. Its been a hectic few days as always seems to be the way when we start the project. After spending a relaxing morning in Jerusalem doing some site seeing, including walking the Jerusalem walls, Lesley and I made our way to Jericho and the hotel which we will stay for the next few weeks. Its a lovely place which has great food and is very comfortable and took full advantage to relax when we got there.

Mahmoud, the dig director and the students from Birzeit University arrived a little later and we met with old friends and new ones. Later in the evening two students from UCL, who had completed their masters only recently, also joined us, after spending a full day travelling. A couple of beers and a catch up later and it was time to get an early night. At the moment the team is quite small., m, mainly because Birzeit University is in the middle of exam season and some of the students are busily finishing off. So far we have myself, Lesley and the two MA students, Mauro and Talfan from UCL and Mahmoud, Noura, Hussein and Jad from Birzeit University with Alaa, a student from last season joining us the day afterwards. This year we also have Mohammed, a GIS specialist from the Palestinian Department of Antiquities on the project, who should hopefully help us combine al the data from the last few years.

Day 1

The first day as always was a matter of reacquainting ourselves with the landscape and introducing the new members of the project to what we have done over the last few years. We started exploring the springs for the aqueduct of the palace and hiked some of the sections of the aqueduct that we uncovered last year, as well as a possible large settlement that we identified last season through surface collection of pottery. the pottery recovered tends to suggest that this tell may be contemporary with the aqueduct and therefore the palace. We continued our tour over to the area of the reservoir that was surveyed in the first season and where we are planning to excavate this year. To the east of the reservoir lies a small building with the remainder of a vaulted ceiling which may form part of one of three mills that are shown on the historic mapping of the area. We had another good look over the site and figured out where was the best place to put some trenches. The rest of the afternoon was spent looking at the aqueduct by the palace and re-examining possible locations where the aqueduct entered the palace complex.

The evening was spent enjoying dinner together as we do every day and have some introductory lectures in the evening by Mahmoud who summarised the work done over the last four years and Lesley who showed everybody the extent of the survey work done in the last two seasons.

Tomorrow we will head over to the Reservoir site and prepare for the start of our excavations. More tomorrow!