| Entry: | Today was one of those days. Issues concerning access into deep areas, having to remove huge amounts of spoil, suddenly feeling the shortfall of workmen and counting the number of walls we should remove before we go deeper and trying to work out which we’ll get away with removing.
Pete and Charlie are now taking out infill in building 6 but Pete has found another burial, the cut (if it is a cut) is large with a central location in the building, an irregular straight sided cut and up to 0.5m deep, the size of the cut as defined could be an indication of more than one burial. Charlie’s just found another feature but I’ve not seen it yet. All recording in building 7 is done and we’re just about ready to remove more backfill but we want to take a little more out of building 8 first. By doing this we’re making the step down into Bldg 8 quite deep but we can’t use ladders yet because we have so much backfill to remove. It’s difficult to decide where to put the ladders when eventually we do introduce them, originally we had nice 1- 2 m steps, now we will have 2-3m steps, a longer distance to carry these very flimsy buckets up and down too. I think we’ll have to try to build a platform to the south of bldg 7 and secure a ladder there and something similar for bldg 8. Bldg 6 is tricky, we have to remove the south wall of bldg 2 and use that side as our main entrance. There are parts of the east section that will eventually sheer off so those need excavating too. There is no way we can just dig down, there are so many periphery things to do too.
We’ve stopped in spaces 159 and 160 for the time being, I now need to be convincing in my argument to dig it down a bit more. Basically Space 159 was constructed over fill (not excavated) which at the moment appears to be between walls for bldg 6 to the east and bldg 7 to the west. The walls were stepped down to the south. There was then a layer of infill and over which space 160 was constructed by cutting into the space 159 N=S walls to the south. What we don’t know is how the floors to space 159 related to space 160, were they at some stage contemporary?
I’m still trying to excavate the buildings to the west of bldg 8 , these are Mellaart’s houses 5 and 6 renumbered as spaces 169 and 168 respectively. My digging time is unfortunately restricted.
We’re going to try to excavate the whole of building 6, it’d be nice to do at least one whole building and it may be a good one, if we do this our chances of reaching natural in this building are low but it may generate publicity and further support. The only concern is whether the south section will hold up, it looks pretty solid at the moment.
One thing I forgot to mention was the decision I made not to dry sieve the bricks and mortar of walls. This was a suitable shortcut to make considering our time scale and resources. The routine samples are taken of bricks and mortar separately, and the walls are removed but litres counted so some form of quantification can be made.Entered By: Shahina Farid |
