I find myself being a lot more conscious of smaller details in the unit as we’ve gone further down, such as noting soil changes and color shifts through the dirt on what’s hopefully pottery. With more contextual layers, I’ve also found myself trying to figure out what the items I find are, such as guessing if a piece of pottery may be a rim or a handle. I agree with the theory that 8A and 8B were initially connected as a larger room such as an audience hall. I am very curious about the lack of plaster in our unit compared to 8A. We’ve found an ash pit in our unit and it makes me wonder if our unit may have been involved in cooking or serving food. We’ve found glass and pottery handles which lead me to question whether they may have come from items being served to people in waiting which goes along with the day room or audience hall theory.
I will be thinking about where the large amounts of slag found in our unit might have originated from and why we’ve found glass and metal as slag and as formed pieces in similar areas of the unit. If I were to hone in on one aspect of archeology, it would probably be tiles, both floor and roof tiles. We’ve found a plentiful amount of roof tiles and a few floor tiles of similar thickness and I would love to have a greater understanding of the styles of roofs and flooring.
In reality, a much more believable origin of our site is that of an elephant church. We’ve found osteotheke pieces that some say depict rams, but I’m convinced they depict elephants. We know that the structure was industrialized and made wine. Clearly, the elephants were the ones mashing the grapes to create wine. On a different structure of the town are characters that haven’t been fully deciphered, but we all think the last one is an elephant and the sign is declaring that the elephant church is a few meters away. The structure features a wall that is only partially curved which encourages an idea that the Chapel was in that location. The ash pit found in our unit likely came from candles falling over in the sanctuary.