| Entry: | So we have finally reached some Neolithic layers! We've dug out some serious fill (u. 20221) which still contains a fair amount of late pottery, but we've come down on a platform (f. 7173) that is eminently Neolithic in appearance, complete with a depression that everyone feels confident will be a burial cut.
Meanwhile, Mateusz and Lokman and another workman whose name I didn't catch worked really hard on removing a large unit of collapsed mud-brick (u. 20267) and revealing THREE side-by-side walls in the trench (7176, 7171, and 3952). They did a really incredible job, and now we have some obvious deposits of fill that we can attack next.
However: here's the continued weird motif of the Bermuda trench, as we call it. The highest building, currently referred to only by space number (493) is plastered on the outside, and the plaster continues below those three standing walls. So: the highest building continues to be the earliest. Take that, laws of deposition!
Still, the fill of this space (u. 20703) is free to be removed, which is what Erik and Selma (and someone else!) are coming in to do starting tomorrow. With them, we have enough members in TPC Trench 3 for our very own pub quiz team!
It’s amazing how much the experience of digging this trench has changed. We still have big deposits, but they’re almost entirely bounded architecturally, which is a whole new experience. Slowly, we’re closing out units that were opened last year and we’re getting space numbers, building numbers… Moving up in the database hierarchy. We have things like “north platforms” and “dirty floors,” we're using words so familiar in the North and South shelters, our language is becoming much more quintessential Çatalhöyük. Hopefully with the newly linking language will come the ability to link the stratigraphy as well! |
