| Entry: | U13783 : I was exceptionally frustrated on site today. I had no idea what I was digging. There is a area which Maxime and Katie H had begun to dig and I came in when Katie got frustrated with it and moved to Trench 7. Maxime doesn't mind it as far as I can tell, but I just find it an unfathomable mess. There are holes everywhere from animal activity, and then some mud bricks that come through it all, which at the moment we're saying are a fallen wall. I think I'm probably getting over-emotional about how much I dislike digging in this area. My instructions were to dig down until I found a difference in the soil, being careful not to break up mud bricks. So continuing on the what's a mud brick debate: I took a mud brick out earlier today, and Eva said it was alright to hack at it to see what it's like, and I can say in all honesty, it was very much like a clump of earth. It seems like we need to figure out some way to identify mud brick on this northern edge, as it keeps on getting taken out and only seen in the profile once we've destroyed it.
I'm aware that this frustration isn't a unique experience. Because I do the photos on site I lose a certain amount of getting close to the material for starters. Also we're all digging the churned up things left after the Byzantine burials, so we can hope on the whole that things will be better next year once we've finished the groundwork.
On reflection later on: I think the main problem is I'm very tired at the moment. Having looked through other people's diary entries I can see that everyone gets annoyed at the animal burrows, and we're all getting anxious about destroying things through confusion with the material. So I think I should rise to the challenge and get on with it.
Photos:
U14263, U14264 - fill and cut of pit/grave. I photographed this as U14213 yesterday. This is the one that lies to the north of F2416.
U14262, U14261 - fill and cut of a pit that overlies a grave to the south of F2416.
F2416 - excitingly with skeleton inside. Just a working shot.
Working shots all over site. I played around with getting top-down photos of things today. I've began trying to document the archaeological process too. So I've got a few photos of Ray holding the prism for the total station, staking out. I got some tools in the trench as well. It's nice to have images that show how we do archaeology. Once I went to the store room in the Archaeological department in Cambridge and saw pot-sherds in old cigar and biscuit tins from a 1950s excavation in Egypt. The material culture of the excavators excited me as much as the archaeological material. There's this incremental move in style and technique which you don't see until it is gone. I think it's useful to record it for the future, and for the public. Open to comment.
P.S. having read Maxime's entry: I tell fairytales to keep myself occupied too. I believe those in the know would say I like the sound of my own voice. I also do a fine range of bastardised (due to my poor memory) Mesopotamian, Greek and Roman mythologyEntered By: N.Christie |
