July 6

Tuesday, 6 July, the pace in square 7K23 picked up! This thrilled Anita especially. K'sigh moved over to help Rainbow in her square, and we kept Aboud and Shak'er busy. Shak'er found many ways of annoying the team, with multiple breaks, complaints of a tooth ache, and worst of all smoking in the square (he sat on the balk and puffed away) then putting out the cigarette in a full dirt quffa. The cigarette incident, multiple reasons to leave work, and a sour attitude did not spare him from Anita's attention. She made sure that he had constant meaningful employment. We're just glad he doesn't know where we sleep, because her thoughtful care for his steady industry seemed to make him unhappy enough to track us down.

Amjed, a worker from another field, created a mini-break when he handed out fresh cucumbers. After polishing mine against my shirt, I crunched away. No ill side-effects. Yet.

Graeme started to bottom out. Unlike the local workers, he is not paid. And, unlike the college students, he is not getting class credit or working on a paper. Several times throughout the day we worked at side by side sifts. "Graeme, I'm proud of you," I said. "What for?" he asked. "This is hard, hot work and you're keeping up with most of these college students," I said. "I'll never forgive you for bringing me here," he said without looking my way. "I'm prepared to live with that," I said. However, in spite of this, he continues to collect and correctly use an astonishing assortment of Arabic words and phrases. Early on the workers dubbed him "Prince" because he wears glasses like the prince of Jordan. (This means my name is "Mother of Prince". I'll settle for Queen.) He likes the nick name and clearly enjoys interacting with people on the site. Graeme also cheerfully works on pottery washing every afternoon, exchanging remarks and quips with the group. I don't think he'll be scarred.

Remember Mutual of Omaha's Wild Kingdom? We have a small glimpse of that every once in a while on our square. Early on we rescued a lizard from our balk. Today, Amjed brought around seven small snake eggs cupped in the palm of his hand. Sorry, no pictures. Later, I worked in the breakfast tent with Audrey on a notebook check and heard commotion. A small snake was caught and released away from our field. Ants make regular appearances and a pale version of potato bugs make it into the sift. The occasional spider crawls out of the rubble and of course flies (not too many) seem to know when second breakfast arrives. Wednesday, the 7th, we had bees (no stings) and a ginormous "camel spider". Ugh!

Ken took a few more pictures of pottery tables since that is what we're really all about.

Tuesday & Thursday evenings lectures are presented for students and anyone else interested. This Tuesday groups visited the object/artifact room. Suha explained the process for recording items, Audrey talked about pottery washing etiquette, and Jillian gave a brief overview of photographing important finds. Then we moved to the computer room. Matt talked about GPS and GIS technology use on the dig. He is also responsible for setting up the open source Umayri database which he explained and showed to us. Finally, Larry took a few minutes to show us the program he wrote for cataloging information from the dig.