| Entry: | Today was the second day with the students from the southhampton team helping in my unit. We finished removing the rest of the room fill that we could (we left a 70 cm baulk along the Western wall for safety reasons), and began the work of prepping the room for 3D photos. As it was nearly the end of the day when we finished with the room fill itself, we did not have enough time to properly finish the prep work or to begin the the 3D photo process. This will be finished tomorrow in the morning. As has been the case with the rest of the room fill, there were a lot of finds, including many large sherds of pottery, large animal bones, and groundstones, among other things. The fill was fairly uniform across the entire room, with a lot of mud brick rubble atop and amongst the many finds. The center and the southwest corner of the the room had relatively more finds, and the other 3 corners of the room had relatively fewer, but other than that, the room was rather consistent.
It has been interesting having the Southhampton students digging alongside me. I am used to essentially digging my unit on my own, including the digging itself, the bucket removal, and the sorting and labeling of finds. When I have had people alongside of me, it was usually only for very short times and in a limited scope, so it was nice to have people alongside me consistently, sharing in the entire experience of excavating. It was also interesting as these were students with little excavation experience of their own. On the one hand, I enjoy teaching and showing them not only how to excavate properly, but explaining what they were looking for and helping them interpret what they were finding. On the other hand, as this has essentially been my room for two years now, it was a little tough letting them actually do the excavating itself and not jumping in and doing it for them. little things such as a planum not being as flat as I would like it, or pottery being dug out from the wall were facts of experience, and while I could point them out and alert them for next time, once dug it was dug and that was it. It is just a different experience teaching excavation versus merely excavating oneself. |
