Stone and Bone

Greetings all. Again - apologies for not uploading any images. I am still having intermittent access to the internet here in the desert (suprise)...so bandwidth is at a premium. I will be in the town of Madaba this Thursday/Friday - so hopefully I'll be able to do a proper update at that time. For now - here is a quick update.

Excavation is proceeding slowly as we all get used to the site and the nature of deposits. One thing I can say about this Epipaleolithic site is the fact that I have never seen so many lithics in one place...the ground is riddled with them and I am hoping to get a picture to you soon. We have finally finished cleaning operations in our various fields of excavation and have begun to excavate down. Today we found a bit of "mother of pearl" which had been carved to have "teeth" along one side. Basically, someone about 15,000 years ago was at the Mediterranean Sea - brought this bit of shell home to Kharaneh (or traded for it) and fashioned it into a piece of jewellery. When you think of it that way - its pretty amazing. As for the other artifacts coming out of the ground - the title of this post says it all - stone and bone.

I had to come into Amman today to pick up some other crew members - its about 1.5 hours from Azraq and along the way I picked up a couple of army hitchikers. Its the thing you do here - those who don't own cars, bum rides from everyone else. It was nice to have someone along for the ride, we were able to communicate in my broken Arabic and his broken English. Like all Jordanians, once he found out I was from Canada he immediately responds with "I want to come to Canada"....well, why wouldn't he....Canada is a great place. I warned him about the cold.....but that had little effect, so who knows?

I have to go - heading back to Azraq via the Jordan Plastic Factory to pick up some red crates for storage.....allways an adventure!