| Entry: | Today was an interesting day, as I was able to expose and dig the 8th skeleton of my archaeological career. This one was in much better nick than any of the others, and the bones were very robust, meaning cleaning round them was easy. In the end grave feature 2416 turned out to have a complete body, fully articulated lying in the traditional Byzantine style (skeleton 14267), hands-by-sides - what I had previously taken as a robbing cut turned out to be the line of a wooden coffin lying inside the mud-brick constructed tomb walls. The nails found and X-finded confirm this. Unit 14259, the grave fill, turned out to be full of mud-brick inclusions, large orange slabs that were deposited right next to and touching the bones themselves. It seems that maybe that either there were some burned mudb-bricks laid on top of the coffin, which later collapsed into it - or maybe it was simply the case that the grave was back-filled with mud-brick material (this is more likely as their spread over and aroudn the body was quite patchy). On Saturday, the skeleton will be lifted - hopefully there might be a coin or some sort of grave-goods in there around him - nothing yet, and for such a well-built, undisturbed grave I'd had high hopes.
Things for the future are really looking up as well in the last couple of days. I got confirmation of my PhD funding 2 nights ago, and this means I can really now plan for the next three years with confidence - with this is mind I'm looking forward to three more years of involvement in the Catal project, working with the West Mound team in something which is really going to change how people look at this famous site. It is mentioned in so many of the texts books and general introductions to archaeology, and now these will all need to be revised to include this stuff. On a personal note too, this is now looking like a chance to really see an archaeological excavation in action, and the behind-the scenes preperation, and post-ex stuff too. Over the last couple of days I have also been thinking a lot about the excavation procedures, and seeing the difference between working in a small 2-man team where it is easy to keep track of things, as against a whole trench full of people where paperwork can quickly get out of hand, and where keeping on top of everyone at once for the sake of coordinated recording is really important - only by doing this can the site be written up coherently by one person at the end (the Eva-Peter team).Entered By: Alex Pryor |
