| Entry: | Have spent the last day and a half removing two neonate basket burials F.543 and F.544. These must have been cut during the lifespan of building 23 but because of the location of one of Wendys samples and the removal of composite layers for speed we don’t know where from exactly this renders them nicely decontextualised. I also had to remove them more quickly than I would have liked as they were going to hold us up so some of the excavation and recording wasn’t great quality, it all wasn’t helped by our digital camera breaking down.
Whilst I did this Jez, Richard and Serap continued removing the surrounding layers. The upper infilling (4849) = equivalent to (4708) etc to east = and the upper stabling (4850) - equivalent to (4710), (4715) and (4716) - have both now gone. (4850) was interesting as it has the bones of an articulated small animal, possibly a neonate sheep/goat, which strengthens the stabling hypothesis. It feels good to be extending the area of the deep excavation and it is also good that we now have two of the boundaries of the stabling to the west and east, it makes me at least feel a bit better as we are digging a slightly less arbitrary area and I feel I can get a better understanding of it.
The week that we have given ourselves to lower this area to the height we have already reached to the east is still a tough target but looks possible.
Tensions seem to be rising a bit, some of which may be my fault. I am beginning to question what exactly the point of this season is. We seem to have fetishised getting to natural but it seems a bit pointless unless we gain high quality information as we do it. The increased number of lab specialists also seems to be a bit of a problem. They are all fine individually but we seem to have achieved critical mass where priority tour discussions and other things seem to go on for ever. Also some of them who haven’t been here from the start haven’t really absorbed the implications of the speed we are digging at and still think as if it were previous seasons pace. This leads to them asking for things that we can’t realistically afford to do and generally taking up extra time we can ill afford.Entered By: Craig Cessford |
