| Entry: | Since the database has been out of order for some days and it hasn’t been possible to enter the diary, this entry consists of many days, from the beginning of my stay.
After a few days of work of at the east mound, north shelter, space 84, things are starting to work smoothly. Many new things such at single context documentation, sheets with vocabulary in English, etc. made the first days busy understanding the documentation system. And of course the site itself, a completely new context for me, made me kind of scared. But with help from Burcu and Asa things became more clear and I got more relaxed. I also got a lot of valuable help with small things, sheets etc from a member of the team, Maciej Chylenski, who had been at the site during a study season.
The first working day I spent surveying with the new Trimble totalstation together with Rebecka. Nails with coordinate signs were put out in the south and north shelter. The Trimble 360 degree prism wasn’t possible to fit to the Leica rod so Bjorn and I went to Konya the first Friday with the taxi driver Abdullah, to a mechanical workshop to make a fitting in metal. A very skilled person who was a childhood friend of Abdullah made it. He and his employees were very friendly and charged nothing for the adaptor, which took more than one hour to make.
The work at the north shelter begun with a few days of emptying the back filled houses, together with archaeologist and workmen. When we were more or less ready I was assigned space 84, a rectangular area with walls and a coming building name. Maciej and I began cleaning the surface of the walls and the inner space. We documented the walls in plan and gave them feature numbers. Meanwhile Asa was excavating a child burial in the central area of the space, F.3622. The burial was exposed during the previous excavating at the site, and left under a cover. There were several other cuts from previously excavated burials in the same are. Maciej and I excavated our first unit, U.19440, a clay layer in the southeast corner of the building. It was very windy and dusty during the day and the whole area was covered with dust that made everything have the same colour. The area was documented by camera at several occasions by Bjorn for tests of 3D visualisation.
04/07/2012. The stratigrafical relation between the two southern walls, F.3623 and F.3624, in space 84, was not obvious, so Burcu suggested a small peep hole outside the wall that was believed to be a younger one, F.3623. It turned out that it continued down at least 0,2 m and was partly covered by the wall F. 3624. So it was the other way around, the upper outer wall was older than the lower western, or they are contemporary, as Ian remarked today when he looked at them. It was lucky that we didn’t start to excavate the wall. We only made an archive sample of a brick. We also documented the extension of the layer of clay, U.19444, that covers a major part of the area. In the middle of the space this layer seems to have been excavated previously and the underlying black midden layer was exposed. A major part of the western area of the clay layer, U.19444, was excavated and a new internal wall was partly exposed. There were some finds in the layer, mainly bones and obsidian, some fragmented clay balls and a sharp fishhook that was fragmented, etc. The clay was very hard in the upper part, especially in the northern 1,5 metres, where it had a layered structure and broke of in flat pieces. After lunch our third team member Jackie Low joined us.
05/07/2012. Today we finished excavating U.19444, a clay layer in the western part of the supposed building. It seems as the midden layer continues all the way to the western wall. The inner room wall, that we found yesterday continued further to the north and it has probably a doorway. It is still unclear if the room wall belongs to a lower building or if it is a rest of a younger building. According to Burcu the three buttresses could be an indication of a younger building. The thick layer of hard clay along the northern wall differs from the western layer of clay. It was cleaned and several thin layers of clay with different colours were seen. The layer is probably a part of a destroyed platform over the nearby older burials, belonging to the younger building. Similar thin layers of clay were seen in the remaining clay layer in the southeastern area. Space 84 was cleaned before the tour.
07/07/2012
Today we got help excavating by Mehmet Mertek. We finished excavating the clay layer close to the northern wall, U.19457. It consisted of several laminated layers of clay with different colour. There were almost no finds in the layer. They occurred mainly close to the underlying layer. The thin layers sloped down northward by c. 30 degrees. The idea that the layers were part of a platform was confirmed by Ian, who said that we should give the younger building a number. It was named building 108. In the afternoon I helped Susan in B.77 with interpreting the oven construction, F.3621 and at the end of the day I also helped Numan documenting the obsidian mirrors, since they had to be brought in before the end of the day.
08/07/2012
Today it was mainly me and Maciej working in B.108. Jackie got a hurting foot so she had to wash finds instead. We started excavating a clay layer in the southeastern corner of the building, U.19458. It was partly similar to U.19457, with several thin clay layers with varying colours (5 could be counted, grey white to light brown), c. 1-2 cm thick. They were sloping down to the east by 10-15 degrees. So far the layer mainly contained bones and obsidian, found primarily in the lower part and in the south eastern 1,5x1,5 m of the unit. The laminated part of the layer contained almost no artefacts. The low number of finds made as stop dry sieving and hand picking finds instead. I discussed with Ian an Asa where to make the first section. An idea was to make it north south going approximately one third in from the east. This location would catch the dirty area, central area and northern platform, if the building were similar to B.77.
09/07/2012
The infill layer U.19482 was excavated and documented by both hand drawing and totalstation (only the contour by Rebecka). It was interpreted as some kind of infill in the grave platform area, in building 108. It was positioned along the walls in the northeast corner of the building. There were very few finds in the layer, but a lot of plaster fragments, some with red paint. It seems that this and the underlying infill are specially chosen for the purpose as a coming grave area, since the top of the black midden infill is much higher up just some metres to the west. They obviously avoided to fill the upper part of the easternmost area with midden infill.
Ian commented the position of the coming section. He said we should try to check the relation between the two walls to the south, F.3623 and F.3624, before we decided where to position the section. We agreed to make a test trench the next day the in the area where the plaster at the surface seemed to finish. In this area there could be an inner wall going to the north. If so it would be little workspace, between that wall and the section. |
