| Entry: | Space 95 continues to be a confusing mess. Every time I am sure we have found something, it turns into something else or the thing I was sure about crumbles (sometimes literally, I am working with some very burned sections and sometimes what I thought was solid wall turns out to be crumbly fill upon further scraping) again into uncertainty. There are several things causing particular problems in trying to define my little burnt, crumbly, room.
So far the only walls I am sure actually exist (this is a bit of an overstatement. There are several places where there are indeed clear walls. They just tend to dissapear quickly, almost as if we have a bunch of wall segments) are the thin ones that form the small bin on the northern edge of the room. And even here parts seem to be destroyed by later burial cuts and small burrowing animals that I will touch on in a minute. The places where before I thought there where no walls turn out, after scraping off more topsoil, to actually house the tell-tall bricks that indicate there is indeed a wall there. Conversely, the places I thought there were walls turn out to be more like dense fills. To put one more confusing aspect in, the places I thought there was one wall no appears to have two, only the second one disappears at an angle after only half a meter or so. Im bumping up against these problems on the western wall, the south-western wall, and the northern wall. And it doesn’t help that the fire in this space burned so unevenly, so some places appear to be made of different material when in fact they very well might just have suffered different degrees of baking.
As promised, I would like to make a short mention of the furry mammals that appear to have found something particularly appealing about space 95; especially around the bin. The burrows are everywhere! I literally was able to excavate one that travelled from the southwest corner of the bin all the way to the southeast corner, destroying part of the bin bottom in the process. They are also making it difficult to interpret the walls because they have filled the brownish yellow clay bricks with trails of the grainy grey fill indicative of their furry activities. They so voraciously burrowed into the space that I even found an iron nail smack in my Neolithic bin. I agree with Burcu’s statement that it probably came from the late burial that cut the top of this space.
If anything it makes me wonder a bit about the rodent problems the Neolithic residents must have faced here. As archaeologists we see the traces as an annoyance, but we do not have to deal with the actual problem—we only see the imprint as a result of the problem. There must have been significant rodent trouble, especially since there would have been food involved. I would be interested to see or hear if anyone has detected anything in their digging that might reflect a mitigating reaction towards rodent infestation or preventative measures taken against it. Perhaps sloped out bin sides, phytolith remnants on the tops of bins indicating possible lids or anything of that sort. |
