| Entry: | Saturday 26.07.08
'Exciting' is the word to describe the work that we have done today in Trench 5 (West Mound). More and more walls of mudbrick emerge and spaces (maybe 3 or 4 already) are identified. The difficulty remains to define mudbrick walls. It is now pretty clear that walls can be traced when a line of mortar can be identified on the ground or in a profile. On the contrary, the hardness of the mudbrick is in itself no indication, since we have had a lot of tumbled mudbrick, or dried soil that looked like mudbrick, etc. This is sometimes very confusing, even for team leaders.
The day started rather badly: Eva looked at some of the soil that we took down on Thursday in the west of units 16833 and 16839 to realize that a line of mortar could be seen on the ground. In other terms, we had removed what may have been the top of a wall. After this rather unfortunate discovery, I started helping to clean unit 16833. We gave a good scrape to the surface and tried to bring everything to the same level. However, huge differences in soil textures could be identified, so we left a step roughly 50-60 cm wide on the Southern and Western sides of unit 16833, where the soil is more compact. A line of mortar could be partially traced on the Southern and Western sides of unit 16833, so the step that we left may have actually belonged to a wall. In unit 16833, we found several X-finds: parts of a clay ball, and a rectangular piece of burnt clay with incised motifs. Moreover, loads of bones, including one human phallanx, some pieces of pottery (white/greenish slip, cream slip with decoration, etc..), some small obsidian blades, etc. were recovered.
After Lunch break, I was working on unit 16839, which was changed from arbitrary layer (similar to 16800) to room fill, since it is now surrounded by two walls on the Western and Northern sides and two lines of plaster in the Eastern and Southern sides forming a room. I should mention that unit 16839 is cut in the North-eastern corner by the mole disturbance that I dug away some days ago (16822-16823) and in the South-western corner by a new disturbance, which may turn up to be a grave. The surface of unit 16839 was drawn on a 1:20 drawing.
Other discoveries in Trench 5 included another clay ball by Sonia, and the Selcuk team revealed a probable Byzantine grave with a decorated clay cover (?) and very close an almost complete Chalcolithic oval pot of large size with nice painted decoration.
Yesterday, I went to Konya to the archaeological museum, it is small, but as usual in Turkey, full of interesting stuff. I can only recommend to people going to Konya to visit this museum, if only to see the finds from Catal, including the reconstitution of a baby grave from level VIII of the East Mound and a nice 'Gelvery'-like (I don’t like this expression) sherd from the West Mound.
That's all for today, a lot of hard work and effort, but also some nice EC architecture coming out. |
