| Entry: | Craig 7th Sept
Digging is finally beginning to wind down.
Space 157 finished a couple of days ago and since then Mark has been drawing elevations.
In 156 Asa is continuing to remove the 'trample' layer 3253 in 0.5x0.5m squares. She will probably only finish the two western spits before I have to stop her to do some drawing.
In 155 I took over from Adnan. I did some general sampling including the basins and then dug an area in the north-east. I dug part of F.353 which is probably a post pad or pillar base. I then dug various mixed layers 3898, 3899, 4000, 4004, 4011, 4012, 4013, 4014. These were generally quite mixed and confused with a pronounced and increasing slope to the north. They look like a series of occupation deposits and 4014 in particular looked dirty and produced a number of X finds. This excavation also revealed that pillar F.354 pre-dates basin F.355 which in turn pre-dates basin F.356. We took lots of sample from the basins including a micromorphology block which as good as we have very little idea what these instalations were for. I hope that the conservators can block up the hole properly as I had my doubts about sampling it as it now looks horrible and is suppossed to go on display.
In 154 Sharon excavated a long sequence on platform F.239 with lots of floor, trample and makeup layers. It looks like this feature had a long and interesting history. She eventually encountered a cut [4024] so we decided to stop. The function of this cut is unclear, is it a burial or something else?
The only person still digging is Asa and she will have to stop tomorrow. Mark has made a good start on wall drawing but we still have a lot of walls to go. There are also a number of sections that I would like to have drawn. We now have three days with the team which should see most of the work done although I may have to finish a few things off afterwards. I also have a mountain of paperwork to check which is now beginning to flood in.
Overall I have had an enjoyable season and I think that the team on the North area [Mark, Asa, Adnan, Sharon and Serdar] have all worked really well. In terms of progress I think that we have achieved quite a lot. We removed the walls of building 1, examined the deposits and other buildings this revealed, removed a lot of infilling, revealed Building 5, dug a small selection of deposits from Building 5 and made a good start at understanding and interpreting the building. It is extremely frustrating that it will be a long time until building 5 is excavated. Amazingly my predicted timetable at the start of the season held up quite well. I do worry about the state that the building will be in when it is finally excavated, I really think that despite he best efforts of the conservators some fragile features and layers will probably be badly affected.
There are still a few gripes that I have with the excavation methodology. Stopping 0.1m above floor layers and inserting baulks and intensively sampling cost us about a week and does not seem justified by the results. The lab specialists are essentially chasing a ghost that isn't there, ie the 'last occupation' which was left in-situ. It was fairly apparent from the start in some spaces, such as 154, that given the amount of truncation it just wasn't present. I feel that it was a waste of time but the various lab specialists seem reluctant to abandon it. A similar case was the bins in 157 where the excavator, Mark, could clearly tell that there were no primary fills in them. Once again what the excavator could see was disregarded in favour of what the specialists wanted to believe might be present. This also impacted onto the priority tours as we were prioritising things that the workers on site didn't think were particularly meaningful. This was borne out by the results and I basically think that of the last five of six tours only one has been worth the effort. The methodology is in fact anything but fluid and reflexive, once we start doing anything it is almost like it has been written on tablets of stone. People don't want to abandon anything we do until we have 'a large enough sample', by this they seem to mean around 20 building which will happen around the year 2015. The arrival of chemical residue, phytolith and phosphate sampling en masse has meant that any time we reach occupation deposits we go into sample overload. The time needed to take these and process them is phenomenal and will really slow down progress when we hit sequences of floors. There is also a problem of people taking samples either without telling you or without keeping exact records. Even worse is sampling things out of sequence that you are not ready to deal with or number yet. There has also been a notable break-down in site etiquette with some non-digging staff simply wandering into the trench without asking permission and then walking willy nilly wherever they feel like. At some point I think I will crack and start screaming at someone because they are the fourth person to do this on a given day.
The gripes sound fairly negative but overall I enjoyed myself, now I just have to panic like mad about the next week or so.Entered By: Craig Cessford |
