| Entry: | Back again and I have risen to the dizzy heights of supervising the North area, lots of extra responsibility and stress but no extra advantages or money. I would have been more happy to come back as a humble excavator and work on my oven and the rest of spaces 150/151 but thanks to Gavin giving up the on-going saga that is Çatalhöyük to dig in the land of the Sagas [here only 1 week and already I’m making appalling puns] and Chad having Rhodesia confused for Rhodes by the Turkish Embassy [can this rumour really be true?] I get to be third choice to run the North area, I wonder who would have been number four as they were obviously already scraping the bottom of the barrel - RJ the cat?
Started last Thursday clearing backfill and cleaning up then had Friday off, or at least didn’t work on site. Have started by removing the shell walls of Building 1 [Saturday to Monday]. Started on F2 [eastern] which has gone, F1/F5 [northern] which has also gone. Am now working on F7 [western] and F4/F6 [southern] both of which are partially gone. Progress has been fairly good and the method that we worked out in the Mellaart area last year seems to work quite well. The wall demolition is generating a horribly large number of units but this can’t really be helped. Unfortunately some of the elevation drawings from last year are unreliable and have had to be partially re-drawn which is frustrating as it takes time. Also the bases of the walls are slightly problematical in places, are they partially in foundation cuts and where precisely do the walls below begin. The walls all seem to have three main builds which match from wall to wall showing that the whole shell was built a couple of layers at a time rather than one wall being built first.
Examination of the area to the north shows that wall F5 pre-dates wall F217, which is presumably the southern wall of the building to the north of building 1. Removal of the walls has revealed a series of dump deposits between building 1 and the surrounding buildings which will be the next thing to be examined after the walls are down. There is what may be a feature showing through in the fill to the south of wall 6, possibly protruding from the building to the south, but this needs investigation.
Although I would have liked things to have gone slightly more smoothly everything is fine and the team [Mark, Adnan, Åsa, Sharon and I] seems to be settling down quite well. The schedule is that we reach the building beneath by the end of the season which is a reasonable target:
ROUGH SCHEDULE
Week 1 - Removal of walls of building 1
Week 2 - Investigation of material between these walls and the next buildings
Week 3 - Begin removing infilling
Week 4 - Continue removing infilling
Week 5 - Complete removing of infilling
Week 6 - Clean up and record what is initially visible of the building beneath.
Weeks 7/8 - Contingency for things becoming complicated and taking longer than anticipated.
No doubt I will look at this at the end of the season and laugh at my naïve optimism in attempting to guess at a schedule.Entered By: Craig Cessford |
