| Entry: | It’s been a great week in Building 96, thanks largely to Jenna joining the team! She takes over in the afternoons while I conduct ethnographic interviews with Cansu’s indispensable help. Jenna has become a master of plaster, wielding the leaf trowel to uncover B. 96’s endless laminations of plaster and makeup.
Today, she worked on revealing what we think may be the earliest layer of floor plaster across the entire space by taking off makeup layer u. 20872. I worked on the eastern side of platform f. 3508, where we were three laminations behind. My goal was to get through makeup, plaster, makeup today but I only made it through one layer of makeup (u. 20862) and half of a layer of plaster (u. 20873). Tomorrow hopefully I’ll be able to make it through the rest of the plaster and the next layer of makeup. Once we’ve uncovered this last layer of plaster across the entire space, we will be in phase across the entire building for the first time in a year! Jason’s already on alert to take the video to celebrate… I mean, document it.
Also, once I get through the final layer of makeup on platform f. 3508 conservation can come back in and continue to reveal the geometric wall painting—what Michelle has called a “Jacob’s Ladder” design… Derivative of the brick motif but only visible in relatively thin vertical strands up wall f. 4092. This is good—Peter Pels is here and today came to visit our wall painting. It would be great to reveal more of it, and its earlier incarnations, while he is still here!
The question remains of what those burials that are exposed exactly are… Where are the cuts? Are there cuts at all? We have most likely two individuals who are within our limits of excavation (one being juvenile sk. 20853, whose feet appeared underneath subadult burial f. 7012). We had assumed at the beginning of the season that these burials would hold us up for most of the beginning of the season, but in fact there has been no stratigraphic reason to lift them. With 14 days left, it’s getting dangerously close to the point where we’ll be rushing to excavate skeletons on our last day here! For purely practical reasons, it would be great to find the cuts in the next few days. Although, if they are foundation burials, we probably wouldn’t reach them this season anyway; they’d be below about a half meter of makeup! We should find out when we finish revealing the plaster layer we’re currently working on, if it is the earliest, which makes the peeling we’re currently doing even more significant! |
