It was supposed to be a day off. But the call went out for volunteers to help clear the backlog of pottery washing.

Apparently, we were so productive in the amount of material taken out of the dig that almost 100 buckets of pottery shards were still waiting to be processed at the end of last week.

So we showed up at 8am this morning and didn’t get finished until 3pm. We poured bucket after bucket of shards into the water and gently washed each one, looking for anything out of the ordinary. Through the day there were a couple of pleasant surprises.

Sometimes, what makes possible a greater good is hour after hour of mundane, even tedious, work. There’s not much glory in some tasks, but they need to be done nevertheless.

Tomorrow we head to Masada and Qumran (Dead Sea Scrolls).