Aoife Raney
It’s been a big few days in the southwestern corner of EU 25, where Sarah and I have been working to bring a roughly 1.5 by 1.5 meter chunk of dirt down to bedrock as Vigla’s dig season nears its end. The area, bounded by walls to the east and west, a large slab to the north, and bulk to the south, is made up of sections of EU 33, which we excavated this year, and EU 25, excavated in 2024. It has a few peculiarities. Its western wall is built haphazardly over trash and strange slaps, and it contains large stone with a concave basin cut into it, maybe part of a mortar and pestle or an amphora holder. The space is also small–I wonder if a room this narrow could have had many practical uses. But overall, the area is mundane–betraying nothing of the spendors we would soon find, just below its surface.
We began digging by leveling out our portion of EU 33 to the past year’s EU 25, and then taking that larger area down in search of a surface. Quickly, we uncovered a large amount of artifacts: A bronze coin, and a bronze pendant with a square hole. A several-inches-long iron skewer or rod in three connecting pieces, as well as the three connecting chunks of black-slip ceramic, making up about half the rim of what might have been a cooking vessel.
We eventually uncovered the area’s surface, which was at a significant angle, sloping downwards from north to south. It was white and chalky, with a great deal of pebbles two to three centimeters in diameter. We found several exciting pieces of pottery in this layer. A cooking pot lid wedged under a large stone slab, a juglet intact except for its handle, and two ceramic disks in the soil which looked like the bases of upturned vessels. The cooking pot lid is especially exciting, as its location under a large slab means it could not have fallen from a higher layer and allows us to date it precisely. Continuing on, we started excavating the surface and were able to take out these four pieces. The juglet was intact except for its handle. The pot lid was also intact, and had char marks on its underside. The two ceramic circles turned out not to be intact vessels but just their bases.
Moving through the white, pebbly subfloor layer, we did not make any further significant finds. Eventually, the soil shifted significantly in character, becoming brown in color and very soft. This layer was strange, bringing with it an abundance of two and only two things. Seeds, hundreds of them in several distinct deposits, and bones. Sarah moved forward with excavating, masterfully identifying and collecting dozens of bones, as I sat curled in the corner, picking a seemingly unending pile of seeds out of the dirt and placing them into small plastic ampoules for what felt like hours. In collecting these dozens of ampoules of seeds, we were able to accumulate a sample large enough to produce meaningful data. This is exciting, even if the process of collection was at best meditative and at worst grueling. To her credit, Sarah took over seed duty, fearing for my sanity, when we encountered our second large deposit of seeds. There were also a ton of roly polys!!