| Entry: | Yesterday in the evening the 2007 DAI Reisestipendiaten arrived at Catalhoyuk, which is great fun for me, and I spent some hours after breakfast showing them around the mounds.
We started the day with a thorough brushing of the whole trench 5 which is best done while there's still not too much wind: afternoons are usually very windy. A weekly cleaning is advisable, as too much dust accumulates in the corners and grooves of the walls.
DEL continued to dig down roomfill 16896 to the level of the cut of grave 2416. Cleaning the plaster of space 342 is a time-consuming work, as it is very disturbed by moleholes and only preserved in patches that are sometime shad to match. AWH closed unit 16898 in space 310 when the bottom of the biggest potsherds of cluster 17208 was reached. Might be an arbitrary layer, but I want to be on the safe side. MB documented the cut of 17211, and SO documented the finds cluster in 16894. JJW continued 16885.
Spaces 340 and 341 are still a bit of a headache for JMR, KJK and me. At least 16859 seems to have come down to a basal bounday now with much more mixed soil! This coincides with the level where we have seen a corner right after the removal of 16861. Now that the region has dried up, I can"t see it anymore. I can well understand French who decided to dig Can Hasan in autumn in pite of accasional rain in order to avoid this extremely fast evaporation. The good discussion on how to properly proceed here was on how to meet all goals: get deeper in an efficient way, while at the same time producing both clean units for IF and finding the missing corners. In space 341 we give a little test quadrant in unit 16880 a try. We still have to clearly define wall 5056 which was very well visible in the planum, and the corresponding SE and NE corners of the rooms are still missing. As all the walls in that space complex seem to be of the no-mortar-no bricks-discernible massive type, identifying a truncation of walls 5052 and 5057 as well as 5053 and 5054 is extremely hard.
Resolved to prepare a compulsory reader on the archaeology of the Catal Mounds and the Anatolian Neolithic for all our team members as soon as I am back in Berlin. |
