| Entry: | I liked the way Justine put it-- "the hurry-up speech"
It's less of a speech per se than a gentle urging, but the basic sequence of events is when Ian listens to your archaeological frustrations regarding what's confusing or difficult about excavating a particular trench, and responds with a recommendation along the lines of "be brutal" or "be sure to really attack it."
My hurry-up speech involved his recommendation to divide our trench while half of it is held up by a 4 (maybe 5, after today!) person burial (f. 3931) directly on top of all of the walls that are starting to appear in trench 3 in the TPC. We're finally starting to see stratigraphy, but it's all beneath an ever-growing number of semi-articulated individuals in the North half. And the idea of digging out of phase seems especially incongruous to our goal of connecting the stratigraphy of the TP area to the stratigraphy of the South area.
But now we're digging the south half, aggressively, with three men and some picks-- which seems to be all right, since we're not finding the same concentration of structures and building materials in the south half that we've been finding in the north. Meanwhile, Jenny and I continue to use our spoons and kebab sticks to savor every tiny ped of loam we pick away from the always-growing number of bones we have in feature 3931. (Today, Scott brushed away some dirt before taking our 3D photos for this grouping of people and revealed some emerging maxillary teeth-- meaning we likely have an upside-down FIFTH skull!). I'm at peace with the idea that this season may involve the simultaneous digging of essentially two separate but conjoined trenches. I have to be... Postmortem parties do not accord well with the hurry-up speech! |
