This week, I was told by a professor working on the site that I was not adequately scared of the work I was doing and that being more scared would make me a better archeologist. Between her fear and PHD, she was still unable to distinguish between consumer goods and industrial waste, and so I feel no need to be more scared. Fear is irrational and impulsive. Being that scared all the time must be exhausting
The more time I spend on the site, the more I realize I have no idea what is going on with these walls. During our last 30 minutes on Friday, we began to take down what we initially believed to be part of the wall. We now believe that it may have been a blocked-up door or potentially a wall that fell in a really deceiving way. It was another in a series of rock formations that originally seemed to be some sort of wall but eventually had to be taken down. The deeper down we go, the more skeptical I become of everything we find. I think early on, I thought I’d be able to identify structures easily, but now I don’t know what anything is.
I think the next week of work will be very interesting. We believe our locus is very close to reaching bedrock, and so I hope we begin to find more and more cultural material as we approach the bedrock. Our current layer has had much less pottery and bones than the previous layers. My theory is that everything above was washed into the site from above, and we are about to begin to find the material from the structure itself this week as we close out the locus.
We have found various carved marble pieces of a bone box in our locus. I hope we will find more pieces or even human remains. Bioarcheology really intrigues me. The ethics of what is done with human remains is such a grey area, and there seems to be no consistency across the world. Being able to see this process at work would be really interesting and perhaps provide more insight into the thought process that leads to the rationalization of human remains sitting in boxes for decades.
My fun theory is that the building we are uncovering is an elephant sanctuary. The blocked up doorway we have found is too thin for an elephant, so my theory is that it is an elephant confessional box. The rooms are all roughly pigmy elephant-sized, so each room must have been a stable for one elephant. They used their large feet to stomp on the grapes in the wine press to make wine for the sacrament. We found marble with what the “experts” say is a bull head, but one of my fellow archaeologists’ first idea was elephant, so it must be an elephant.