field trip

Alright, what's new with me? Let me think...Oh ya, yesterday I was taken on a field trip to visit the sites from which my animal bones come. Can you imagine spending months on end analyzing animal bones, thinking about how the animals were raised, killed, butchered, cooked and finally discarded, without having been to the sites where all this took place? Well, the excavator of one of these sites, Eliot, was nice enough to give me the grand tour of the Bet Shemesh area. We visited Eshta'ol, Hartuv and Horvat 'Illin Tahtit, and saw Tel Bet Shemesh and Tel Yarmout from a distance. We even went to the central warehouse where the vast majority of Israel's artifacts are stored. Eliot is in my opinion the world's leading expert on pottery from the Early Bronze I period, and at this warehouse, he gave me quick lesson on these ceramics as we looked at vessels from a couple of sites. Several people have been exceedingly nice to me during my time here, and Eliot is one of them. Living up to his reputation, he brought me back to his house where we had a nice lunch with his wife and grandson. He just may have to be the first person I mention in the acknowledgments of my dissertation.