| Entry: | Things have definitely been progressing in TPC Trench 3, although I have to say we're starting to feel the pressure of the end of the season, as I'm sure everyone else is. Bright leaves us on Wednesday (two more days of excavation with us, as he reminds us with a countdown each day!); Erik leaves in eight days, and Mateusz and I will be hanging on til the end… beginning as we started… until the 7th.
The influx of new people has allowed a lot more simultaneous excavation to occur. Mateusz and Bright worked together to excavate an enormous, meter-deep pit (f. 7188), which contained some really cool finds! A non-Neolithic chert dagger, according to Adam, as well as a post-Neolithic figurine, possibly a lion or a bull. Really cool stuff! And they finished digging the pit today, at least as far as we could tell…. They came upon a wall in the W half, but not in the E half, but we're leaving the E half in case it represents room fill rather than pit fill. We may not find out this season!
When they finished, Mateusz moved on to u.30766, a really important unit of fill lying between our two very bizarre walls f. 3981 and f.7176, which are both plastered on faces that seem to signify some sort of exterior space. Really bizarre! Excavating this unit will be really important for understanding the spatial and temporal relationship between these two walls-- whether they are part of some Late Neolithic mega-complex, or if one is later than the other.
Erik and Selma have been working in space 493, which is bounded to the south by f.3981. They've been visited by specialists from archaeobotany, conservation, and faunal labs, having found antler, wheat, and barley in the space. We've got lots of evidence there for many hanging baskets which fell in the room fill u.20703, as well as on top of the bins. It's a really amazing space, although the entrance must be somewhere between TPC trenches 2 and 3 (where would they enter through the roof?? Especially if it's actually part of this mega-complex idea) so it's getting more and more difficult to enter the space as we dig deeper and deeper.
Meanwhile, I clearly have the most exciting job, struggling to define heavily eroded walls and floors in the NW corner amid patches of disturbed plaster, in situ floor bits, mud brick collapse, and in situ bricks. This has been a many-day struggle, as the difference between bricks and collapse is often impossible to see. The soil is difficult to distinguish, it's really tough to dig through, and it's the really only safe place for people to walk into the trench and enter… BUT I had a breakthrough today, being able to identify multiple in situ bricks, enough so that three separate people commented on how much better and clearer it looked. Now that's progress! It seems what we have is the eroded remnants of a building or space built against sp. 493… We're currently thinking it's from a later period, but may turn out to be contiguous depending on how many patches of floor we find meeting up with wall f.7183 (the W wall of sp. 493). It's exciting to have these specific questions needing particular answers… But the thought of tearing out all this collapse is pretty exciting too! |
