Pottery Reading and Tel Dan

One day per week a team stays at the kibbutz and washes pottery sherds and is trained in reading pottery.  In the lab (an old bomb shelter) our resident pottery expert examines what we have found and trains us.  Here you see our group dividing the pottery into different groups based on use and finish (cookware, fineware and storage (which is thick and less elegant).

Lunch is eaten in the factory worker's cafeteria. Lunch is a meat meal, while breakfast is usually a cheese/nonmeat meal for us here.

 

Our meat is often something breaded or wrapped in a filo dough, but of course never cooked with butter. We have a choice of a variety of vegetables (often tomatoes and cucumbers figure prominently)and ususally potatoes and rice.

Fridays and Saturdays food is often brought in from outside since it is Shabbat.

We also took a short field trip to a nearby tel. (A place that probably originated as a fortification and had many groups successively inhabit the area - building up layers of social deposits. )

Tel Dan is a nature reserve with some old settlements that have been ham-handedly conserved and reconstructed. There is an area called the  "High Place" where King Jereboam supposedly built some buikdingsand erected the golden calf.

 

The nature reserve grounds are beautiful with many palms and figs and some nut trees.

 

 

There are a lot of fauna (The Cairo Spiny Mouse, the broadtoothed mouse, thte fire salamander and Tristram's Jird (a kind of gerbil)), but I saw none of these - but there is a picture below of the Spiny Mouse. (From wikimedia - the Spiny Mouse: (picture taken by Olaf Leillinger on 2005-08-13)

 

 The area was fortified recently too and one element you could visit was a bunker / command post look-out.

The most interesting remains were those they did not try to reconstruct.

 

There were many other  buildings on the site including a 150 year old flour mill, and several ancient gates.

 

After our trip to the nature reserve we returned home to the kibbutz for dinner. I have been collecting more fuzzy animal images and will add a few here. Some are from dinner time and some aref rom yesterday's breakfast.

This is the Palestinain sunbird nest outside my window.

Here is the best I can do in terms of a picture of the Palestinian sunbird itself.

 

Yesterday morning I saw this spider on my door (about thumbnail size.)

 

We saw ferrets while eating breakfast and then on the way back to my room I saw these parrots fly to a nearby tree. 

 

And here is a very happy Kibbutz dog!