Week Two: Digging Mt Zion
The second week of our summer season (June 22-27) was filled with much excitement and accomplishment. Our excellent team continued to bond together, gain skills, and exude great enthusiasm. As some of you know who have done a bit of archaeology, team members quickly become attached to given areas of an excavation and more or less lay claim to them, anxious to master all the features, tackle the interpretive problems, and advance the excavation efforts. Such was the case in our second week. We made tremendous progress in three areas and continued to find many valuable artifacts including fragments of stone vessels, fairly intact tops of pilgrim flasks, nails, glass, and lamp remains–plus thousands of pottery sherds, mostly now dating from the Byzantine and 2nd Temple periods.
It is always exciting to uncover a mosaic. Mosaics reached their full development in the 1st century B.C.E. and have become one of the hallmarks of archaeology in the Levant and Mediterranean worlds. Their development and history is quite fascinating. In previous seasons a patch of lovely colored mosaic floor that we believe to be Byzantine (5th-8th century A.D.) had been uncovered and preserved by the Israel Antiquities Authority. Much of it had been 
destroyed by later building but we were anxious to trace it under the area of soil along its edge which involved opening another square and removing two meters of soil. By all appearances it continued and was intact. Team members began talking on Sunday of how pleased they would be to reach their goal by the end of the week. The digging was careful but deliberate and enthusiastic, down through several loci or levels. On Wednesday the mosaic was uncovered and to our surprise it included a tiled sump for drainage and cleaning as well as a channel along the edge leading to a wall. It will have to be cleaned but we now have enough to really evaluate the floor and put it into the larger context. We celebrated the successful end of our task when the full mosaic was revealed and took lots of photos.
In our main open squares we continued to articulate and isolate the complex of walls and debris that appear to be Byzantine foundations over highly preserved 
2nd Temple period rooms. This is clearly the most immediately excited area of our operations at this point but the whole week was spent in carefully digging around what is there and only doing selective removal until we could understand the complex of stones and walls. Our plan is to remove the entire Byzantine substructure (it was what supported our mosaic above) in the next two week session and we will at that point come down into the 2nd Temple areas. We are of course all eagerly anticipating that prospect.
Up above these deep areas another team came upon a floor and a robber trench and spent the whole week clearing it. Robber trenches are found frequently at complex multilayered sites and are the result of later cultures digging down
into previous levels looking for stones to 
reuse. You can actually see the tunnels with their fill that are left behind, and trace them into the walls of stones left behind.
Once the tench was cleaned the floor was removed on the last day of the week of digging and immediately two lovely coins, in situ, were uncovered. A delicate bone hair pin was also spotted by our careful diggers who had become quite skilled at proper examination of sensitive areas. Such an item could easily be broken but we managed to remove it intact.
Over the weekend Gibson and I examined all our coins (100+) found so far that had just been returned from the Israel Antiquities Lab after cleaning and made some preliminary assessments. We have some exceptionally well preserved examples from almost every period, early Roman, late 2nd Temple, Byzantine, Crusader, and Islamic. We eagerly anticipate the arrival next week of Prof. Warren Schultz of DePaul University (Ph.D. in Islamic History from the University of Chicago), our famed Numismatist. He plans to dig with us a week, along with his daughter Amanda, as well as examine all our coins.