| Entry: | My first entry for a few days. I am feeling quite frustated on the whole. There are considerable pressures on us to perform here, and yet one's peformance is so dependent upon other people and extraneous circumstances. Sounds like whingeing. We had a TAG meeting yesterday, discussing possibilities for papers. I came away from it quite depressed. The session is called "Post-processual methodology at Catalhoyuk". It was all about pulling categories apart and so on. I realise now that I am a positivist and a processualist, because I am interested in the processes of the past and I am not interested in understanding the subjective, culture-specific roots of my own standpoint, beyond being aware that they exist. I am interested in just being me and finding out about the past for myself and for others and in using the scanty fragments as a basis for imagining multiple universes of the past, which the evidence can never entirely substantiate but does not contradict. I think I won't go to TAG at all. Ian has also asked me to consider returning here next year, but it will be very difficult as regards my time. I feel up one day, then down for five days, or so. Up days coincide with shifting earth, down days coincide with overlong specialist tours or endless discussions about the point of it all. We have had some good days on site lately. During the past couple of days we took out the late walls in Spaces 71 and 110 and have got the entire building pretty much down to a consistent level, with only one or two anomalous patches. It looks really good now, with little plastered steps and crisp platform edges. The building was only chopped up after the fire - perhaps it could have stayed the same had the fire not occurred. But why didn't they reoccupy the entire building after the fire? They could have easily shovelled out the burnt collapsed rubble, as we have done, and restarted the processes of living on the singed floors or put down new floors. They didn't want to, must be the answer. How does the roof work? The burnt collapse in the S part of the building comprised mostly burnt roofing clay and other matter so at least part of the roof had fallen in. Did they re-roof the whole building after the fire or just the N part - if the latter then what was holding the roof up along the S side? If the former then were they living in the N part of a previously integral building with a roof covering a large pile of burnt collapse along the S side? Did wall 18 reach right to the roof and so keep the burnt rubble well back and out of sight, and also act as a support for the roof? It all seems crazy, yet nothing else matches the stratigraphy. We are now deciding how to approach the excavation of the floors. Wendy wanted us to continue with the 1 x 1 m grid system, with lots of sections to draw etc. I can see that this is probably the only way fully to comprehend every nuance of the floors, truncations, packings etc that make up Building 1, but we simply don't have the time for it. It would mean the excavation of Building 1 stretching well into next season, perhaps beyond. Ian came up to the building this morning so that he, Wendy, Gavin (fresh off the bus from Antalya) and I could discuss the issue. In the end we agreed to leave strategic baulks through the main spaces and also to leave working sections where appropriate for Wendy to come and take quick samples. I think this will work well. Another issue is that of dealing with human remains. We have started excavating several of the graves now visible under the top floors along the N of the building and it is not clear what the involvement of the human bone team should be. They did a nice job on the previous burial, but no nicer, and a lot slower, than me or Gavin could do. I prefer for us to do it and to present them with the bones. I prefer for us to do everything and to present people with bags of things. The animal bone people are also concerned that our sampling strategy across and through the floors does not fit in with their computer hierarchy. In all we still have a huge task to complete the excavation of Building 1 this season - we are still on the bucranial horns of a dilemma caught between exhaustiveness and expeditiousness, exhaustion and expedition.Entered By: Roger Matthews |
