| Entry: | Thought I had better make a diary entry before I go away on my next little break. This time it will be a holiday, in the Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus. Anyway I suppose I had mention the archaeology. Since I last wrote, things have still been going pretty slow in space 163. When I last wrote, Charlie had just located another burial. This meant that infill removal in the northern space had to work around him. I also found what looked like a burial cut in plan, but which turned out to be just a patch of slightly different infill. Progress has also been slowed by the weather. Rain last Friday turned a lot of the site into a quagmire so no site activity was really possible until Sunday, and then a great deal of quagmire removal was necessary.
The last few days I have been gradually removing the infill (4325) in the north-west quadrant of space 163. This has been hampered by the finding of a couple of nice! pieces of animal bone. Yesterday I located what turned out to be a sizeable chunk of articulated vertebral column of a large animal, which I think the animal bone specialist is probably removing as I write. Today I found the horn cores of some type of goat which are now covered in conservation gloop and drying in the sun. I have had to work around both of these obstacles. However, some progress has been made and today I have located what appears to be a large cut feature in the north-west corner of the space. I hope to expose more of this tomorrow, animal bone-removal permitting. After that, I hope that the remainder of the infill will be removed by the workmen in Mine and Charlie's absence, so that we can return from our break refreshed and with plenty of in situ archaeology to deal with (oh no! all that sampling to look forward to).
Finally, I suppose I should mention a couple of off-site things. Two and a half months in the work is beginning to take its toll. A number of people (myself included) are getting very tired and clearly in need of a break. A couple of non-site incidents in the past couple of days (I'm sure someone will provide details) have reminded us that things are far from plain sailing here (and the phone's been cut off today!). Anyway that's about it for now because, we're all going on a summer holiday, no more worries for a week or two, we're going where the sun shines brightly, we're going where the sea is blue.................. Thank-yoEntered By: Peter Boyer |
