| Entry: | Day 9,
Good and bad yesterday, thankfully in the right parts. We had a productive day of digging, and from my vantage point high up on the NW corner of T5 it looks like the team's hit a pretty good stride. People seemed less tense in and out of the trenches. Working with the total station and camera, I had a couple of stressful moments when I had a backlog of three or four teams waiting for a photo, elevation point, or daily sketch, followed by 10 minute lapses where I had nothing to do. I've been thinking about jumping into a unit (Maxim's U16822, most likely) with a trowel during these calms, only I haven't got one; my old trowel is on loan to Sonya, and my new Marshaltown to Katie. Besides, it's difficult to get into a unit when you know you'll be called elsewhere within only a couple of minutes. Instead I've been trying out the reflectorless mode on the total station to shoot in mudbricks without a second archaeologist positioning the prism. This works well from a technical standpoint, though there are some interpretive difficulties. First, I'm only able to capture the parts of the feature I can see from my perspective, second, clearly defining unit boundaries from four meters away through a telescopic lens is problematic. Fortunately, these issues have so far only resulted in taking twice as many points as I need to define a mudbrick. I've produced sketches of two walls- Feature 2426 in the south center and one of a double set in the north center (2429? Will check)- which turned out nicely in CAD. I need to finish shooting in the rest of the walls soon: many are only a few degrees shy of parallel, and it would be good to have a map of these with projected lines for the excavators, Tom and Eva especially.
Back in the seminar room I'm ready to admit defeat to the Catalhoyuk network demons. It turns out that it's not Vista which is causing problems with the Catal databases, but the University of Buffalo licensed copies of Word 2007 which we have installed on three of our four computers. The rotar turns out to be a blessing, since we no longer have the structure to do our own data entry. I've talked with Sarah about this problem and she's been looking into it, but the prospects don't look good. It seems that something has also been swallowing Dan's diary entries, though I'm not entirely sure if that's a bad thing.. |
