| Entry: | Day 11
First job this morning was to sketch, photo, and record the position of Unit 15306, fill for a possible pit or grave. Sketching didn’t take too long, as it was a method I was already familiar with, and I was able to get started excavating the unit right away with Katie Kamphaus. I thought the unit would be excavated quickly and we’d be back to following the trace of the plaster line mentioned in my 7/7/07 journal.
At the end of the day today we still hadn’t hit the bottom. In some parts the fill has been homogenous loose silt, while in other parts we’ve hit harder chunks of clay. Artifacts ran the whole gamut, from ceramics and obsidian to faunal and human bones, including an ankle bone. The soil has a musky smell and dark color which Ingmar suggested might indicate the presence of human remains, but I’m skeptical, given the quantity of other objects in the fill and its small shape, that it is a burial. At first we were careful to excavate a few centimeters at a time with trowels, but having discovered on the north side how deep it is we switched to choppers and turning with trowels to excavate faster. By the end of the day we had gone between 30-40 centimeters. We’ve found two rocks in the pit, but I don’t think they indicate the bottom.
After the crew left I joined Peter, Jonathon, Eva, Gen, Alex and Tom at the deep sounding, where they were trying to peel back enough surface soil to get a sense of stratigraphy and layout. We believe we found two opposing corners of a square room, though there is still some discussion about the exact layout of the northern wall. Although I didn’t contribute much, it was still useful as a learning opportunity to see archaeologists interpret on the spot. After this journal I’ll be helping Ingmar sort pottery to get a sense for it. We discussed his plans briefly last night and I offered to make him a quick and simple database. So far we’ve got a working copy, but I’ll have to check with Sarah to make sure it can be used exactly as he’d like. I might get around to working on a geodatabase again tonight, but I’m waiting on Frank for some data and he’s very busy.
I've settled very well in the routine of Catal, and I think I've got a good week or 10 days of really getting involved before I realize I'm leaving and start to change gears. Being anchored to the NW corner (area under unit 14213) has, albeit a bit slowly, worked out for the best. I'm getting a sense for the feel of mudbricks, soil, and rubble in the area, and trying to follow the plaster line through a series of intrusions has been a nice micro-goal which allows me to put the trench and units in perspective. With the exception of one or two frustrating moments, excavating doesn't feel like work so much as a puzzle or challenge to be solved.
On that puzzle note, one of the things that interests me about archaeology is the breadth of interpretation necessary. At one end are discussions of how ancestral homes structure social life, and at the other end is the need to determine whether part of the mudbrick wall in the profile was built later than the other part or merely slanting in, or whether the intrusion blocking a plaster line was a burial or pit. A field archaeology is involved from the minutiae through to the abstract, and I wonder to what extent other social sciences can claim a similar focus.Entered By: RBW |
