| Entry: | Came back to Catal in the night of the 19th to the 20th after seven more months of travel and an exhausting summer term. Now, after two days, I start to get adjusted to the crowded yet mostly anonymous life here again.
Yesterday was a bit of a chaotic day, as we moved everybody out of trench 7 into 5 and it was my first day, so I found it hard to re-detect last year's features and at the same time organize work properly. Today, things seemed much for straightforward, and we started to face the difficult nothwest corner of trench 5.
KK and JMR worked on a disturbance around the central 5m nail (which had to be sacrificed in the process) taking it out with 16810.
D and SO helped a lot in discussion with TEB, PFB and me to find out what happened to wall F 2413 which runs towards grave F 2416 but did not show up in its N cut. We finally realized that we might not have got the cut of the grave completely, started scraping unsing unit 16828 and voila, we found the wall in the N face of the cut. It reappears in the S face, too. What a relief!
AH and JJW tried to work out what's going on in the difficult pit-suspicious area we dug out as 15306 last year. One of its "clover leaves" contained a big potsherd and a stone and loose soil, so I am very sure that it was a pit, dug as fill unit 16816 although tracing its cut proved to be almost impossible.
MB cleaned the S end of wall 2429, using our unstratified scraping unit 16800 and started getting rid of a bigger animal burrow (unit 16822).
The Selcuk team has taken the W profile down in the area of grave 2420 yesterday, and after completing its drawing took down the mudbricks of it today. They drew disturbance 16818 that seems to b a looting pit in the western end of a grave N of F 2419 and completed recording of unit 16826 that is disturbing another grave N of that. After removal of the mudbricks of F 2419 yesterday, a grey clayey layer with bones and the familiar tiles appeared in its cut. However, as this is under the present surface exposed in the E end of T5 now, they will have to wait until all the other graves are out.
In T7 IF and PFB were documenting the N profile which seems to give a lot of information on the erarlz history of the mound's edge, including an elongated pit dug into the sterile marl that appears in the W, N and E profiles. Then there is a homegenous deposits that looks like slope downwash to me. This should be the level where only undecorated pottery appeared. It is overlaid by reddish surface that goes with the base level of a mudbrick wall visible in the W profile, followed by a deposit rich in EC ceramics. Finally a miniature vessel of EC type sits on a plaster floor overlying that wall. When PFB remarked that the elongated pit seems to follow the orientation of the EC archiecture higher up in T7, it struck me that the structures in T7 have different orientation than those in T5 which are strictly N-S. |
