| Entry: | More progress today in the space, and many more finds. The horn core 7920 was exposed to be much larger than originally thought, we have one more almost intact one and perhaps a few more bits and pieces, which don't have unit numbers yet.SLS also uncovered partially the skull of a wild-half-ass, which we found pretty amusing. All these are in the east part of Space 100; the concentration of large bones is beginning to look really impressive. We are not quite down to a platform yet, and cannot tell how they are situated in relationship to their context. SHL found a strange cut in the east wall: it corresponds to the original burial cut of 2003 (which we, back then, interpreted as a "mound" on top of the real cut), but is much deeper. If I get done with data entry today I will look at last years's plans and try to figure out why it is there. IHo suspects it is late-Roman or Byzantine. While SHL and SLS worked in the east part of the space, DGN and I continued cleaning the south wall (7938) finding another, smaller clay animal figurine (7938x4) and a sharpened bone tool, perhaps a needle or an awl (7938x3). We tried to make sense of the plaster pieces in the south part of the trench, but were pretty unsuccessful. We also continued to take out unit 7931, the fill inthe middle of the room. I took out, in a bag of bone dust, the huge humerus 7922. Upon IHo's request, I cleaned of what I had been thinking of as a bin in the west part of the trench (7921) in order to re-assess. The aim was to see whether the fill might be interpreted as a raised platform. It did not really become clear; however, we could see that only one layer of fat brick emerged supporting the plaster facing; the rest looked like room fill. IHo's visit at the end of the workday actually provided us with a much better understanding of the interrelationship of the features in space 100. I will not describe everything here, since I still have a lot of unit sheets to enter into the database, but the strategy of the next few days will largely be guided by the insight he gave us.
Later, the Stanford team had its weekly update meeting. It was quite different from the first week - the students are definitely beginning to feel the strain and stress of excavation life. I saw fatigue, exasperation, and there were more than a few concrete complaints. They are going away this weekend to check out Kappadokia - probably a good thing. They need some time off.Entered By: UK |
