Where we sit to draw pottery is out in what’s known as the “open-air museum”. Basically, the took a bunch of random statues/column bases/pillars that they found in the temple during excavation and tossed them into a huge open area next to the temple where farmers called “sebakhim” dug up the “sebakh”, or super fertile soil that results from the ancient bricks being made from nutrient-rich Nile mud. The sebakhim can be terrorists for sites, but the nice thing about them doing it to our tell is that we can already see the ancients layers (sometimes down to the bedrock) so we know where might be good places to dig. In the picture below, you can see the mudbrick in the distance. The whole area from where I took the picture to that wall back there (which holds the bakery I was talking about a few days ago) would have been built up. Hope that makes sense. Basically imagine that you come home from work to find your entire neighborhood has been filled with dirt up to past the roofs and someone has started digging holes into the dirt (some bigger than others) to find the houses. Sometimes they go down and hit a roof, sometimes they dig all the way to a front porch and you can see the whole house in the hole. Now imagine that each section of the house (roof, 2nd floor, ground floor, basement, etc) was a different time period and that’s what we have.
Anyway, as you can see, now there’s this open-air museum. You can’t see it from the entrance and it’s kind of hard to find unless you know it’s there. Either way, tourists still make their way out to it, and, subsequently, out to where we work. Thankfully, this year we brought some signs explaining the site so that we pottery workers (everyone else works up on the tell behind us and to the right- the people in the right of the photo are looking at all the workers up there) don’t get a ton of questions all the time. We also were able to put up come caution tape so that they don’t come bother our stuff. However, it does make me feel a little like a zoo animal. Especially when they take pictures as if we want to be in all of their trip albums.
- Monkey in a cage
PS. I texted Dan to tell him I feel like a zoo animal. He responded that I was the prettiest exhibit they have. I have the sweetest husband!
