| Entry: | Today Serdar, Fatih and I mattacked our way through Mellaarts backfill in what we have (for the time being) called Rooms 26a, 26b.
Our aim, in using the North, East and South walls that are visible to define the floor level of these rooms. The backfill consists of hard, dark brown clay with chalk and charcoal inclusions and some inclusions of vegetation- straw etc.
Once the backfill is cleared we will be giving new feature numbers for the standing walls, space as well as a new building number.
Finds for today include: rectuangular stone bead , bone, clay ball fragments, obsidian fragments, a figurine head and a figurine base. These finds, however, are not in their original context as they are found in Mellaarts backfill.
Aim for tomorrow: we are still looking to locate the internal wall that seems to appear in Melllarts plans for these rooms, in fact our reasoning behind defining this area as two rooms is based on the internal wall that mellart has depicted in his plans, stretching East-West, and dividing the space into two, almost equal spaces.
When carrying out the spoil from the backfill, the workers (Mevlut Sivas, Mustafa Sivas, Saadettin Kuscuoglu, Ertan Kuscuoglu, Ali Kucukavcilar and Arif Arslan) would place the bucket of spoil on top of the north wall in order to carry the bucket out onto the spoil heap. Slightly concerned about the collapsing of this north wall, I warned them to place the bucket on the earth behind the north wall, at level with the wall itself; their response to my warning was quick: "don't worry about the wall, if it collapses, we'll build you one just like it".
At midday, Ian Hodder gave a site tour for the new arrivals of CatalHoyuk, which includes me.The tour was very informative and in my opinion extremely necessary in terms of giving everyone a visual understanding of the common features and the types of finds of the site as well as informing the new excavators on the aims of the many units (pods) that are conducting excavations in the area.Entered By: Beliz Tecirli |
