By Emily Corrigan

The Jezreel Expedition started out for me with an extensive tour given by Norma Franklin. I was surprised by how much history and archaeology is in one tel region! I was also surprised by the amount of new people, there was about 20 of us that had never been here before. A comforting notion for someone who has absolutely no field archaeology experience. After the tour we made our way down to the area that would be dug during this season. A larger more level area and a smaller more inclined one. As luck would have it I was assigned to the sloped one. Which was no problem, but then through the process of digging we found a massive ant hill. This put a halt to our digging and kept us on guard for little critters trying to bite our ankles. Of course nothing we can’t handle!

 As we started taking off the top layer of soil, we were coming across tons of pottery. For someone who hasn’t done this before it was the coolest thing ever! Someone made this pottery hundreds maybe thousands of years ago and now I’m holding it in my hands. This new found excitement was dulled as the morning progressed and we found more and more shards of pottery and I had to get up and out of the square to put it in the pottery basket, but still cool nonetheless. One of the things I was most worried about coming on this trip was that I was going to hate field work and have to pick a whole new career. However I think from these past few days I can safely say that I made a good choice and I’ll be sticking to it.