| Entry: | Annoying day today. The pit which was 'defined' yesterday had to be hastily undefined and a new arbitrary layer established, 16879. Sonya, Tom and I had a bit of a go at it which worked out some frustration but the very diffuse boundaries of any possible features means we will probably be faffing in this area for a while. The disturbance in the Eastern area between spaces 340 and 341 (16861) also turned out to have a grave in it and Alex and Jemima's area (16878 and 16870) is still very confusing with parts of articulated animal skeleton coming up alongside human bone and randomly distributed rocks. All in all it felt like we took a step backwards today. The excitement of assigning spaces and potentially hitting some defineable architecture has certainly dissipated. All these arbitrary layers and strangely associated pits are also, I think, having an adverse affect on the quality of excavation. This has been exacerbated by the arrival of the sieve. The absence of the context, the obvious and understandable lack of interest of specialists in unstratified finds or samples and the possibility that anything really interesting will inevitably be discovered in 4mm mesh makes for some sloppy digging, myself definitely included! Basically we really need some architecture to articulate everything, esepcially as, as tom m entioned, we're over halfway through the excavation now. Unfortunately Peter was ill today as well. Still, I'm looking forward to the seminar tonight on the Riverside project. |
