Timna Time!

Hello to all my followers!I hope everyone is having a good February and enjoyed the Super Bowl Yesterday. In this post I will share with you my experience at the excavations in Timna in which I participated for ten days. This post may get a bit long, so bear with me.

Timna Valley and King Solomon's Pillars

I spent the last week of January and the first few days of February at the Central Timna Valley excavations. Timna is located about 30 kilometers north of Eilat in the Arabah Valley. A rich source of copper, the area has been home to copper mining and smelting for over 5000 years. Extensive mining and smelting remains exist from the Late Bronze Age, controlled by Egypt, and the early Iron Age around the 10th century. Timna is also famous for King Solomon's Pillars (an eroded sandstone formation), other interesting-looking sandstone structures, as well as the Hathor Temple.

A slag mound

This season the excavations were being conducted at Site 34, also known as Slaves' Hill, and at Site 35. Slaves' Hill is a large hill in the middle of the valley with a surrounding wall, a gate house, smelting installations, and other features. The date of the site is placed within a 150-year period from the early 10th century to the middle 9th century BCE. The top of the hill is covered in slag mounds, deposited there by the smelters during the process of creating metal copper. Slag is the stony-glass waste left over after the ore has been smelted. Site 35, located a bit south-east of Slaves' Hill, is an open area in the valley dotted with rectangular structures and small slag mounds. Site 35 is tentatively dated to the Late Bronze Age, around 1300 BCE.

Site 34/Slaves' Hill

Timna Park, run by the Parks Authority, is a well-equipped camping area that hosts tourists year-round. They have small tents, large tents, and cabins, a gift shop and a restaurant. There is also a reconstruction of the Tabernacle built by the Israelites in the desert. We stayed in the cabins, which was an upgrade from what was expected. In the other seasons everyone stayed in the tents, so we were all very happy for the accommodation change.

Our daily routine began at 5:30 every morning, when we would wake up, get ready and pack our day-bag, eat a quick piece of bread with chocolate spread, drink a cup of coffee, and drive to whichever site we were working at that day. By 6:15 we had already started working, either preparing an area to begin excavations or already digging. Sometime between 9-9:45 we stopped for a proper breakfast, which consisted of sandwiches of either cheese or omelet (alternating by day). We took another break a little before noon to have a fruit snack, and then finished the morning's work at 2pm. After getting back to camp we ate lunch provided for us in the restaurant, and then had an hour of rest.

The copper mines

At 4pm we went back to work processing our finds. This involved sifting and sieving buckets of dirt that had been brought back from the field, as well as picking through the separated materials for small finds such as seeds. After several days some of us also began packaging the dirt into small containers that would then be shipped to different labs for analysis. We did this processing until it was time to go for discussion, which occurred any time during the six o'clock hour. Each evening a different veteran of the excavation presented their scientific research to the rest of the group. We had lectures on archaeomagnetic dating, optically stimulated luminescence, stone tools, and other aspects important to Timna's history. After the discussion some people went to bed, while others stayed up for some time hanging out and talking before turning in.

The first few days I worked at Site 35, in an area of the excavation square named the 'animal pen'. The area was a large oblong space surrounded by a wall, too wide to be covered by a roof (hence its identification as a courtyard or pen). I worked in this area along with several other participants, and we found a decent amount of archaeological material. After several days at Site 35 I was moved to Site 34/Slaves' Hill, where I worked at the gate house sifting dirt. Friday I was working back at Site 35 opening a new area of excavation.

Hathor Temple

On Saturday we had a more relaxing day, doing a ground survey of the area around Site 35. We spread out in rows and systematically walked areas collecting finds such as stone tools and pottery. This activity is important for identifying new areas that may be excavated in the future. Saturday afternoon we had a tour of important sites within Timna Park. We visited the Hathor Temple, some of the mines, and Site 34/Slaves' Hill. The Hathor Temple is an Egyptian and Midianite shrine dedicated to the goddess Hathor, who was the patron of mining and smelting. Nearby is a hieroglyphic inscription on the cliff-face depicting Pharaoh Ramses III worshiping Hathor.

I ended the ten days working on Slaves' Hill in an excavation probe. The probe was a small square on a hill opposite the main excavation site at Site 34. The square had been opened the previous season, but in the last three days a few of us cleaned up the erosion and finished the excavation down to bedrock. We found two man-made features, but nothing else very exciting.

That basically sums up my ten days excavating at Timna! I was so happy to be properly excavating again. I met some really cool and professional people, made some great friends, and learned a lot about archaeological science. I'm so thankful to have had the opportunity to work with Erez Ben-Yosef and his team. I'm looking forward to coming back for the excavations next year!

The Central Timna Valley 2016 excavation team

Attached here is the link to all of my photos, for those that don't look at or don't have Facebook. It includes all the photos I've taken while I've been here in Israel, including some of the less spectacular ones that I choose to omit from publishing on Facebook. The link will work no matter how many photos I add, so saving this link will always show you the most up to date files.
https://www.dropbox.com/sh/rzg8dgcag9yjjx7/AADeP0ft-J6r_xxApFqm7p1xa?dl=0