Thus ends the first full week of work here at Antiochia ad Cragum. One of the most interesting things I have noticed about the actual digging process is that you never know with 100% certainty what is beneath 1 meter of soil or 1 cm or even a light cover of dust. In my trench by the imperial temple, where I was assigned last Friday, we wanted to find where two walls intersect, one from the temple and one other. Dr. Hoff figured that they would converge right at the corner of our 3x3m trench. But alas! After digging maybe 10cm it became apparent that the temple wall veered off in an unexpected curve. We simultaneously scraped away the top 10-20cm of soil to reveal the rest of the other wall- a wall without any mortar. Very curious… This wall had a hole on one side and moderately packed soil on the other- well of course we can clear away this soil to reveal another hole, with coins and amphorae and glass! Wrong! All we got was bedrock. End of the road. No at least we know the unmortared wall was meant to be a retaining wall. But wait! There is more. Of course bedrock has to be cleaned of its super hard soil cover (that fortunate task has been mine for the past three work days). Lo and behold! We found lime and burnt limestone. Could this mean that there are lime kilns near by? Very possibly. All it took was a little patience with a trowel to remove a couple centimeters of soil and we discovered beyond what was thought to be rock bottom
