The Old and the New!

Just 300 feet down the slope from our home is a very rocky lot.  It has lots of dirt, lots of thorn bushes and lots of little things that people have been losing for thousands of years.  I can't imagine anyone saying.. oh, this beautiful glass jar is broken, I'll just toss it out the window and let someone find bits of it one day... but it does seem to work that way.  Otherwise, how to explain all the bits of pottery and Roman glass just laying around everywhere? (OK, so the ancient coin I found today probably fell out of someone's pocket...)

So, what you see here is a very young seedling that has sprouted in a piece of Roman glass.  The technique for making this kind of piece involves folding over the lip to make a nice, soft and even rim.  It usually traps air all along the edge, under the rim.  What happened here?

After a very long time - perhaps 2 thousand years - a little seed got caught against one edge of the glass.  When it sprouted after our recent rain storms, the root grew into the little tunnel of trapped air, which had filled with dirt.  When I spied the chunk of Roman glass and picked it up, the seedling came with it.  In the photo you can't really see that the dirt is INSIDE the glass, not on the outside, unless you look carefully at the bottom left of the chunk, where the roots are hanging out. 

This is a very cool find - and I've put it on wet cotton in my window, until I find an appropriate way to pot it. I'm wondering if the growing root will eventually crack the rim open, or if the little thorn bush will be a dwarf, since its root growth will be severely limited.

Wa-wa-wee-wah - What a FIND!

My glass addiction sends me outdoors compulsively searching for little bits of Roman glass - glass that some poor fool dropped 2,000 years ago and never bothered to clean up. At least, that's how I imagine some of it gets there. I never collect from archaeological sites but you can hike fields and hills and forests in Israel and often just find this stuff laying around. Which is unbelievable. (Hint - walk into the sun and look for something shiny). What is really unbelievable is that I can infect other people with this compulsion and we all clamber over rocks and through gullies with our eyes glued to the ground as if we are contemplating a major concern of the planet. Or as if we've lost a contact lens. It's a miracle that we haven't walked into trees or off cliffs while doing this.

So there we were, David and I, having a nice conversation while returning from such a hike, (OK, he was trying to convince me to take on a huge project that would gobble up my life for the next 20 years; it's the kind of project you could only consider for love, and could only take on if you are independently wealthy, which I'm not) and I, while walking down the perimeter road of our village - the one that 2 joggers had just run down and that I had walked up with David just that morning - I noticed THIS!!!

Since it's only about 1/2 inch in diameter, and I'm over 5 feet tall and don't have the eyes of an eagle, I didn't actually see it the way you're seeing it now. But I did see that it didn't look natural. I spend a lot of time picking at things that don't look natural but are natural, as you might guess. I once even picked up some squished deer poo, which is pretty natural from close up. And the first thing I noticed about this is that it wasn't glass. But I was only dissapointed for a second - I think the entire region must have heard my screech. I think David may have feared for a moment that I'd stepped on a snake....

I've sent photos of this for identification but my best guess at the moment is Roman. A lot of those guys and gals posed for their portrait coins with decorative hair pieces and togas, while facing to the right. Although I've searched, I haven't found anything like the back of the coin (not posted here), so I'm not sure exactly what I've got but, by golly, I AM EXCITED!!