Week 1 Tall el-Hammam

After the first week of excavations in the monumental Roman building process is slow due to many obstacles such as mounds of night digger dirt and shrubs growing around the site.  Most of our efforts were confined to preparation of the site and establishing benchmarks and squares. We have had heavy equipment for the last two days in the Roman area provided by the Jordanian Department of Antiquities to move some of the contaminated piles of dirt that have been dug up by the night diggers and local farmers over the years.
Two of my Canadian students arrived this week and are anxious to get started on excavating the Roman building. We will open up two squares to begin this season 15A1 and  14A1 with 15A1 proceeding with after preliminary work. So today we had a full crew (10) and things started to get serious. We found a plaster wall, coin and a beautiful jar today.  The heavy equipment as in a front end loader and has made life alot simpler. While this is not the way one does archaeology it saved us many hours of relocating contaminated soil.