| Entry: | Tried the next old computer today to get my floppy-saved diary of the day before yesterday into the database, but it says that the floppy is not in the right format. Why then does it work fine with my Windows 98 laptop? Sarah is still hatching hopes she can network my old laptop within the bnext days, so eventually the diary entry will we pasteable. Inshallah.
Yesterday:
Gen, Maxim, Katie H. and Helen drawing and digging in trench 7 with Mustafa, Ali, Mustafa and Mevlud
Katie K., Ben, Ros, Ray, Naomi, Tom and Frank working in trench 5
Ray and Katie finished and documented pit 15305/15306.
Frank and myself, later Ros and Ben, cleaned down the room infill in space 310 with unit 14279 towards a level that Jonathan calls a floor. I had severe problems distinguishing it from what I get if I scratch the overlying lumpy infill to a flat level. There is a lump of white plaster with a red L-shaped line that mighht be collapse from the walls or roof or upper storey, and Frank thinks he sees internal dividions made from plaster in the NW coner of that room. I have severe dounts, also about the nature of the big plastery lump sitting close to the W wall of that space. I think it is all rubble.
Tom and Naomi came upon a hard brownishyellow surface in their rubble unit 14278.
Yesterday the weather was so hot and wind-free I stayed out over lunchtime as I was not hungry at all (!) and very sleepy after my first night of seven hours sleep after four nights of five or six. Pleassant sleep under some trees, very bucolic athmosphere. In the afternoon and early evening a short spell of Grabungskoller (feeling troubled by the stink of sweaty feet and generally unwashed people in the seminar room) that was cured by a pleasant walk around the East Mound with Peter after dinner and some workout-ourt at the ping-pong table.
Today:
Gen, Maxim, Katieh H., Helen and the four workmen in trench 7
Ray, Ben, Katie K., Naomi, Frank and Tom in trench 5
Ros in Lab for Rotar
Helen sick after lunch and went to wash pots, Peter on a field trip with Arek
Very good mood after yet another night of normal sleep, and I am so much looking forward to the arrival of my travel mates Philipp and Francis who are going to come tomorrow. Singing and humming a Turku Philipp likes very much while spending long hours with Frank, Katie K. and Ray figuring out what is going on with the two walls close to the N profile. Lots of fun discussing that. In the end, we came to the conclusion that the N wall, which seems to be a bit more yellow than the S one which is rather grey, runs parallel with the S wall, divided by a 20cm gap between them, not unlikely given EC parallels elsewhere. So they might well be contemporaneous. The N wall seems to run into the N profile at roughly 695 E in a very oblique angle. It seems to be cut by a white plastered pit. Tomorrow we'll clean the planum in the former trench 5 extension to see if the S wall is visible there, too. We should definitely clean towards the S, to find out if and how this wall connects with F. 2413, but as the graves are in our way, we can't do that right now. Katie and Ray used 14213 to dig down in the NW of the pit 15305 in order to find the yellow wall here in the planum. The cuts of the pit are a great help, as both walls as well as the 20cm interval are visible as cross-sections in the pit's W and E cut face, and the N wall is cut in length in its N cut.
The priority tour came round and Rissa was quite interested in the pit fill 15306 as it may be hellenistic. No one has seen late pottery coming from that fill, though.
In space 310, We decided to go on with 14279 in the yellow clayey rubble on the level where Jonathan thinks there might be a floor. Neither Shahina nor Ian nor any of us is really convinced by that floor, given my reasing above. In the white plaster lump, red paint was detected and sampled by ben. I really have difficulties seeing that. Colour-sight is a very subjective thing, and no one seems that alarmed about green or brown spots. Seeing the colour of blood is certainly an alarming thing, and this might all be a heritage from our ancestral animal times. So maybe it is an advantage rather than a disadvantage in archaeology to have a slight degree of deuteranomaly? Nevertheless, we showed our thicker line of red colour on this other plaster junk to Duygu, and we maybe sample that once we decide to dig deeper into the fill.
Tom and Naomi continued exposing their hardish surface in 14278, interrupted by various blind pit-alarms. The worst pit-alarm came when they found a ball that proved to be magnetic and was first addressed as a cannon-ball. After a short period of speculation on how deep a cannon ball shot from the evil East Mound can penetrate into our rubble and some attempts to locate a hidden intrusive pit, we washed the ball and it was stone. Stone version of clay ball for cooking? Slingstone seems more likely, given the EC examples from Hacilar.Entered By: ER |
