I'm gonna be famous!

Well start looking for me in the top archaeological journals...because I'm making my ANE teacher Brother Seely proud! My friend Sam Egbert is great at finding cool things to do, and he told me about a trip to an archaeological sifting project just a 3 minute walk from the center. I went with a group of eight not expecting anything too crazy, but oh what pleasant surprise! Turns out the dirt we sifted through was actually taken from the Temple Mount where Herod's Temple used to sit and where the Dome of the Rock currently is! They taught us some about the history of the mount, and then we went to work. We took buckets of muddy-rocky stuff and washed all the mud away. Then came the fun part...sorting through the rocks. Some of the "stuff" was just plaster and asphalt, but we found and sorted some really neat things like pottery, glass, pottery, metal, bone, pottery and more pottery. Then...drumroll please....my co-sifting-expert-partner CJ and I (admittedly with a worker prodding us just a bit) found a coin! They have to clean it to be sure, but the workers there guessed that it is like a Hasmonean coin. HASMONEAN!!! AKA the Maccabees! From 167 BC-ish. It was so cool! I have to email them in a few months to check for sure, but ya know...we're going to be front page news. :) Sam and Jamison Peterson also "eureka"-ed. They found a piece of marble tile that could have very likely been on the floor of Herod's aka the Second Temple. At the end of our sifting adventures, one of the workers took the coolest things that we found and spread them all over a timeline to show us where they came from. We found stuff from pretty much every era in Jerusalem from the neolithic age to modern day. Too much fun for one group!