| Entry: | Finished U.15158 yesterday, and helped XHB to bring the adjacent NE areas to the same level and see the plasterlines in one plane. This morning we removed a large soil section in U.15159, which appeared too disturbed to show the outlines of the architecture.
Not really worth reporting in a detailed convoluted diary entry, as most of the information is visual and inconclusive – see the plan (the one that I'll draw tomorrow) and photos of U.15159.
A thought that may be worth sharing is about the phases. Ismail, one of our workers and I pick-axed a patch of soil, roughly 2m x 1.5ml, 30cm high. The west side of it was circumscribed by plaster lines, the rest was unclear. We brought it all down in order to see the plan. So now several of the double plaster lines of the inter-buttress area that I talked about look like older walls. So far as I can tell, we have razed the later walls down to the top of the early walls, and the plan at the moment looks like an interphase. This makes life a bit complicated, as we are digging two phases at the same time. The top walls and lower walls will appear at the same level physically, making it harder to keep in mind that the later features were higher. Our mental image of the trench as a multi-temporal space will have to compensate the physical reality we dig in daily, and guide our interpretations. But if that is the case, one always has to make a choice of period to be represented. This disjuncture between multitemporality / single space can be problematic if we want to preserve the walls in order to show the site. … then again, the presentation on digital archaeology we just had makes me think maybe virtual preservation can resolve this sort of dilemmas? Plenty of food for thought in that presentation, I'll write more one I have ran it through my mind several times over. |
