| Entry: | At the depth of half a meter (over 1,5 feet) down, two crania (both crushed, one of them is large) have been encountered in a burial pit (the one with the nice smell I wrote about yesterday), in Building 96. The cut is deep and narrow and the space is crowded, as Barbara and Celine are lifting another individual in a cut close by. The three of us are lying in difficult angles, hour after hour, without possibilities to change position (no space left...). After a month, more or less, my knees are beginning to hurt.
BUT the burial is intriguing! It seems difficult to understand how the two crania are related to the long bones (which bones belongs to which cranium) and in what positions the bodies are lying. It is not even clear if they were buried together or separately. Stratigraphic data and forms of the cut seem to suggest they were buried separately, but the skeletons seem to be partly intertwined and the crania are definitely resting in direct contact with each other, which suggest they were buried together. Some body parts are, to make it even more complicated, placed in awkward angles. Were they - or one of them (the one with the large crania?) - buried in a semi-decomposed condition?
The human remains team is struggling to understand in what angles the bodies were placed and I, as archaeologist, am struggling to understand how to read the dirt around them, sort out the stratigraphic options and to try to excavate and expose the spaghetti of human bones as carefully as possible. The burial is, indeed, still very much open to interpretation. |
