| Entry: | It is a most intimate process to excavate a burial – to expose the remains of a human being to the world again, after it having been hidden for – in this case – so many thousands of years. First, the almost sacred moment when you encounter the skeleton, maybe especially the head. And then the time consuming procedure of excavation, of uncovering part by part of the body, studying each part and how it behaves under the trowel, in relation to the fill, so closely. It is a slow process, which gives time for a lot of thoughts and questions of who this person was, how she/he lived, loved and died, what she/he looked like when put in the burial, and what she/he believed would happen to her/his body after it had been buried. The person had perhaps experienced the burial of other persons and how skeletal (or bodily, with soft tissues?) pieces had been encountered, handled, reburied. She/he might not have hoped for eternal peace. But of course, the fate of becoming a scientifically studied archaeological item with a unit-number, cannot have crossed her/his mind…
Anyhow, by now, almost all of the right side of skeleton u. 20810 (B.96/Sp.370/South) is uncovered. It is the first burial I examine here at Chatalhöyük and it is a delicate and challenging task to remove the burial fill as gently as possible, without the skeleton flaking more than absolutely necessarily.
In the last minute, before finishing excavating for the day, an obsidian item was revealed in the front of the forehead of the dead. Tomorrow I will uncover it completely. Is it a part of a blade or is it something else? It looks intriguing, anyhow, with the shining black surface lying there, in front of the forehead, almost like a mark of the mind. |
