Welcome back to my fabulous blog everyone! I hope you are ready to hear about the work I have done and will be doing this week, because I'm ready to tell it. It might be a little short, but enjoy! In other news, how about that World Cup? I've been trying to watch as many of the matches as I can, but because of the time difference they are usually really late and it's hard for me to stay up watching and wake up early for work. Spain and Portugal's crushing defeats, Argentina, Italy and the US's close victories. I can't wait to see more!
There is one important thing I would like to mention. Due to political and secrecy concerns I am unable to talk about or show the location and nature of my work for the past week. I have removed all of these details from my previous blog posts and cannot elaborate further. Sorry for any inconveniences! Sunday and Monday were the last days at my previous site. These days consisted of cleaning up the site, removing some of the scaffolding and artificial construction, and gathering up all the tools and equipment.
Today we (the team I was working with and will continue to work with) started working at a new location. Now we are doing conservation work on a 3rd century synagogue in a kibbutz near Bet She'an. The site is inclosed in a makeshift building to protect it from the elements and human hazards. The synagogue has some pretty cool mosaics, but we're not working on them. Today we did consolidation and covering of one part of the wall of the building, called coping. Capping the top of a wall helps give it stability as well as help protect it from erosion.
The process of coping starts off with cleaning and wetting the top of a section of the wall. Then lots of mortar is put on the surface. Stones are then placed into the mortar, and excess mortar is removed. The mortar on the edges around the stones are cleaned and smoothed to make it look good, and finally dirt is thrown onto the mortar to make it look older and more natural. The stones we used were all original stones found at the site that had been removed either during the excavation or other conservation works. We added one course of stones to the top of the original wall, making it a fairly flat surface. First we put large stones on the border of the wall, then the opposite side. Finally we filled in between these two lines with smaller stones.
Nothing else is new with me here in Bet She'an. The apartment is still wonderful, and I am enjoying my work. Soon I hope to make connections with the municipality and the Jewish Federation Partnership from Bet She'an's twin city of Cleveland and get more involved in the community while I am here.
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