| Entry: | A day of steady work in the building. Burials were worked on by Tona, Jenis, Bashak, Adnan and Louise. Tona cleaned the infant burial at the N end of platform 13, the very latest burial in the platform, and found a chain of small pierced beads about its neck. Possible that grave goods from earlier burials in the platform were robbed by later grave diggers? Common practice in Mesopotamia. Thomas of the video team took time lapse of Tona digging another child burial under the platform after lunch. They talk in French (Thomas is from Strasbourg, Tona from Barcelona), so our trench has been alive with English, Spanish, French, German and Turkish today and currently Greek voices fill the lab. Wish I'd worked harder on languages at school - learning as a kid is easy compared to learning as an adult. Brain cells rapidly diminishing now.... I am making progress with Turkish, though. I'd like to live in a Turkish village for a full year - use the time to make a full scale reconstruction of Building 1 and then set it on fire and push it all in and dig it five years later. Louise exposed most of a tiny child burial to the E of platform 13, while Adnan and Bashak drew and removed child bones from the next burial to the E. I hope there will not be much in the way of further bodies under the currently exposed ones. I think we can finish everything now exposed, but will have trouble to finish any more fully articulated ones. Jenis removed the headless burial in Space 110. Mehmet drew sections and excavated the main N-S baulk from the middle of Space 71. Gavin dug the remainder of the SW platform and lentil bin in Space 71 and then removed the remaining floors in the SE corner of Space 71. He also cut some blocks for Wendy who felt ill today. I exposed the hearth set into the main S wall of Space 71, just to the E of the lentil bin. This hearth is set well into the wall and must have been planned as part of the original layout of the building. It is located just to the W of where we now believe access from the roof came in - the sub-floor packing here is very blocky, hard and re-worked, suggesting heavy trample and repetitive pressure. Interesting that the in-wall hearth is so close to the ladder position - possibly to gain advantage of the draft from outside. Funny that we have ended up with a building so like the classic ones dug by Jimmy when we didn't expect it. I've been looking at our scrape plan of the North Area with new eyes, trying to see how other buildings in this area might have originated as classic "shrines". It now seems easier to accept what we may have long suspected - that all the Catalhoyuk buildings have both shrine-like and dwelling-like attributes and that the differences between the buildings are simply a question of at what stage in their history they have been frozen in time for us to rediscover.Entered By: Roger Matthews |
