| Entry: | Excavator's log - Catal Day 5.
I was asked today to leave "mySpace" and to work somewhere else. Oh, what a treachery, that my initial dismay faded quickly to be replaced by excitement at the opportunity to study a human burial from close up. I took the measurements for JFB, who drew the skeleton in the newly opened space in the eastern part of the trench (unit 15142, feature 3317).Tricky business as some bones were higher situated than others, quite a number were loose and I had not done this before. Anyway, this was the first grave outside a graveyard that I encountered. My feelings towards it were mixed: On the one hand I saw only bones, most of them fractured, no skull, so identification was difficult. On the other hand the knowledge, that these are the remains of a human being, who surely had thoughts on how s/he was going to be treated "correctly" after her/his death, was and is there. Maybe this is not the place to go into an ethic discussion, but I think it's remarkable, that upon the sight of an almost complete femur, which even I with my limited grasp of human anatomy could identify as human, the realisation of the knowledge, that this had been a living person once, set in rather suddenly. Seeing is believing.
(Interestingly enough, this femur came from the adjoining space/unit, though it may belong to this person - seems to be a pretty disturbed context.)
After the drawing was complete I was given the task of removing the bones and clearing the burial fill (unit 15141), which proved to be a slow going business as there were more bones coming up than I had thought. The cut (unit 15143), too, wasn't easy to find, although I concur with JFB's assessment that it was recognizable by the texture of the fill, which was softer than the surrounding compact layer. Still, as the space has been open for some quite time by now, it has started to dry out, which puts the term "soft soil" in another perspective. At the end of the working hours we had only succeeded in removing the fill of the western part of the burial.
Trying to give the complete surface of the trench a brush-down in 10 minutes was a bit unsuccessfull in my opinion, partly because of the windy weather, partly because most of our brushes are rubbish and mostly because 10min. were simply not enough.
I will have to see where in the trench my mission to explore time and space will continue on Saturday.
SCS out and over. |
