| Entry: | Full team today, weather not as cool as yesterday, very agreeable if not for the wind gusts throwing sandy silty loam into our eyes.
While some teams are shifted around too much at the moment, others have to stay too long in the same frustrating corner. At the moment the only really exciting features are the graves, and I feel sorry to drag people away from them as soon as they have exposed one ready for take-over by the Selcuk team, but what can I do? That's what the team leaders agreed on. I do hope we will get into equally thrilling EC stratigraphy this year to pay them back for all their patience.
The digital daily sketches Frank produces every day now have become a great tool for visualizing what was gong on in the trenches.
The morning started with a big shocker in the NW corner of trench 5: four rows of mudbrick wall visible in the W profile! It appears that the animal burrowing 14218 was correctly traced by Ros towards the N profile, but the mudbricks the ground squirrels had dug into was so soft that they were vitually indistinguishable from the burrow fill. As we have also not recognized some rows of a mudbrick wall in the trech 5 extension last year, this teaches us that they are really hard to find when still moist in the soil. Anyway, they now nicely explain the line of plaster we got at the bottom of 14218. Ben, Katie K, Naomi, Ray and Ros then spent the day by cleaning down the whole area using unit 14213 to make sense of the various mudbricks that pop up, and we finally got another grave sitting above the supposed continuation of the badly truncated wall mentioned above.
Katie H. and Maxim documented and lifted the badly preserved upper body parts deposit feature 2414 and then proceeded to excavate the N part of the baulk. A pit identified in the E face seems to ink up with unit 13783 identified in 2006 and they started to scoop it out.
Alex and his grave 2416 was joined by Zeliha from the Selcuk team as this grave is exactly a picture book example a what units a grave can possibly contain. They took down the orange deposit on top as unit 14244 and then the badly truncated grave fill under it with unit 14245 down to the level where all mudbricks of the grave lining are preserved. They also started to dig into the fill 14246 which contains several lumps of burnt mudbricks and reminds me pretty much of the fill of the disturbance in grave 2404.
Utku and Serdar scooped out something that first looked like another garve close to the S profile but turned out to be a softly filled pit unit 14251 and 14252.
Zafer and part-time Frank scraped around the outlines of the burnt-orange mudbrick grave that is visible in the SE corner of the trench 5 extension using unit 14233.
In the afternoon Ingmar, Peter, Nurcan and me had a quick look at our first and so far only well stratified unit 13796. It contains a dozen of sherds only and covers the whole spectrum from white ware over a pretty LN looking monochrome brown holemouth pot to painted EC sherds. Hooray.Entered By: ER |
