| Entry: |
Tired today – don’t feel like saying much. Took incorrectly defined unit 14277 down the rest of the way, cleaned it up, and closed the unit sheet with Ros. Helped brush out unit 14279 which Alex had began before and Frank and Eva were working on today. Helped scrape an area near the supposed head stone of a grave excavated last year to identify possible mud brick (after checking the plan sheets from last year Eva decided it wasn’t oriented correctly to actually have been part of the grave).
Shortly after the area became a hot spot, I moved out of it, and Eva, then Peter began taking it down and trying to decide the situation with the pit Ray and Katie had been excavating (Cut 15305) and its relation to the rock that had been removed. They decided there may have been another grave cut below the one that had been excavated last year. I spent the majority of the end of the day moving other people’s dirt by the wheelbarrow, which is fine because I felt like moving around more and engaging more muscles than just those in my right and sometimes left arms.
I will be entering unit sheets in the database today, as well as trying to work on the GIS dataset with Ray to take care of the visualization / 3D side of things as he works on integrating multiple databases to aid with quick queries and cleaning up information from sketches and the AutoCAD data to define unit polygons. Hopefully extruding the unit polygons Ray is creating with high and low boundary tin files made from the levels on the unit sheets will work like I think it will (I’ve only done this with basic terrain data, never with trench data before, though I think the potential is worth exploring). Had a ‘discussion’ with Frank in the trench about the use of GIS, quantitative methods such as spatial statistics, and other things integrated into GIS analysis, and don’t really get the arguments against trying it. He many not like having to mess with relational databases, but in my experience it’s about 30 times easier to work with someone else’s data after their excavation with a relational database than it is without it, and with the database infrastructure already present at Catalhoyuk, it should be quite easy to integrate multiple sources of data in one place (the join procedure between data copied from the excavation database and the prototype database Ray has for the unit polygons worked quite easily and visual data query is already possible for a few units without requiring too much of an expenditure of effort). Besides, all of this data provides a good sandbox dataset for Ray and I to experiment with the potential of on-site GIS rather than post-ex GIS.
Still feeling frustrated with the on-going assumption several team members have that the only context that matters is primary context, and the distrust of any methods that attempt to identify potential primary contexts for items found in secondary or tertiary contexts. I also think it’s too bad we aren’t planning on using quantitative methods to take artifact data from disturbance areas and apply it towards identifying potential primary context areas and allowing that to help in the planning process of the excavation.Entered By: BK |
