| Entry: | I’ve not had time to write individual diaries due to other things, so this will be a long entry.
Last week on Thursday, we were blessed by two Turkish travellers’ presence in the North shelter. One of them, without asking, without contemplating, with pure action simply took out his santar and began playing. We were all in awe clinging on to his notes simply formed by the his emotions at that moment in space and time. So distant from the Neolithic, so complete on its own. I can’t quite explain what those notes brought up within me and for all of us working in the North shelter that day. But somehow it reminded me much of those ephemeral aspects of culture such as song and dance that constitute the core of our humanity, and how we will, whatever we do, always have an incomplete picture without those experiences.
While I’m on wonders, I must add here that it was absolutely amazing to witness the exposure of two obsidian mirrors within the burial context(s) in Sp.77. That happened yesterday (which by the way seems like eons ago right now as I write these words at 9.30pm the next day). First mirrors since the project has begun, right next to B.1, perhaps 10cm below the surface. To think of all those times we’ve been treading on them and how many more things we continue to do so feels somehow a bit ironic.
I asked Numan to begin working on sp 77, an area defined by burnt brick and plaster remains right SE of B.5, possibly even later than B.1. One of the big issues Ian wants to tackle in the next few seasons is to actually stratigraphically link B.1&5, B.77 and B.3 to the rest of the 4040 sequence, as well as having a finer understanding of the stratigraphic relationships between the buildings in the area in general. Sp.77, although partially blocked by the metal bridge construction above B.5 is an important bit of the puzzle. While I was not expecting to actually excavate there, I wanted Numan and Kasha to clean the area as to have a better understanding of the spatial differences. Soon into their cleaning they began to uncover bits and pieces of human skeletons that suddenly turned into a mass of skull and bone. They couldn’t have let it go, so I asked them to uncover it.
Well, so far they have come across 3 ambiguous cuts, 4 or 5 skulls, and many unrelated bits of long bone as well as some random articulations of hands. They assigned one unit to the whole context (unit 19447) which is most likely the culmination of a couple of events, although I will talk about this more after the cuts are defined in full. The obsidian 'mirrors' seemed to be related with skulls. We need to actually do some proper deconstructing to actually figure out the puzzle sequence there - but so far I can say that there are a number of different types of beads associated with both the various remains and the obsidian. Further, pigment was found directly underneath the mirrors, some azurite as well as some ochre. The azurite was this incredible 'royal' blue.
There were some flat beads that made me wonder about the relationship between these so called mirrors and beads. Could beads have been burnished on the flat surface of these incredible obsidian cores? Is that even possible?
And what on earth were the hackberries doing right above the mirrors? An offering? I must remember to ask Amy more about the hackberries!
The question remains whether this was a series of different burial events, or whether the late Neolithic people began to actually mass bury their dead and do weird things as Ian would and many others would probably like to believe.
While I’m on the topic of burials I want to talk a bit about the late graves that have been popping up here and there between the BACH trench and the B.49-52 cluster to the south.
We’ve been mostly excavating these features since the beginning of the season. So far we have removed three individuals (F.3632, F.3633, F.3631), have one badly disturbed individual to deal with (F.3641) and one full burial (F.3640) to expose. Today, we found a glass jar with within F.3641, although it may even be related to another burial immediately south of it, as there were two nails right above the jar, that would have held together the end of a coffin. I think the jar should have been by the head, not feet, and since we did not find any substantial amounts of bone, we may have actually hit the head side (western end) of another burial. All of these burials seem to belong to the same period, not only evident by their orientation but actually by the small step in the cut they all have where the head of the individual would have rested. All of the burials had some gifts within them, like the spindle needle / hairpin made of ivory (? am I being too optimistic?) in F.3632 which apparently belonged to a woman as identified by Chris. Even the child burial (F.3633) had a bronze plaque. And I’m sure Asa will go over her cute stones in F.3631 (as well as the missing head!).
I can’t recall how many meetings I’ve been in these past few days and there are many changes coming up to our recording system in terms of the visual documentation (PLANNING!!!). I’m quite stressed out about it all, particularly with the fact that I am stretched too thin with the teaching and area digging I do as there are no other supervisors. But this discussion deserves its own entry. Good night. |
