The second week at the dig site and our first full week of work raised many new questions and helped us get more comfortable on-site. As we excavated deeper into our unit, we became better acquainted with our tools and got into a rhythm as we did ten centimeter passes. Unfortunately our easier first pass was quickly disrupted by the presence of a theorized rock fall that extended very far into the dirt of our area. This also contributed to a quickly changing soil color that hid between jagged rocks. Our mentality shifted slightly opposite to the group next to ours, as we initially encountered a looser layer with plenty of interesting finds and an abundance of pottery sherds and bones. After this layer the aforementioned rock made an appearance and slowed us down considerably. Removing the rocks while trying to maintain a ten centimeter pass was challenging as they often dug deep into the soil. Powered by plenty of Pitbull (Mr. Worldwide) we still had some fun throwing rocks down the hill and found a few interesting things that kept us motivated.
Initially our unit was created to explore a supposed exterior wall that was present further up in the area. We uncovered the wall but its thickness did not match the other part so we cleared further rock fall on the outer edges of the unit in an attempt to find it but we had little success. The presence of the wall on the northeast side was enough to catch bone and ceramic that made its way down the slope over time and we initially found large amounts of animal bone. However a lot of our most interesting finds were on the northwest side of the unit up against a wall of newer rockfall. We eventually hit the rock fall that continued under layers of soil and within it may have found another wall. There is a presence of mortar and stacked rocks that go away from the rock fall into the southeast side and probably extend outside of the border of our unit. The conclusion of it being a wall is still not set in stone and we probably can’t find out definitively without extending further to the southeast. As we approach our final day at the unit before we rotate groups we will hopefully clear out more of the rock fall and maybe even make it to the layer below where things could start to get a bit easier. So far I have been most interested in coins due to the amount of information you can get from them just by a glance and by glass as it looks incredibly modern and feels like a familiar connection to the past.
Our imaginations have run wild a few times so far as we unearthed more of our unit. Our first theory involves the large amount of bones underneath the northeast wall. Obviously, the goat, pig, and other bones we found near the wall were pirates responsible for the kidnapping of Julius Caesar (ignore the timeline discrepancy) and were murdered and then dumped underneath an eventual wall fall to make it look like an accident. Besides such a grounded theory we had a crazier one involving the supposed wall we uncovered to the southeast of the unit. Some of the rock fall near the wall added to it and made it into a throne, perhaps for the goat pirate king of the area that was so unjustly killed nearby. This makes the stakes of our excavation even higher as we only have one more day at the unit to solve the murder of the animal pirate crew.