| Entry: | Posting for 7/28/2013:
Three days of excavation remain, and though this could be my final diary entry I will try hard to reserve most of my parting thoughts for the concluding record, to be written in the coming days. For now, details of the present state of B.43 and its excavators: On Thursday morning I finished off my previous area, Sp.235, with what we believe to have been the last make-up layer and the presently exposed surface should be something like room fill. Following Thursday’s afternoon of thorough cleaning and photographing, we just today began excavating the southern end of Sp.236, myself working in the SW corner, Agata in the SE corner. The move has been a welcome one but just like my former area Sp.236 presents a challenging excavation landscape--heavily weathered and eroded. More specifically, Thursday’s cleaning revealed a fairly muddled stratigraphic scene, with patches of make-up and plaster floating in the sequence; though I was expecting that at least each patch would be fairly straightforward, my first unit here (U.30331) has already turned out to be quite troublesome. Our initial suspicion, based on the surrounding bits of plaster and the unit’s contrasting grey color, was that it was a make-up layer, however, upon excavation I encountered no floor, with all of the plaster patches I had hoped to follow ending abruptly or turning out to be plaster rubble. I now suspect that the area I planned is some sort of fill, with the plaster remnants of what might be a crawl hole (appearing as if they go into the east wall) exactly tracing the unit’s limit along the eastern wall. Hopefully we’ll see in the coming day(s).
In last week’s Field School meeting Ian (Prof. Hodder) mentioned something about how single-context excavation of plaster floor layers might not be worth the time it takes. I’d like to put in my own word on this matter, having just dealt with a rather tedious patchy floor several days ago: This was actually the second plaster floor that I had come upon in Sp.235, and it was revealed after removing the second make-up layer and F.7250, a bin in the NE corner of Sp.235. Because of the eroded nature of B.43 it was already impossible to definitively determine whether the patches of this floor (U.30327) actually belonged to one stratigraphic level and whether they were above or below the new make-up layer (where U.30327 did not survive), the boundary of which was more arbitrary than not. The outermost extents of U.30327 covered a swath of floor about 70 cm E-W x 10 cm N-S along the northern wall of Sp.235 and a 50 x 50 cm square in the eastern portion (see corresponding plans for actual extents), consuming about 1.5 hours to put in plan. The excavated volume was less than 0.5 L and after 30 minutes contributed entirely to an archive sample. That this unit consumed 2 hours and contributed very little to our story of B.43 says to me that it would have been more efficient to group it with the make-up layer upon which it sat and to take the two layers as one unit. As Ian mentioned in today’s meeting, these plaster archive samples are not infrequently used and in several cases excavating a floor layer separate from the make-up beneath has shown that a burial cut was made in the make-up and then plastered over; nonetheless, in cases such as I described above, we seem to gain almost nothing by single-context excavation. Perhaps the decision to break the mold should be made case-by-case. We may loose some objectivity, but I think the much of the objectivity in the case of very eroded floors is already muddied by the heavy interpretation that goes in to determining which patches actually count as part of the floor layer in question. |
