| Entry: | Today has been the third day since we started removing the massive infill of Sp. 504. Hard work, as expected. Two days ago, we felt excited by the new task and full of energy, and we removed almost 3.5 tons of soil! It was pehaps too much. At the end of the day, all of us, including our young worker Ferdi felt exhausted. When we told Ferdi's mother (she work here as well, in the kitchen) how many tons we had excavated, she was slightly disappointed. And she were right, it was perhaps too much.
Yesterday morning we were still feeling the tiredness accumulated from the day before. After having cleaned and taken an interim photo of the infill layer, it was really hard starting with the hard work. The photo also revealed that the infill layer was not massive as we thought, but composed by two different layers, I.e. the orange, burnt infill we were still excavating for a few days (U.21193) and a layer of grey, unburnt infill which seemed to us quite superficial but it was in fact going quite deeper in the western part of Sp. 504 (21194). When we tried to scraping the edges of U.21194 the orange layer were coming out after a few centimetres. What we didn't expected at all was that this layer went much deeper in the proximity of the walls. I was a bit scared of excavating too much, while I had already excavated around 20 cm of soil. Eventually, though, the reassuring and familiar orangish colour shined at the edges of my trowel. And the same happened in other part of the building. Agata interpreted such a weird pattern in a way I totally agree with: the grey, unburnt layer (U. 21194) was probably added to the burnt infill of the earlier building in order to stabilize the soilf where the later walls were to be built. An indirect proof to this interpretation is given by U.21193 itself, which is much soft and sometime loose, and thus probably not suitable as a foundation layer.
In the last part of the day we faced some issues with the workmen. Ferdi, who was much tired from the day before, tended to spent too much time emptying the wheelbarrels, while our second worker, Lokman, sometimes waited for him seated on the full buckets. This slowed down our work, and Agata appeared soon upset for this reason. I tried to speak with them and to help them more actively, but I was just too tired to do so. All of us were just too tired, but we learnt our lesson anyway: it is much more effective being helped by one workman than by two of them!
Today we have carried on removing U.21194, which now means many tons of soil. We have now recovered some energy from the day before. While trying to identify the edges of our unit, we have also eventually found our western wall, which doesn't lies exactly underneath the later walls as happened in the case of our northern and southern walls, but slightly toward west. It now stands out with its wonderful orange colour, which remind me the colour of some old Vespas and Lambrettas!
The south-western corner of our building reserved an other surprise for us: more of less 10-12 beads anda few clay balls were found in that area, in some cases much close to the interface between U.21194 and U.21193. The objects most probably belong to U.21194, because they don't seem have been damaged by fire. I imagined an middle-aged lady (it shouldn't necessarily be a woman, but that's how I istinctively thought) accidentally breaking her necklace. A dozen or more beads sparse on the soil, but nobody really care about them. I laughed by myself of my weird thought. |
