| Entry: | Day 12
I am Captain Ahab, and the bottom of unit 15306 is my white whale.
Or at least that’s what it felt like this morning, when Katie and I were trying to remove the fill in the pit. In the hours before breakfast Katie tried to follow N & W edge of the fill to the cut while I kept digging down. One of the rocks we found yesterday was much larger than expected, taking up about half the unit, and precariously sitting above my hand and trowel as I dug deeper. We found a single tile sitting partially under the rock, and mixed human bone, animal bone, obsidian, and ceramics in the fill. After sketching the position of the rock in the pit and taking a photo (there was some concern that the rock could have been the cap on a grave, though this proved unfounded) Frank moved the rock and Katie and I went back to work cleaning and peeling away the unit.
Then Peter came.
Professors always seem to be able to move much faster than students, and I’ve decided it’s more than just experience with the trowel: when Katie and I were excavating, we were very careful lest we destroy some marker that Peter or Eva could interpret to figure what the heck’s going on. But since Peter knows what he’s looking for, he’s much more capable of ripping through soil quickly (oh, and he also used a shovel and mattock, whereas we limited ourselves to trowels…). I’m starting to feel like I can recognize some of the changes and markers he’s looking for, and that I’ll soon be able to work with a similar autonomy and speed. By the time he and Eva left our unit it had about doubled in size, though they still had not hit bottom. Katie and I went back to cleaning the pit and trying to find the cut in the profile.
Then Peter came back.
This time he expanded the walls to their Eastern and northern extents, until he hit what he and Eva agreed were mudbricks. The western edge of the unit opens into another pit, and the southern end has some mudbrick truncated by a cut and crisscrossed with rodent burrows. After Peter left Katie was able to clear the border between unit 15306 and 14218 while I worked on the rodent burrow mess. Tomorrow we’ll have to clean a bit of the southern and western ends, but unit 15306 should be finished, yielding a window into the (meter tall!) chalcolithic structures abutting it.
Oh, and it was Peter, not me, who hit the bottom of the pit. Never found that whale.
Concerning off-site activities: I put together a simple database for Ingmar to use to record his finds last night, and he’s approved of it. I’ll be helping him input his already recorded data. I’ve also talked with Frank, and he’s agreed to let me use his computer to get a crash course in cad.Entered By: RBW |
