| Entry: | Yesterday I finished working on the presentation I am about to give on Wednesday until 12.30 in the morning, so I was the last one to bed for the first time on this excavation. Now I have to catch up with the backlog of diary. The fact that my travel mates hit the road of freedom again and left me here in neolithic toiling and labour made me restless again, I want to travel on and find the unit narrative boring today. But it is a necessary thing.
On the 12th, Tom and Helen finished the rubble infill 14278 W of wall 2408 and then took down the hardish surface 14285 together with the underlying fill 14287.
Ray and Frank cleaned down the NW corner of the trench to expose the level of the mudbrick walls.
On the 14th, work on the graves 2419, 2420 and 2421 was restarted by the Selcuk team. I am very happy about that, and by today skeletons are exposed in each of them. The presence of Michaela encourages the team to expose them fast, so I am confident that we will get them out within the next two days. As grave 2420 runs into the W profile, we had to extend the trench a bit with an arbitrary unit 14290.
Today, Frank dug into the poorly understood area where the profile baulk had once been, in oder to expose the edges of the mudbricks we see there a bit further. We decided to define the unit 14299 by the mudbricks running EW along the plaster line 13798 in the N and the mudbricks F. 2412. First big EC potsherds and a stone ball and the overall look was reminiscent of room infill like in space 310 or like unit 14278. Increasing amounts of brown soil towards the W then seemed to indicate a pit. Different degrees of dryness of the soil as well as the incredibly soft texture of the mudbricks make things even worse, and I just hate this corner of the trench. Mudbrick walls seem to be everywhere, and I know now why it took Jonathan and Catriona so long to excvate building 25. I really hope we can sort that corner out till the end of the week.
Peter is absolutely right that the best way to tackle the corner is to first understand the N profile, and as it has to be drawn anyway, Ray did that today.
Tom and Naomi finished 14287 and then cleaned the whole area W of 2408 for photo. An EC vessel 15308 fell half off the crumbly rubble in the profile while cleaning, so they took photos of the other half still sitting in there, drew that part of the profile and then took the other half out as well. A sample was taken from the soil in the pot. I wonder how a complete pot can sit upright in rubble, and will study the situation more intensively tomorrow, as another row of the ashy mudbricks 14286 appeared under 14278 and the pot is right above that.Entered By: ER |
