| Entry: | Today I went on digging the fill of the pit 15160. The borders aren`t clearly defined yet, I am going to look for them tomorrow. The pit fill contains a lot of x-finds, especially worked bone. There are also a lot of bigger pottery sherds and in the S-W corner there turned up a complete half of a carnivores mandible , as well as an articulated vertebrae, which I couldn`t follow completly until the end of the day, so I will have a look tomorrow wether there`s a sacrum connected. In the western part of the pit I found also a little more of worked obsidian (we are talking about big tools, not just the small stuff) than in the eastern part. In the western part of the corner also seems to contain more chunks of mudbrick and there are definitely a lot of phytolits inclusions (las well as in Bela`s unit 15158). There is also a small clay figutine, found by Ismail in the sieve.
The pit is heavily disturbed by animal burrows, making the search for the exact outlines slightly more difficult. But in my opinion it is very important to get the outlines of the pit as exactly as possible, instead of creating fast and without further knowledge of the situation a new space. As Peter already said, this pit is an event, and if we have the opportunity to record this event ( the pit in the roomfill) then that`s what we should do, because mixing up two things (the pit and the roomfill) DOES make a huge difference to me. That`s what archaeology is about, understanding the situation and the horizontal and vertikal line of events, and it is not (only) about digging up finds. If we can`t define a border between a roomfill and a pit in the end, then we tried at least. But loosing informtion, that might be there, on purpose, is not what should be the regular case in field work.
I`m sorry I am so stubborn about this point, I know it can be quite annoying, but that`s the way I see field work. |
