| Entry: | So, finally time has come for my last field diary entry for the 2012 season. People are going home. The trench owl made its last inspection yesterday evening, the corridors are silent and empty and there is suddenly hot water in the showers and cold water in the drinking water dispensers. Mateusz and I spent the last week removing wheel barrow after wheel barrow of the infill of space 17+18, now also known as the north half of building 102. It ended up being 135 full wheel barrows, so we were happy to be close to the shelter door and the sieve space. The poor guys in the south end of the shelter carried all their soil out in buckets, through the entire shelter. Why did we never set up a second sieve station south of the shelter? It would have saved them so much time and muscle ache. . .
Last Tuesday we suddenly reached the floor level in space 17. Although we had been digging reasonably carefully, going down 0.10 metres at a time, we did not at all expect the floor to attack us already. Scott had been telling us about the 2008 excavation of the eastern end of the same building, when they dug two metres down, and Burcu kept encouraging us to be quick as professor Hodder was especially interested in this building with its large grave cluster excavated in 2008. Then came an oven (F7101), which made us suspicious, and suddenly we found the floor level more or less in a bucket. Unfortunately the spot where we cut through the floor was just around the oven, where we would have needed to check the relations to the different floor levels.
The last one and a half field days were spent exposing the rest of the floor level in space 17. Initially we intended to take away all the last remains of the infill, U20481, in space 18 too, but when we found an aurochs horn core (U20481:X6) and had to wait for the faunal remains team we decided that it was better to leave the last infill for the next season. In that way the floor will also be protected during the winter. We collected the horn core, cleaned everything up and planned it with the new cuts found.
It is amazing how a space can go from being just a hole in the ground to being a building in just a couple of hours. When we saw the floor surface and the post holes, things started to make sense in a completely different way. The spot where an extra thick plaster layer had come off the wall, but been kept in place in a strange way by infill between the wall and plaster, perfectly matched a huge cut that could be a post retrieval pit. Suddenly we were in a room, not in a pit.
Now it is finally time to remove six weeks' dust and go home. My poor computer will never be the same again. Perhaps I can leave it in a bucket of water and soap for a night before packing it down. Yes, that's what I'll do. It will probably do it good. |
