When you find yourself in a hole...

Keep digging. Though not too far as you might go through the 1960s backfill and into the Severan-era (late-2nd century AD) sandfill.

This week we started to really open up the other half of our trench. To our happiness (and more to the point, to LMW's happiness), we found lots of floor in the new section. Intact floor means that we have a perfectly-preserved (or at least in theory) stratigraphy below the floor, which will allow us to better date the building stages of the synagogue complex. This is really cool because that's essentially the entire goal of the dig--settling on a precise dating for the various stages of its growth (not finding the Ark of the Covenant). There was, however, a chunk of the section that did not have a floor near the surface; this was stuff that was dug up by excavators in the 1960s and not well-documented. So Tony and I set about to dig. And dig. And dig. When we got a meter and a half down, LMW informed us that we had gone through the backfill and into the ancient sand. Not very cool, but whatever was in the Severan era sandfill was not going to tell us a lot about the chronology of the site because (a) we already know that it's from the Severan era and (b) it was not preserved under a "hard seal" like a floor.

Today we set about cleaning up the walls (I like the idea of cleaning dirt) so that we could get some nice pictures with the camera of what we do have. I was finishing up my cleaning (the trench is deep enough only for one person to work comfortably at a time) when I struck something hard. I wiped a corner off with my trowel and it didn't move. I carefully troweled off what I'd found and saw that I'd found a rather sizable chunk of serpentino marble...which was pretty cool

In the end, there wasn't much this marble could tell us--it was part of the fill which made it essentially ancient trash. Pretty trash, but still trash. But this excavation WAS able to give us a better look at the foundations and we puzzled over what they all meant this afternoon.

I'm including a labeled photo above (click to make things bigger!). So what we have is a pier that might or might not be bonded with the wall. We know that the wall is part of an opus mixtum a shell for the synagogue and we know that the pier is one of several running down the length of the room we're working in. When we dug down, we saw a crevice between the two which suggested that the two might have been separate construction builds. Moreover, under the foundation of the wall (a foundation done shutter-style...i.e. they built a small shell of wood to frame the concrete pour and then removed the wood when  dry) there is a recessed amount of concrete--a previous wall?

In the course of the afternoon, after probing and poking, we are pretty sure that the upper foundation joins with the pier foundation (which was made by digging a hole and pouring concrete directly into that) but that the shuttering would have been done somewhat later than the pier's foundation. As for the recessed portion? Probably a part of the main foundation; it's only like that because in the process of making the shuttered foundation, the builders would have dug a hole and then as the hole widened out at the top, they put in the shutters to control the width of the pour.

Ah archaeology. If it weren't so gritty and dirty, I might really enjoy it.