Laila Maidenberg
It’s been a pretty exciting week here in EU 28. During our first week, Riley, Mason, and I worked on getting our unit down to the same level as one of its adjoining units, EU24. We worked tirelessly to get through layers of topsoil, the plow zone, and lots and lots of rocks. We made it (phew), and this week, got to expand EU 28 to be about a foot wider, reaching all the way to a stone wall in EU20.
Then, we opened up a new stratigraphic unit to encompass our expanded unit, SU 10007, and continued working down, in an even layer. The first two days of work this week were plagued by rocks, rocks, and more rocks. We had lots of big ones throughout the unit, with a big concentration on the south side, that almost fooled us into thinking we might have a new wall! But after very carefully articulating each one, most of them seemed to be floating, with dirt underneath. There are a few that we haven’t removed yet that seem to be maybe making up a crosswall, but we’re still a few inches away from deciding their fate. Notable finds from SU 10007 include 3 sheets of lead, bronze tacks and lots of olive pits!
After the rocks, things are starting to get pretty exciting. We started finding chunks of plaster in our dirt, which indicates a floor surface. This might seem like a fairly mundane find, but it changes our previous guess that EU 28 might be an alleyway between two buildings, since a plaster floor means we’re working inside of a building. Even more exciting, underneath all those rocks was a huge deposit of pottery! Instead of just removing the shards of pottery as we went, our EU decided to try to articulate them as much as possible while leaving them in situ, so that we could do photogrammetry on it, taking a series of pictures that get made into a 3-D digital model. Unfortunately, when we first tried to take the pictures, the sun was too high in the sky, so we swept and covered the unit and all helped out in EU 30 for the rest of that day.
Yesterday morning, we went up to the site and took the pictures right away, before the sun came up, and after two days of staring at our pottery shards, we finally got to start pulling them up. We got 10 bags of pottery in about 45 minutes (for reference, 2-3 is normal for a whole day), when we were interrupted by a pickup truck pulling up to our site. The British were coming! We paused on our very satisfying pottery removal, bagged and tagged, and made our getaway.
EU 28 is very excited to get back to digging tomorrow, and to uncover the rest of our pottery deposit, and discover what other surprises might be in store!