First Day in the Field

This shows how we have the site laid out into a grid, each square has a letter and number designation, just like the game Battleship.

Our fearless leader Dr. Jerry Mattingly giving directions at our excavation site at Mudaybi

Hello from Karak,

We had our first day in the field today. Up at 4AM, breakfast at 4:30AM, Depart at 5AM. We left in the dark, then in Umm Hamat we picked up our local workers. Our main job today was getting our squares (the areas we excavate) in shape. After 8 years there is a great deal of windblown debris in the squares.

We are going to work in 7 squares at first. When we finish one (we finish by reaching bedrock) then we will start another. This might be our last season of excavation, although I hope we can return again, so it is important that finish all of the squares we begin.

Everything got under well today. Clean up is mostly finished so tomorrow we will get into some new material. I spent all of my time working with our surveyor Paul Mabry. We hiked all over the site looking for benchmarks so we can reestablish the grid of the site. We have laid out the the entire in squares, so we can keep track of all the objects we find and data that we generate.

After lunch we worked in camp, getting our pottery table setup and cleaning the plastic crates that we had in storage, so we can use them to store the pottery and artifacts that we unearth this season.

This evening we had a "church service".

Tomorrow we start early again.

John Wineland
Karak, Jordan