| Entry: | This diary entry covers both yesterday and today. Yesterday was spent in largely the same way as the day before, taking down the large unit 14213. A lot of people came into this area of the trench to work on it at this point, and so the whole area was going down fairly quickly. However myself and ray came down onto a line of mudbricks. Then followed a long discussion between myself and Eva over how to interpret this, and move forwards. In the end I think we were both arguing for the same thing but in different ways, the outcome being that we took another 2-3cm off the midden stuff at the side, and then had another look at things. It turned out to be a grave, with very large, wide, mud-brick walls (F. 2416). Eva had a fairly good idea of what she thought it was, but I hadn't at that point and so questioned her on every point - needless to say she was proved correct in every instance, even finding a cut for the mudbrick lining which was almost invisible, but clearly present when you knew where to look. After that, myself and Ray spent the time cleaning off the grave and preparing to investigate it. Lots of new unit numbers were taken out at this point for the photographs. Then some cleaning, and some more checking the position of various mudbricks around the structure. The preservation is really very good, but animals have made it hard to see in places exactly what the relationships are, particularly in the NW corner of the feature.
Today was spent investigating this grave feature, and removing the upper fill units. I'm helping to train one of the turkish Selcuk team (who's name I can't remember - I'm appaulingly bad at peoples names for some reason), who is picking things up very quickly, but also seems to be doing a lot of the recording things for the first time. We removed an upper unit of orange mud-bricks (14244) which we initially thought was just rubble, but on excavating the remaining portion of the upper grave fill (14245), it turned out to have a lot of orange mud-brick inclusions in it as well - this suggests the top bricks were in fact part of this back-filling action. The second layer of grave fill (14246 - determined arbitrarily according to the level at which most of the grave mud-brick surroundings have survived) continued in this vein, with lots of orange mud-brick inclusions and other burnt clay lumps - in other words not exactly what was expected from a grave fill in an otherwise very posh grave. It seems it may be the redeposited fill from a looting episode, which is very unfortunate as all the signs are that this would have been a farily rich grave otherwise. At the very end of the day, we turned up some disarticulated bones, the first human bones we've found in the fill. This was depressing, as it seems to confirme our fears that the burial has been disturbed, presumably meaning any grave goods will be gone. One consolation, a small white-and-black patterned bead came out of the sieved soil. Which suggests grave goods may still be present, in some form. More on this unit tomorrow. But check out the photos - it's a beautifully made grave, even if it has been screwed around with by looters.Entered By: Alex Pryor |
