| Entry: | This is my first diary entry of the season, the task for this year is to remove all the byzantine/roman graves and other features truncating the neolithic archaeology and expose the final phase of use in each of the buildings. The area reopened covers 40x10 meters and is located to the west of the strip we were working in last year. Over the last couple of days we have removed all the sand bags and started working in the northern end. Achieving the aims for this season is going to be difficult because there are few diggers. The Berkley students have been helping us so far but they will probably leave to work on the media stuff more.
Also the sampling procedure has not been agreed upon and, unlike last year, we may have to sieve 30 litres of each deposit from which the specialists will decide if they want us to do the rest of the deposit. I cant see this system working at all, we excavate far too many units in a day to be able to wait for specialists to make a decision. The idea of taking a 30 litre flotation sample from each unit is fine but there is no way that we could wait for the results from the dry sieve sample before finishing the excavation of a unit. The flotation will provide the botanists with what they need and with the faunal remains, obsidian and pot, I think that the excavator should be able to identify anything unusual on site. I worked in the faunal lab for two years and have a good idea of the material they are particularly interested in. As for the pot and obsidan they could point out aspects of units, other than quantity of material, they would be interested in studying in more detail. I think that some specialists do not trust us to make any sampling decisions using our own judgment on site which I strongly disagree with.
Anyway we will see what happens. On site there is alreay one late burial in my area but also we have made good progress on removing the room fill [10310] from space 98. That’s about it so far.Entered By: Lisa Yeomans |
