| Entry: | Today, we continued surface scraping work on the two 10mx10m trenches we opened on July 20th after they had been preliminarily staked out for us by the surveyor team. Hopefully the surveyors will provide us with the defintite grid tomorrow morning so we can cut back the profiles and do exact measurements from tomorrow onwards. The weather was slightly windy and therefore quite agreeable. Most of the time Christoph, Nick and Necad and me as well as two to three workmen (Ismail, Mustafa and the last one's name is Metin, I think) were working in the A trench, and after some time Neesha joined us from the B trench. The tools here at Catal are in a deplorable condition and some of them really dangerous - by and by I am going to have them repaired by Ismail Agabey who obviously is skilled at that.
In the east trench called "A", intented for the deep sounding, we finished unit 13701 which was ca. 10cm of loose topsoil with a lot of vegetation and grass roots. In the eastern part of the trench, the head of a ceramic figurine resembling Hacilar types was found by Necad in the topsoil. Beneath that topsoil, a hard dry light grey horizon is visible. In the heavily eroded eastern part, where also some modern soil robbing seems to have taken place, two yellow clayey patches (mudbrick remains?) close to the northern profile as well as an ashey lens and some yellow clayey patches in the south showed up. In the western half of the area, however, the grey horizon seems to be thicker, as no structures are visible yet except some spots with very loose material (pits?) as well some sherds that stick out vertically. Shahina says this is a typical feature of eroded surfaces here at Catal. Since the edge of the erosion is roughly located in the middle of the trench we decided to dig deeper in the western part only, so we started unit 13702 in the NW corner.
In the western trench "B" we want to do surface scraping and it soon became clear that the grey horizon we already know from the "A" trench is even better preserved up there, so we dig down ca. 30cm as unit 13700 which also includes the loose topsoil. Some accumulations of limestone as well as loosely filled pits become visible here, too.
As regards to the finds, we collected all of them and then sorted the diagnostic pieces out of unit 13700 and 13701 which were sent to the finds office. The rest of the sherds are going to be buried on the site in a cache in case somebody wants to analyse them later. To avoid misunderstandings by the workmen, also with the "loooook, look, we found a figurine" gathering, I explain all we do to them as well.Entered By: ER |
