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orion Ostracon context
Prof. James Strange, excavator at Qumran in 1996, asked me to forward the
following, which I do with our list moderator's permission. It refers to
the article in the latest Qumran Chronicle cited in a 4 June post.
Stephen Goranson goranson@duke.edu
>Mr. Stephen Goranson has been so kind as to send me a copy of his post to
>Orion, in which I see that Mr. Callaway has confused de Vaux's dump with
>Strange's dump. I will give this one more try to remove any ambiguity of
>the provenance of the ostraca and the other potsherds found at the time.
>Here is my correction of the sentences in Callaway's article, p.156. (My
>edits are in parentheses.):
> "The excavators [(Strange) and crew] had excavated straight down
>(through sterile)soil in the center of the terrace and dumped (it) beside
>the east wall. (After) cleaning up (their own dump) the volunteers [Strange's
>team] were sweeping and scraping lightly with trowels beside the same
>outside wall of the ruin. The idea was to remove every last trace of the
>intrusive soil originating from the middle of the terrace. One volunteer
>heard the clink of his trowel on a sherd, picked it up, and saw writing.
>The sherd--and (many) others--therefore came from the (bottom) layer of the
>trench left(open) by Pere de Vaux when he excavated outside the wall."
>