| Entry: | So this morning we finally finished taking out the (infamous) Roman wall. The really regular one, with the 40 cm square bricks (f. 3951). And I expected to feel a huge sense of relief-- this was one measurable, visible step toward getting TPC Trench 3 securely into the Neolithic (aside from the late pits, and the Roman building, and now our sweet action water pipe... Aside from all that, of course). The wall was going to disappear and our trench's stratigraphy was going to look so unified, so ostensibly Neolithic.
But Mateusz came over when it was finished and looked at the void left by my vigorous but highly precise pickaxing, and looking down he said, "Are those more bricks?"
Nooooo!
They weren't; they were the remnants of the orange Neolithic mud-bricks on top of which the Roman wall was actually built. They had been crushed quite a bit in the last few thousand years, so that the Roman bricks had left impressions of themselves. We were seeing the ghosts of the Roman bricks projecting themselves backwards in time onto the Neolithic bricks.
I started thinking a lot about traces, about how archaeological events leave traces that transcend their immediate moment of deposition. Every behavior and process affects how we can read the archaeological record, how we can read stratigraphy. There are obvious ones, like the extreme terracing that the Romans apparently felt necessary to live on top of this mound, but then even more minor ones, like the impressions of these more recent mud bricks on much older ones.
And so, even as I approach more and more the contexts of interest to researchers here, it is harder than I expect to really remove the traces of more recent human history. Clearly, I find this a really philosophical question.
But maybe it just serves to reinforce just how far we have to go in this trench! |
