| Entry: | Full team in the trenches except Maxime who left today for croissants in Paris
TEB on the rota
Michaela supporting the Selcuk team with the skeletons
Jonathan helping us on is last day
In trench 5, cleaning and documentation of the burials continued by the Selcuk team, while most of the team worked in trench 7 today. Here Peter succeeded in hitting natural today with a unit containing mainly unpainted sherds. However, given the small amount of sherds per soil and the pretty worn edges of the sherds, I am not sure if this deposit is still part of the mound or rather stuff that deposited here as downwash from elsewhere higher up. As it seems unlikely that it came all the way from the East Mound, the material can nevertheless be used as evidence for a LN occupation of the West Mound. And that is what we wanted!
As the graves are still blocking our way, Ray and Katie dug in the area where the baulk had been. Frank's unit 14299 nicely peels off a hardish mudbricklike edge, and we decided to leave this area alone as it looks pretty o.k. for an EC room infill. Taking down the area around the tile cluster 15315 with 15312 finally revealed a pit 15313 and 15314 that they scraped out. Fortunately no human bones except some rib frags that can be attributed to rodents. As grave F. 2420 had revealed a tile floor under the skeleton today, we had expected the worst. Maybe 15313 and 15314 was once a grave, but only the last centimeters have survived.
Naomi continued unit 14217 to get rid of the last patch of loose soil in the S half of the trench.
Slowly mudbrick or hard surfaces (fills?) peel out everywhere in the trench except in the W, where the slope is still quite high, so there is really hope now that we can produce a CAD plan of the wallls this year. It seems that the graves avoided the mudbrick walls and thus can serve as indirect evidence for room infills beneath. To have both evidence for the existence of the LN and outlines of buildings in the EC seems a good two-fold foundation for fundraising texts.
My general mood today was influenced by both lack of sleep and the crush on my knight. In the morning it changed each hour between the desire for lazy daydreaming (away from the boring and dull archaeology we do here) and enthusiasm about my great exciting life (and therefore the great and exciting archaeology we do here). Around 11.30 I finally gave in to the next spell of bucolic mood and spent a quarter of an hour sitting hidden behind a tree in the meadows between the mounds alone with my thoughts. A lot more concentrated afterwards, and even better after spending the lunch break sleeping out there again. When I woke up a bird sat in the twigs just a few centimeters away from my head.
In the evening, I finished piecing together the illustrations for my talk. I am really grateful to Raiko who sent all the scans immediately.Entered By: ER |
