While I was flying over from the US to Türkiye, I was bringing not only my luggage inside the metal bulkheads of the plane, but also something that would survive quite persistently over the first two weeks; a preconception. I was mainly focused on the physical excavation part of this internship and very little on its academic elements, a mentality which has been eroded away like the layers we’ve swept away with pick and brush. In its stead, I’ve become a lot more receptive to the theorizing part of our work, and readily listened to some of the presented ideas, such as the Hibachi Counter Theory, or the Punished Kiln theory. I personally think that this area being an industrial area of some sort is looking more and more likely based on the amount of ash we’ve been finding, or if there was an industrial area that was close enough to make it feasible enough to just use its ash as flooring. For the oncoming weeks, I’d like to focus excavating the area with none of the ash, mainly so we could compare our findings in that unit with the potential industrial room, as if its a non-industrial area or a residential area it’d be very unusual for there to be a kiln in the next room over. In order to find more pieces of this scattered puzzle, I’d like to focus on my soil analysis if possible. The reasons for this are two fold, firstly, it’s my weakest area when it comes to archeology by a pretty big margin, and I’d like to reinforce my knowledge in that so it’d at least be workable. Secondly, soil analysis has already shown to take precedence compared to other forms of analysis in our trench, mainly due to the presence of a significant amount of ash in the loci w/ the Kiln. If we’re not talking about the needs of our unit though, I think I’d probably like to go more into studying glass. It seemed people expressed their status quite a bit through glassware and I’d love to delve more in depth into the subject, although the fact that glassware remains relatively static over the centuries is also a nice bonus to making it easier to study. Speaking of status, I’m curious as to what the social status of this apartment actually was, because all the relatively intricate glassware and the industrial remains could point towards someone of a higher status, while the shoddy mortar we’ve found semi-often points to the contrary, though it could also not even be a kiln at all and instead a contained fire that occurred when the earthquake happened.
As for my own personal theory, due to the fact that the possible kiln is just kind of… in a random place in the middle of an apartment, I am personally thinking that it might be part of a parable that would seem familiar in our modern day and age. Perhaps, just perhaps, the owner of this house was thinking that there were big follis in pottery/glass kiln’in and decided to chase gold over the well being of his household. Perhaps he became more, and more obsessive, this potterybro taking over more of the space in his house to chase this dream of his, his diet becoming nothing but the marrow of goat knuckle bones, until like how Icarus had his wings o’ wax melt in the hot summer sun, an earthquake would drown him in the one thing he ever truly desired in his life; ceramic tiling.
