I've been busy lately (you may have noticed) and it looks like I'll be even busier over the next few weeks. Since I'd like to get more than four hours of sleep tonight, I have only a few things to say:

1. I'm done with high school.
2. I just started volunteering at the Ramat Rachel archeological dig (near my house and not in the Jordan river valley, thank you Flying Spaghetti Monster).
   
3. I am running a blog for them. Still haven't decided exactly what to put in it (especially since my camera seems to have died). They don't want an official news blog, apparently for some academic political reasons I have not had fully explained to me yet. Will think of something.
4. I am sore in places I forgot it's possible to be sore in.
5. Free time is for wimps.
   

 

 

This is really interesting:

Some of the first farmers in the Near East probably used green beads as amulets to protect themselves and their crops, a study suggests.

The authors of the research suggest that early agriculturalists attached special importance to this colour.

Beads they recovered from dig sites in Israel had been made from a variety of green minerals and the farmers went to great efforts to obtain them.

They take it a little far at the end, in my opinion (but they usually do).

If I remember correctly, we found some green beads at the Tel Tsaf dig (which falls into the time period the study looks at) while I was there, as well as other imported beads: mother-of-pearl from the sea and a light, clear yellow stone which may have been amber.

Green stone is common in the south of Israel, near Eilat. The hills there - most notably the Timna mines - are full of copper deposits that tint many types of the rocks there green. I'll make an educated guess and say that that's probably where the green "Eilat stone" gets its color from.