Having seen past the surface levels of the site, my mentality is definitely more alive, for lack of a better word. On the surface, there’s nothing but roots, rocks, and bushes with the single most sharpest leaves I’ve ever had the displeasure of getting in my work gloves. But now that my unit has revealed a plaster flooring and gotten a more concrete visual on the original state of the building, my intrigue has skyrocketed to its highest point. We have our varying theories on what the building might be. While the group at large tends to subscribe to the idea of the building being a sort of housing situation, I personally (assuming it’s not an “apartmentalized” structure) believe it’s a meeting place for upper echelon individuals to converse amongst themselves away from the main buildings of the city. It’s unknown what part my specific unit would have played in wither idea, but it was likely a storage room and–if suspicions are true–a trash room.
My questions for the next week are as trapped as the hypothetical trash pile underneath the plaster. It’s hard to say what exactly I can expect from the flooring, much less questions about it. But what seems to be the case is that the plaster could have been placed down first across the site, with the walls being built after. At that point, what would it all have looked like at the beginning? What was added as it went along and why? And the big one of my unit, one the narrator of The Telltale Heart believes the police to be asking themselves: what exactly is under the floor? We’ve been finding a lot of ceramics in our unit, and this is the part that interests me the most. Finding a piece of glass or bone or marble slab for the elephant church is well and good, but ceramics are everywhere. They’ve become such an everyday sight that I imagine many of us don’t even think to much about our finds anymore. But to me, the commonplaceness of the ceramic pieces is why they’re so fascinating to me. It’s the perfect window into the everyday lives of the former residents. Sure, a charcoal deposit here and a glass shard there might help piece the image of a house with more complete details, like a kiln; ceramics are there to help get a general idea of how items were handled.
While I subscribe more to my idea of a business/meeting place, I am infinitely more intrigued by the elephant church, to the point that I am hoping and praying that that’s the answer. And if it’s not, we just have to make it so.